No, you and I need not be psychiatrists to recognize mental illness. We know it when we see it.
If you are out of doors in your town and encounter a man in the street shouting about his enormous imagined competencies and accomplishments while complaining about always being persecuted, do you hail him as a most excellent soul and invite into your life to manage your important affairs? Or do you avoid eye contact with him and keep your distance out of fear that in his psychosis, this afflicted person might attack you violently for no reason other than his sickness?
The American electorate had such a choice in the past three presidential elections. In the first instance, in 2016, the mental defective was embraced as some sort of messiah and invited indoors. As many clearheaded people predicted, the nation’s experience with him at the helm would prove to be disastrous. Therefore, moved by buyer’s regret, the electorate pushed him out of office in 2020. But it was disturbing to note that even then, a huge share of the electorate had wanted to keep this fool on the job — inevitably along with his chaos.
Nonetheless, he was out. He couldn’t take the loss of face. He made an almighty fuss, claiming that he had been cheated in the election, and he inspired some of his supporters to attempt a coup to keep him in office. That failed, and he was replaced by a well-meaning but cognitively impaired, doddering man just a little older than the lunatic. In 2024, the electorate, apparently also overcome by madness, compared the doddering old man and the flaming lunatic and made the incomprehensible decision to return the lunatic to office.
This time around, he has been off his chain. His delusions of grandeur have been grander and more menacing than ever. And whatever is ailing his brain is clearly becoming worse. If you wish to see evidence, just look at Trump’s performance on two recent occasions: his address to the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan on Sept. 23 and his speech to senior U.S. military officers in Quantico, Va., on Sept. 30. If you can make it any meaningful distance into those speeches, you will see that both were showcases of nonsensical rambling leavened with lies, exaggerations, fantasies, self-pity and the usual lashings of spiteful rhetoric. They clearly show a thought process marred by illness.
In both instances — occasions on which rational and normal leaders would have presented consequential visions of the world’s future and of how the U.S. military would buttress the nation as it advanced core U.S. values of promoting democracy and maintaining old alliances and building new confederations against tyranny and backwardness — Trump fell woefully short. It is clear that he is not being advised in any positive way. Both speeches were unhinged screeds fit for a campaign appearance in front of a low-information and fanatical audience.
At the U.N., we saw a bitter and ignorant old man complaining and complaining as he always does, and patronizing and insulting the rest of the world on various bases. James M. Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations summed up Trump’s speech at the U.N. this way:
Much of Trump’s speech was familiar to anyone who has watched a MAGA rally. He frequently went off script. He boasted of his domestic policy successes, complained that he had been overlooked for the Nobel Prize, and bragged that the United States is “the hottest country in the world.” Former President Joe Biden served as a punching bag throughout the speech. Trump mentioned his predecessor directly or indirectly nine times, accusing him of leading “the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history.”
Biden was not the only target of Trump’s barbs. The United Nations was as well. Some of his complaints were minor: a broken escalator on his way to the speech and a malfunctioning teleprompter once he reached the dais. Some were historical: he lamented losing a contract decades ago to renovate UN headquarters and claimed he would have done a far better job than the winning contractor and would have given the building marble rather than terrazzo floors. And some were substantive: he argued that the United Nations is failing to live up to its “tremendous potential.” Anyone familiar with the United Nations sympathized when he dismissed its penchant for a “strongly worded letter” and “empty words” in place of effective action. He offered no practical solutions, however, for improving the organization’s operations.
To the extent that Trump’s speech had a theme, it was the evils of immigration and renewable energy.
Observe this demented flight into fantasy early in Trump’s U.N. speech (the bolding for emphasis is mine):
Six years have passed since I last stood in this grand hall and addressed a world that was prosperous and at peace in my first term. Since that day, the guns of war have shattered the peace I forged on two continents.
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Something new has emerged among Trump’s obsessions: the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his minions actually have been lobbying for it. This behavior is outrageous. Who does this? Donald Trump does, because his diseased mind cannot stand the idea that Barack Obama, one of the people he despises most in all the world, was given the Nobel Peace Prize merely for taking office s U.S. president in 2009. Obama certainly had no accomplishments to justify being awarded the prize, and that award has stuck in Trump’s craw as an unhealthy idée fixe, although he is even less deserving of the accolade. So when he spoke to the admirals and generals in Quantico, the Nobel was on his mind. He claimed then, as previously, to have settled seven wars, with a settlement of the conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip possibly about to be his eighth peacemaking triumph.
Here is Trump in Quantico:
Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it — they’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.
And if he does not get the prize:
[I]t’ll be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it. It should get it because there’s never been anything like it. Think of it. So if this [peace in Gaza] happens, I think it will.
I don’t say that lightly because I know more about deals than anybody. That’s what my whole life was based on. And they can change and this can certainly change. But we have just about everybody. We have one signature that we need and that signature will pay in hell if they [Hamas] don’t sign. I hope they sign for their own good and we create something really great.
Also in Quantico, he suggested, casually, that the U.S. military use Democratic-run large U.S. cities as training grounds. This is a U.S. president speaking in the Year of Our Lord 2025! Here is what he said, and it was in the context of his supposedly eradicating crime from Washington, D.C. (again, the emphasis is mine):
And now, Washington D.C. after 12 days of serious, serious intensity, we took out 1,700 career criminals.
If you have five career criminals, they can make your numbers look very bad because they’ll commit many crimes a day. But we took out 1,700, and they took them out. There was no doubt who the boss was. They did an unbelievable job. Then they [National Guard troops] started even cleaning. I said, I don’t want them doing that. Sir, they wanted.
They were cleaning it up. I drove through it two days ago, it was beautiful. People were walking down the street, holding hands. Man and wife coming from Iowa, they’re not worried about being shot. Washington, D.C. is now a safe city. In fact, I went out to dinner with my crew. I haven’t done that. In theory.
I wouldn’t do it. And I felt totally safe. And nobody’s been attacked. Nobody’s been hurt. Washington D.C. went from our most unsafe city to just about our safest city in a period of a month. We had it under control in 12 days, but give us another 15 or 16 days, it was — it’s perfect.
… You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape, too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.
… And I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city, with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.
A madman with federal executive power is threatening to unleash the U.S. military on American citizens in cities he identifies with the political opposition. In an era of deeply transgressive firsts in the governance of this country, Trump could well find that he becomes the first U.S. president to be removed from office by the U.S. military. Let him keep overreaching, and we will see what happens. Somewhere, at some point, something will have to give.
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Whatever the subject before him, Trump declares that he knows more about it than anyone else — medical matters; military affairs; diplomacy; business; the country’s economy; the environment; our tax system. You name it, Trump is the greatest expert in the subject. And anyone who has an opinion contrary to his is so far in error as virtually to be committing treason. In September, for instance, Trump declared that heavily critical media coverage of him is “really illegal.” Yes, illegal. This man is plainly mad.
During the past presidential campaign, Trump disparaged the nation’s capital city as “nightmare of murder and crime” and threatened to take it under federal control to clean up its problems and its image. After taking over policing in D.C. for a month this summer and bringing in law enforcement officers from numerous federal agencies — plus National Guard troops from a number of states in a deployment that continues here — Trump declared variously on Sept. 1, 2 and 3 that D.C. had “no crime” or that “there is none” as a consequence of his security surge. Follow the D.C. police on X and see for yourself the numerous fresh crimes on which MPD is seeking the public’s assistance.
Trump’s 30-day crime-emergency order for D.C. expired on Sept. 10, and the extra law enforcement officers have gone back to their various agencies. At the end of the “emergency,” Trump declared that there was no more crime in D.C. And he has continued to make that plainly ridiculous declaration, despite the Metropolitan Police Department’s multiple daily appeals via X and YouTube for the public to provide information so that the police can address various newly occurring crimes. Even when he addressed senior U.S. military officers in Quantico on Sept. 30, Trump continued to lie shamelessly about crime in D.C., to wit: “Now I can say it because we solved it, but Washington D.C. was the most unsafe, most dangerous city in the United States of America.”
Trump’s initial excited exaggeration of crime in D.C. and his latter declaration of having eliminated this problem from the city were both plainly absurd.
D.C. in general was not “a nightmare of murder and crime” to begin with, and there is not now “no crime” in the city, not even in the poshest and best-secured areas. Yes, there is crime in D.C. In fact, there are parts of the city that I have seen with my own eyes to be frightening places. But Trump’s security surge did not touch those places, because his surge was all about deceitful optics.
Trump had an opening to stage this pointless performance because of the timidity and fecklessness of local D.C. politicians on the question of crime. D.C., like many other major U.S. cities with large and largely poor black populations, is chronically afflicted by the kind of largely black-perpetrated street crime and antisocial behavior that seriously diminishes the quality of life for people, including other black residents, across the city. I speak of carjackings, car break-ins, package thefts, shoplifting, group sweeps by thieves through retail stores, gun and knife robberies on the streets, public weed-smoking that poisons the air in many places with a horrid stink, and loud and obnoxious behavior in all kinds of public settings.
The feebleness of the D.C. Council on the question of crime has given the demented president and his pet U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, the opportunity to posture as heroes in attacking D.C.’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, a piece of legislation dating to 1985 that the D.C. Council never should have passed. The YRA provides sentencing alternatives — excepting murder linked to terrorism, and a few other crimes — for juveniles and young adult offenders. Its practical effect has been a slap-on-the-wrist criminal justice culture vis-à-vis young offenders, who are a predatory scourge in D.C. and in some of the D.C.-adjacent cities in Maryland and Virginia.
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Trump says any foolishness that comes into his head because he remains unchallenged by those around him who are in a position to counsel him, to speak plainly to him about the wildness of his fantasies, to beseech him to seek psychiatric help. In fact, the great hater Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, is one of the biggest abettors of Trump’s deranged policies. The actual chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is the most silent and invisible White House chief of staff that I have observed since the Reagan era, which is when I began seriously paying attention to American politics.
And there is the baleful influence of Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Vought is an architect of Project 2025, that blueprint for the right-wing, white-supremacist mission of permanently taking control of the levers of power in this country to, supposedly, save the nation from the non-white horde — and make America great again, lest we forget, like it was in the days of Jim Crow.
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Trump’s madness would be irrelevant were he not the president of the United States. But he is our president and not just some crazy fellow wandering the streets and barking at the sun. His delusions about being a master negotiator and of bending the world to his will have led him into an erratic tariff regime that is alienating countries around the world and, more important, is leading them to reform their economic alliances to the detriment of the United States’ economy.
Case in point: China, Brazil and Argentina. Until Trump returned to office this year and imposed a moving target of tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese-manufactured products, China had been the single largest purchaser of U.S. soybeans, annually taking some 60 percent of U.S. soybean output. China answered Trump’s tariffs with its own tariffs on U.S.-made goods imported into China. But China, which has a command economy, went a step further: This year, news reports — and U.S. farmers — say China has ordered no soybeans from the U.S. None. Zero.
We are entering the fall season, and the U.S. soybean crop is ready to be harvested, and farmers in Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri and Ohio are in crisis. The Chinese buyers have shifted their money to Brazil and Argentina, which are the U.S.’s top soybean producing competitors.
Huge gains for soybean farmers in Brazil and Argentina, and steep losses for and even the prospect of bankruptcies in the U.S. soybean sector. Our farmers can thank President Trump, that great visionary. Now comes word that Trump is looking into a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of farmers who have been plunged into this crisis of Trump’s careless making. This is exactly what happened in Trump’s first term: His insane policies created a crisis with whose cost the taxpayer was saddled. In 2024, this country’s farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump, again, and again they have been burned by him.
Yes, Trump is crazy, but guess what? He is not alone.
Democracy Warrior 