The New York Times recently publishedan article about a new trend in the care of dementia patients. Some call it reminiscence therapy. It was once thought best for caregivers to attempt to orient their delusional patients toward reality: When a patient suffering from dementia asked for his wife, for example, his caregiver was instructed truthfully to tell him, over and over, that she had died years ago. But each time, the patient would be convulsed with fresh shock and grief.
This is why some have now decided it is better to enter the world of the patients’ remaining memories, where the patients are happy and calm. Caregivers of this school simply tell the patient, over and over, “Your wife just called. Traffic’s bad, but she’ll be here in a few minutes. Look—dinner is ready!”
One care home in California has built something like a Truman Show for its charges, who spend their days in a replica small town from the 1950s. They take their meals in an old-fashioned diner, watch television in a vintage movie theater, and stroll past phone booths and 1959 Thunderbirds. Ike’s portrait hangs in the library. Everyone agrees: They’re happier that way.
Donald Trump lives in a world of delusions. The things he believes aren’t true. Media accounts suggest that those around him treat him like a relative with dementia. They tell them whatever he likes to hear, so long as it keeps him happy and calm. They don’t correct his misapprehensions. They strive, instead, to make the world conform to his fantasies.
But Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He has the sole authority to launch 3,748 nuclear weapons and needs no one’s permission to do so. The decisions he’s making, in his fantasy world, are in the real world rapidly unspooling a noble system of governance that took centuries to build and a world order that, for all its faults, has been more prosperous and humane than any that preceded it.
In the course of two weeks, the second Trump administration has done incalculable damage. Much of it is irreversible. Many will die as the result of the decisions he and Elon Musk have made. The odds today are much higher than they were two weeks ago that the future will be led by China and belong to a concert of brutal authoritarian powers. Liberal democracy may not survive at all.
Trump has, for many years, believed that vaccines cause autism. This delusion will soon become one of the guiding principles of our national health policy.
These rivers aren't connected to Southern California. All of this water will go to the San Joaquin Valley. None of it will go to Los Angeles, which is on the other side of several mountain ranges. This water has been released into the Kaweah and Tule rivers. The Los Angeles water supply comes from the Colorado river and from state reservoirs that are completely separated from this water system. The water was being conserved for farmers, who badly need it in the summer to irrigate their crops. Releasing it now did no one any good, but it created a serious flood risk for the communities downstream. The insufficiency of water in Pacific Palisades was owed to the failure of municipal storage tanks and pumping systems, which could not keep pace with demand. Two billion gallons of water were wasted to nourish a delusion.
The Pacific Northwest?
Trump alone does not have the power to do so much harm—and even Musk, for all his riches, could not do it but for our help. It is only possible because so many Americans, and in particular, so many members of Congress, have chosen either to enter their fantasy world or deny the evidence that these men are insane. We’re witnessing a textbook case of folie à millions: an extreme collective delusion.
Canada announced this border security plan on December 17. Trump had not yet taken office. US agents seized 22,000 pounds of fentanyl in 2024. Only 43 pounds of this came across the Canadian border. Canada intercepted about 11 pounds of fentanyl going the other direction. On a per capita basis, Canada is the victim of our fentanyl, not vice-versa.
Mexico regularly deploys and rotates its military forces on anti-crime and counter-drug missions. In 2021, Mexico sent 10,000 troops to the border, at President Biden’s request, to stem migration. No threat of a trade war was required. It is simply a fact—easily verified—that we got nothing out of Trump’s threats. They did cost us dearly, however, in our neighbors’ good will, the world’s respect, and the widespread belief that the United States upholds the treaties it signs.
We do not subsidize Canada. Trade deficits are not a subsidy, nor are they a problem. Crude oil makes up the majority of Canada's exports to the US. (Without that, the deficit becomes a surplus.) We import oil from Canada because our refineries were built to process heavy, sour crudes, but the shale oil we produce is light. We send our oil to Europe and Asia to be refined while running our own economy on Canadian crude. Yes, we are technically energy independent, but until we refit our refineries, we are completely dependent on Canada—who has been selling us this oil at a discount.
Narcissism
A delusion is a false belief that is at once held with great conviction and impervious to revision, no matter the strength of the contrary evidence. Those suffering from delusions perceive their false beliefs to be self-evident and immutable truths. It has long been recognized that delusions can be contagious, sometimes virulently so. Typically, there is a dominant person—the “inducer”—who is the source of the delusions.
The psychiatrists Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret first described a shared mental disorder, a folie à deux, in the 19th century. Erich Fromm used the term folie à millions to describe the psychopathological phenomenon that occurs when whole societies lose contact with reality, becoming increasingly immersed in the fantasies of a floridly delusional inducer. Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin are obvious examples.
The inducer’s delusions are not random, Fromm remarked. He channels and amplifies the pathological traits that were already present in his society, traits such as as paranoia, narcissism, and a propensity to violence. Delusions are spread by word-of-mouth, in the media, and, in the modern world, through social networks. They impregnate ever-greater numbers, all of whom proceed to reinforce the others in their delusions. “The individual who participates in such common madness,” Fromm wrote, “lacks the sense of complete isolation and separation, and consequently escapes the intense anguish” that he would experience if he alone adhered to this delusional system of belief.
In 1964, Fromm published The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good And Evil,an analysis of collective madness rooted in Sigmund Freud’s concept of narcissism—a foundational idea in psychoanalysis, and one that has had a lasting impact on psychology, social theory, and political analysis.
The word “narcissistic” is commonly used as a synonym for “selfish” or “vain.” But this was not Freud’s meaning. Freud introduced his concept of narcissism in his 1914 paper, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” Primary narcissism, in Freud’s schema, is the psychological stage through which every human passes in infancy. For an infant, the only world that exists is himself—his body, his hunger, his sensations of warmth and cold. He is completely self-absorbed. He does not yet realize that there is a world external to him, populated by other minds, who inhabit other bodies, entirely separate from his. He does not realize that these others have desires and needs of their own.
In the course of normal development, according to Freud, the infant comes to understand that the objects he encounters are not extensions of himself. But we all, to some extent, remain narcissistic. In healthy adults, this narcissism is reduced to a socially accepted minimum; but our residual narcissism, in Freud’s view, is normal and even necessary.
When an infant fails, owing to trauma, to progress through primary narcissism to maturity, what Freud calls secondary narcissism emerges. If an adult continues to believe that the only world that exists is himself, it is a pathological phenomenon. This phenomenon has a distinct and recognizable symptomatology.
Freud’s theories were speculative and introspective; they were not empirical in the modern, scientific sense. But his concept of narcissism has been validated and elaborated by means of rigorous psychological studies. Some elements of Freud’s psychoanalytic account, such as his focus on the libido, have been supplanted by cognitive, behavioral, and neurological concepts. But the core ideas—the notion of narcissism as a spectrum, with both normal and pathological forms; the link between narcissism and aggression; the developmental aspect of narcissism and its connection to early childhood experiences; the impact of narcissistic traits on leadership, relationships, and social behavior—have been extensively confirmed by empirical research.
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory, for example, developed by Raskin and Hall in 1979, is one of the most widely-used tools for measuring subclinical narcissistic traits such as authority, exhibitionism, superiority, entitlement, exploitativeness, self-sufficiency, and vanity—all traits Freud associated with narcissistic fixation. Studies consistently find that if you receive a high score on this test, you'll be more prone, for example, to exhibit aggression when your self-image is threatened, and to seek admiration compulsively but struggle with deeper relationships. Many organizations use the test as part of their hiring process. The Grandiose Narcissism Scaleis another psychometrically rigorous index. The Pathological Narcissism Inventory measures, as the name suggests, pathological narcissism. All of these tests work, in the sense that they can be used to make accurate predictions.
This means you don’t need to be a Freudian at all to accept the validity of the construct. I myself find Freud’s insights irreplaceable, but I’m aware that some readers may find him too abstract or dismiss him as unscientific. It is neither abstract nor unscientific, however, to say that someone who receives a high score on the Pathological Narcissism Inventory is far more likely than someone who doesn’t to exhibit a particular, predictable behavioral repertoire. He is far more likely to be a criminal. You do not want to marry him. You may have no use for Freud’s theory about why this is so, but if you know that it is so, you will be much less surprised by the actions of a pathologically narcissistic leader.
If you wish to be even more empirical about things, there is also neuroscientific support for Freud’s claims. From brain imaging studies, we know that people who receive extremely high scores on these psychometric scales display structural abnormalities in the fronto-paralimbic regions of their brains. You’ll see less than the expected amount of gray matter in the parts of the brain involved in empathy and self-regulation. You’ll see overactivity in the ventral striatum—the reward center. This is consistent with a hyperactive self-reward system that reinforces self-focus and grandiosity.1
Empirical studies have also validated Freud’s claim that the highly narcissistic struggle with external attachments. Narcissists excel at initial charm, for example, but fail in long-term relationships (because they’re so maddeningly selfish). They react with rage and aggression when their ego is threatened, aligning with Freud’s idea of narcissistic injury.
Narcissistic traits are associated with low empathy, particularly in emotional recognition tasks. Research on leadership, too, confirms Freud’s prediction that narcissists are drawn to power. Highly narcissistic corporate leaders often achieve high status, but they are prone to extreme recklessness in decision-making.
Narcissism, Freud suggested, can manifest in grandiose political visions. In his later work, he anticipated Fromm’s concept of collective narcissism when he suggested that we compensate for narcissistic wounds by identifying with larger groups or ideals—such as religion, or the nation. This identification offers a substitute for personal grandeur. It protects against feelings of helpless insignificance.
A defining characteristic of successful mass leaders, Freud wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,is their ability to arouse narcissistic admiration in their followers by reflecting back to them their idealized self-image. The leader, in turn, sees himself as the embodiment of the group’s aspirations, and dissent as a personal attack. The book was written in 1921. It proved excruciatingly prophetic.
The Narcissistic Personality Structure
The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg later described the narcissistic personality structure in detail. The pathological narcissist, he wrote, is invariably grandiose. His life is an endless fantasy of unlimited specialness, superiority, power, and success.
Even being President isn’t enough for him.
An example of psychotic grandiosity. He isn't just saying this as a sales pitch. He believes it, and needs to believe it: The fantasy staves off intolerable pathological shame. He needs you to believe it, too. The intensity of this need, not ignorance, is why he, along with the followers who have entered his delusion with him, believe things like this despite all evidence to the contrary. If I were to show them newspapers from around the world indicating the reality—our allies feel horror, and our enemies, open contempt—it would not change their minds; instead, it would trigger rage: toward me, and toward the countries where those newspapers were published.
His grandiosity is brittle, however; it is easily shattered, and when it is, the narcissist feels emptiness and limitless rage.
Lack of empathy, in Kernberg’s view, is the most significant hallmark of pathological narcissism. The deficit is the consequence of arrested emotional development. The narcissist never successfully formed a view of the world in which others truly exist. This is why he is so exploitative. Other people are useful to him only when they reinforce his grandiosity.
Kernberg’s distinctive contribution was his emphasis on aggression in the narcissistic pathology. The narcissist harbors immense unconscious aggression stemming from a childhood marked by unmet needs and emotional rejection. Because he responds with rage when his grandiosity is threatened, his relationships are volatile and unstable.
It’s not “brilliant political messaging.” It’s not “master persuasion.” It's narcissistic rage.
Another concept key to Kernberg’s theory of narcissistic personality is splitting— a defense mechanism wherein the narcissist categorizes experiences and people as entirely good or entirely bad. He is incapable of integrating these polarities into a whole. This applies to himself no less than others. His fragile self-image vacillates between omnipotence and worthlessness. When his grandiose self is reinforced, he feels superior and invulnerable. When criticized, or faced with failure, he experiences intolerable fear and shame. He externalizes this as rage.
Kernberg drew some of these concepts from the work of Melanie Klein, who believed that the life of a pathological narcissist is dominated by obsessive envy. Envy of others—their success, their beauty, their happiness—compels him constantly to belittle and undermine them: It is a defense against overwhelming feelings of inferiority. Klein notes that the narcissist is incapable of gratitude. He is forever focused on that which he feels he has been unjustly denied. He is prone to projective identification: He attributes his own intolerable emotions (anger, envy, hatred) to others, who in turn become targets of devaluation and exploitation.
For the narcissist, the world and others exist only as mirrors to his own greatness, and when these mirrors fail to reflect him as he wishes, he seeks to destroy them. He does not regard others as human beings with their own needs, rights, and dignity, because he cannot. Having failed to develop this cognitive capacity in childhood, he is brain-damaged. It is literally impossible for him to conceive of other people in this way. He views others only as objects of satisfaction or obstacles to be removed.
In Kernberg’s construct, the other salient features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder—as distinct from narcissism of the normal variety—are grandiosity, antisocial behavior, ego-syntonic sadism, and paranoia. It is obvious why such a disorder is dangerous, and indeed, our prisons are full of these people.
Simply by summarizing these ideas, I’ve drawn a portrait of Donald Trump that anyone would recognize. But these seminal works on narcissism were written before he was born, or when he was still a child. His personality type has long been well-known to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists, and historians. That these theorists described someone unknown to them with such eerie precision indicates the validity of the construct. If you recognize this, it would be extremely foolish to fail to grasp what this implies.
Pathological narcissism is not an abstraction. It is not a failed theory, as some of Freud’s ideas proved to be. It is a distinct, diagnosable pathology. It has clearly and carefully described clinical features. It has been repeatedly validated by empirical studies in psychology, psychiatry, and criminology. Donald Trump is a textbook case, literally: Around the world, when psychiatrists lecture on this pathology, they point to Trump as the most obvious example they’ve ever seen.2
Malignant Narcissism
As with the phrase folie à millions, we owe the term malignant narcissist to Erich Fromm. It is his term for charismatic leaders whose narcissistic psychopathology devours their enemies, their societies, and ultimately, themselves.
I was struck by this passage, which immediately calls to mind Elon Musk:
The malignant narcissist’s personality is particularly marked by antisocial behavior, paranoia, aggression, and sadism. As a leader, the malignant narcissist is, again in a term of Fromm’s coining, necrophilic: consumed by hatred, socially cancerous. His rise to power can only culminate in terror, horror, and death. Malignant narcissism, Fromm remarks, is not only a severe mental illness: It is the quintessence of evil.
Freud and Fromm were German Jews. Kernberg and Klein were Austrian Jews. Hitler was Patient Zero, the platonic form of the malignant narcissist. He may be discerned in the foreground or background of every word they write. But the malignant narcissist is a familiar figure in history. He is Nero; he is Vlad the Impaler; he is Saddam Hussein. Only Hitler has been Hitler, but every malignant narcissist has some Hitler in him.
In 2010, Mila Goldner-Vukov and Laurie Jo Moore presented a synthesis of the literature on malignant narcissism in a paper titled “Malignant Narcissism: From Fairy Tales to Harsh Reality.” They did not have Trump in mind. He had not yet burst on the scene as a political figure. If it seems they are writing of him, it is only because personalities deformed in this fashion are so similar; humanity is infinite in its variety, but all malignant narcissists are alike:
… They are often materialistic and ready to shift their values to gain favor. They are prone to pathological lying. In the realm of love and sexuality they are charming, seductive and promiscuous, but unable to develop deep relationships. When not involved in narcissistic pursuits, they are cold, unempathetic, exploitative and indifferent towards others. …
Malignant Narcissists develop identification with powerful people and rely on internal sadistic and powerful parental images. …
Trump will always identify with those he perceives as more powerful than him. He desperately wants their approval. (If you've read anything about his father, you understand why.)
The ego-syntonic sadism of malignant narcissism is displayed by a characterologically-anchored aggression. It is expressed in a conscious “ideology’” of aggressive self-affirmation. Individuals with malignant narcissism have a tendency to destroy, symbolically castrate, and dehumanize others. Their rage is fueled by the desire for revenge. …
Kernberg (1975) believes the paranoid orientation of malignant narcissism may be the basic cause of their self-inflation. The paranoid tendencies in malignant narcissists reflect their projection of unresolved hatred onto others whom they persecute. They have a deep sense of mistrust and view others as enemies/fools or idols, either devaluing or idealizing them. They have disorganized superegos and consequently lack the capacity for remorse, sadness or self-exploration. They are preoccupied with conspiracy theories. Their pathological grandiosity is a defense against paranoid anxiety. Paranoid regression in therapy can lead to episodes of psychosis (Kernberg 1975). …
People with personality disorders suffer from subtle neurocognitive disturbances. They have poor cognitive performance and have problems with executive function, learning, abstract thinking and attention. PET scans show that people with aggression have decreased metabolism in frontal and temporal lobes (O’Leary & Cowdry 1994). Neurocognitive disturbances can be caused by inheritance or developmental trauma. …
In Trump's case, these neurocognitive deficits aren't subtle at all.
In the development of malignant narcissism there is a strong possibility that parents lack the capacity for empathy, the ability to contain infantile rage and the ability to adequately respond to a child’s grandiose-exhibitionistic mirroring and idealizing needs. Parental figures provide for their children’s physical needs but neglect their emotional needs. The attitude of parents of children who will develop malignant narcissism is controlling and sadistic. They demand that their children be tough, tolerate pain, show no emotion and learn to manipulate others. Parental figures are cold and spiteful but over-admiring of their children’s talents and charms (Torgensen 1994). There is no verbal memory for early relational trauma but the “damaged core” appears in later personality problems that reflect the early trauma (Akhtar 2009).3
… In malignant narcissism right brain impairment results in a developmental arrest at the stage of the archaic grandiose self (Kohut 1971), reactive rage and aggression (Kohut 1971) and identification with the aggressor (Schore 2001). The grandiose self is a pathological fusion of 1) special aspects of the self, 2) the idealized self-image and 3) the ideal object representation. Chronic envy underlies the grandiose self and rage incites its formation (Kernberg 1975). Introjective identification is used to incorporate desirable aspects of others claimed to belong to the self. Projective identification is used to externalise unacceptable aspects of the self and deposit them into others. Talents and gifts are hypertrophied. Whatever love is offered is destroyed in order to maintain superiority over others. Goodness in others provokes envy and this is defended against by devaluation, control and avoidance (Kernberg 1975).
… Tyrants have been recognized as malignant narcissists who come to power in economic and political situations where they have an opportunity to consolidate their power. They have severe superego deficits that over time lead to a loss of reality testing and erratic, self-destructive behaviors (Glad 2002).
Again, this was not written with Donald Trump in mind. But he very obviously is the most extravagant, flagrant, easily-diagnosed malignant narcissist any of us have ever seen.
So if by chance you’re sitting in the US Congress, here’s what you must understand. Donald Trump does not believe that you exist. Unaccustomed as this notion may be, if you study the literature on pathological narcissism even cursorily, you’ll see that the evidence this is so is very significant. You are useful to him only in so far as you reinforce his grandiose view of himself. Other than that, it is immaterial to him if you live or die, flourish or fail. You may as well be an ant.
Something seems to be preventing you from appreciating that he suffers from an extremely serious, and dangerous, mental illness. When he says crazy things, it is not to be shrugged off. He’s not just having a laugh. He believes every word he says. What he says, at any given moment, no matter how ludicrous—even if he said the opposite just days before—is reality to him at that moment, as it is for the dementia patients living in an eternal 1956. His mind is a kaleidoscope of vivid delusions that he must believe to preserve his grandiose but egg-fragile self-image. That image is his false self. He has long since lost contact with the real one.
I beg of you: Understand this. He is not lying. He is hallucinating. His tweets are not “Trump being Trump.” They are not 9th-dimensional chess. They are psychotic delusions.
Make yourself look. Imagine someone else had written this—someone you don’t know. Do you see how insane it looks? That’s because he’s insane. It is not more complicated than that.
Here’s something else you should grasp: Our adversaries understand this perfectly, as do our allies (to the extent we still have them). Just as we have a staff of psychiatrists at the CIA who profile foreign leaders, so do they. Theirs are not constrained by the Goldwater Rule. Every foreign leader who speaks to Trump has received a report from their intelligence services explaining, just as I am here, that he suffers from a very severe personality disorder—but the good news, at least, is that this makes him easy to manipulate. Did you see what Canada and Mexico just did? They’ve read those reports. They told him he won, praised him for his astonishing strength, didn’t bend an inch, told him they were bending a mile, and God help us, he lapped it up. It’s like throwing a blanket over a budgie cage. He got rolled by the Taliban at Doha. He’ll be rolled by Russia. He’ll be rolled by Iran. Don’t kid yourself that he knows how to make a deal—he doesn’t.
Trump and MAGA, who have entered his delusions, genuinely believe this was a victory. Everyone in the world except for them understands that this was a humiliation.
A reminder for the GOP
Folie à Millions
The mystery is not why Trump behaves as he does. However much you pretend it’s a mystery, the answer is obvious: He acts like that because he is very, very sick. The real puzzle is why so many previously healthy Americans have fully entered into his psychopathology. We all know people who, had you told them 10 years ago that within their lifetime an American president would behave the way Trump is behaving, would have responded with horror or frank disbelief. Yet the same people will now defend literally anything that Trump does.
The only concept that makes sense of this is collective narcissism.
Malignant narcissism, for Fromm, is not merely a personal pathology, but a cultural and political one. It originates in the malignant narcissist’s need to transform reality:
Fromm observed that entire groups, societies, and nations can become narcissistic with the leader. When they do, their narcissism typically takes the form of destructive nationalism. In authoritarian regimes, leaders and followers alike exhibit collective narcissism, the key symptom of which is the glorification of one’s own culture or nation at the expense of others:
Speaking of which, this is our new State Department spokesman:
What do these four people have in common, I wonder?
An example of submission to the powerful leader in an act of symbiosis and identification. As you can see, Grok offered him the opportunity to learn more about the reality of these achievements. He presumably didn't take it. The reason it seems that so many of his supporters are idiots is not necessarily that they're unintelligent. It's that their desire to merge with their idealized imago is overwhelmingly more powerful and primal than their desire to think carefully about trade policy. (NB: Trump retweeted this: He plans to be president for life, and people like this will support his ambition fully.)
When members of a society feel shame and worthlessness as the result of a narcissistic injury, Fromm indicates, they become vulnerable to collective narcissism, which permits members of the group to feel powerful and invincible as part of a larger whole. But a necessary component of this emotional strategy is the dehumanization of those outside the group, to whom they must feel violent hostility. You cannot have the kind of passionate bond we see between Trump and his supporters without this profound danger. This is how genocides happen, so do not dismiss the genocidal language coming from Trump’s camp. When he calls Americans “vermin” and “enemies of the people” (and I don’t need to remind you what he’s called immigrants), it can’t be dismissed. His supporters now use the same language. Consumed by an exaggerated sense of superiority, nations in the grip of this pathology are particularly prone to aggression and conflict. Precisely because they’re in such poor contact with reality, they’re also prone to losing those conflicts.
I wonder if particularly accomplished societies might be prone to suffering particularly severe narcissistic wounds. Before the First World War, German society was understood to be among the world’s most, even the world’s most, accomplished and civilized. German culture was a geyser of philosophical, mathematical, scientific, and artistic brilliance—Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weber, von Humboldt, Gauss—and when Germany entered the Great War, it was in the serene assurance that the Continent would fall swiftly under its control. Germany was to take its rightful place in the sun. It ended in ruin. The Treaty of Versailles and hyperinflation were not merely traumas, they were deep narcissistic wounds.
The United States, too, suffered not only a national trauma on September 11 but a narcissistic wound. A great superpower, a hyperpower—the mighty colossus that defeated the Nazis and won the Cold War— was brought low by a bunch of cave-dwelling primitives. They destroyed the symbols of our economic and political power not with the nuclear weapons we had always feared, but with a handful of box cutters. Even if it was an emotion we never discussed, or even consciously recognized, we were ashamed. Worse, our all-powerful, world-spanning military—our nuclear arsenal capable of reducing whole civilizations to ash before breakfast; our submarines, silent specters of Armageddon, each one carrying enough ballistic fury to render the map of the Earth an abstract painting of fire and ruin; our firepower unmatched in the annals of human conquests—managed to lose not one but two wars to those cave-dwelling primitives. How did that happen? Where did our absolute dominance of the planet go? How could those goddamned Dixie Chicks have been right? We even learned that our intelligence services practiced the “rectal refeeding” of our captives with puréed raisins. Then came a financial crisis that made a mockery of our beliefs about the superiority of our economic system and turned the kids into communists, for the love of God—communists!—prattling on about the subjects and instruments of labor and going unbathed for days in Zuccoti Park. When Trump came along with lament that we never win anymore, he spoke directly to those wounds.
Do you not find that this idea makes sense of our eagerness to betray our allies? Americans have long suspected that Europeans look down on them. They warned us about Iraq. They laughed at us because we’re fat. So we’re punishing them for the slight, and in doing so, turning our paranoid fantasies into reality.
Fromm’s observation that the most frequent symptom of group narcissism is a lack of rationality is apt. This is why it so often seems we have been transported to Animal Farm. “Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days.” Two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, exclaim, “Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”
Conrad Napoleon is always right!
(After issuing the second tweet, one imagines, our Tribune of the Revolution burst into a lusty chorus of “Beasts of England.” )
Below is another good example. Representative Goldman states something so obvious you’d think no one with two eyes could dispute it:
But indeed they dispute it. Look at the responses, below. They show the power of narcissistic identification with the leader—in this case, Elon Musk. By submitting to Musk and accepting his obvious nonsense as truth, they achieve symbiosis with him and worship an idealized version of themselves. He represents what they dream of being: an inarticulate, ill-educated plutocrat who is seemingly bound by no law. It’s not for nothing that Musk exercises his strongest hold over socially maladjusted teenage boys who play video games all day and can’t get laid—which is precisely why the ones below now have A-suite level clearance at the General Services Administration, your Social Security number, your address, your tax information, and your money—but your lawfully-appointed officials do not:
It’s why these people think “Why, that’s perfectly cool”—and react with rage upon being told that it is illegal and spectacularly dangerous:4
“I accept giving all my personal info to Elon Musk. I trust him.” This sentence is so manifestly perverse that we’re compelled to conclude Fromm is right. Malignant narcissists are capable of inducing entire societies to share their psychosis.
In 2022, Marco Rubio said that deporting Venezuelans would be a “death sentence.” Trump just sentenced 600,000 Venezuelan refugees to death. Rubio, presumably, now favors this. (But at least we got rid of DEI.)
Trust me: Anyone capable of this kind of cruelty and reckless indifference will exhibit the same to you.
Psychopathological Resonance
In 2020, an Israeli specialist in malignant narcissism, Sam Vaknin (who, strangely, claims to be a malignant narcissist himself, albeit a highly self-aware one) delivered a paper to a conference on addiction research. He titled it, “Narcopath leaders have taken over the world,” and argued that we are suffering from a global epidemic of pathological narcissism. He never advances a thesis to explain this, at least not in this paper. We have, he suggests, the leaders we deserve:
Today, I would like to discuss a phenomenon that started long before the pandemic with a wave of populism, the revolt of the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset called it in the 1930s.
It’s a situation where people use the levers of democracy to elect leaders that are rebels. They don’t conform. They are anti-establishment. They’re defiant. They’re impulsive. … But many of these leaders qualify diagnostically and clinically as narcissists. Some of them are even psychopathic or psychopathic narcissists. Narcissistic and psychopathic leaders reify the pathologies of their cultures, of their societies. They are not an isolated phenomenon. They don’t come from outer space. They’re like a blank screen upon which everyone projects their pathologies.
So if we see a rise of narcissistic and psychopathic leaders, it’s only because civilizations, societies and cultures throughout the world, the East and West, not only the Western world, but East as well, everyone is becoming more narcissistic. And in the fringes, many, many are adopting psychopathic behaviors as highly efficacious or self-efficacious.
These leaders foster and propagate a personality cult. But when things go sour, when things don’t go their own way, they turn on their own fans and followers and acolytes and psychophants. We will discuss this dynamic a bit later. As I said, the narcissistic or psychopathic leader is the culmination and reification of his period, culture, and civilization. Such a leader is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies. The leader’s mental health pathologies resonate with the enemies of his society and culture. I call this a psychopathological resonance.
The leader and the led, the leader and the electorate, the leader and his nation, the collective, they form a self-enhancing and self-reinforcing feedback loop, a diode of mirrored adoration and reflected love by elevating and idealizing their leader. … The mob actually is elevating and idealizing itself. The leader is the mob. And the leader’s harness of hypocrisy, mob rule, becomes the norm, the new normal. In the dictator’s ascendance, these members of the impersonal masses, these mobs, they find hope. In his manifest illness, mental illness, they find curative solace and a legitimation of their own collective insanity.
The dictator or the authoritarian leader himself equates being elected, however patently and fairly, with being chosen by the transcendental forces of gods, of history.5His destiny, says the leader, is the manifest destiny. His exceptionalism is the nation’s own exceptionalism. Like Louis XIV said, let us be one. I am the state.
The malignant narcissist invents and then projects a false, fictitious self, for the world to see, to behold, to fear, to admire. Such a leader maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with. And this is further exacerbated by the trappings of power. He is surrounded by yesmen and sycophants and acolytes. No one dares to tell him the truth. There’s a bubble forming around him. The narcissist’s grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are supported by real life authority and the narcissist’s predilection and proclivity to surround himself with obsequious sycophants. …
The narcissist’s personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism, a whiff of disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid. They have persecutory ideation, or even persecutory delusions. Many of them suffer from ideas of reference or referential ideation, the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not. And so narcissists often regard themselves as victims of persecution. They are the sacrificial lambs.
The narcissistic leader fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the trappings and hallmarks of an institutional religion, a secular religion, with him as the Godhead. … Very often such leaders will say, I’m sacrificing my life for you. Look how hard I’m working for you, for you, not for me, for you. The narcissistic leader is a monstrously inverted saint, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people, or humanity at large, should benefit.
… Lacking empathy, they regard their subjects as a manufacturer, regard these raw materials, or as an obstructed collateral damage in vast historical processes. They’re fond of saying, when you cut trees, you chip wood, or to prepare an omelette, one must break the eggs. These are their favorite things. People are eggs or woodchippings. … weakness is deplored, vulnerability is derided and decried.
… It’s not veritable atavism or true conservatism. It’s opportunistic play, game, mind game, power play, and all of it within the symbolic realm. In short, narcissistic leadership is about theater. It’s a society of the spectacle, to use Guy Debord’s phrase.6 It’s about theater. It’s a theater production. … The cultish leader demands the suspension of judgment and the attainment of depersonalization and derealization and loads and loads of amnesia. The narcissistic leader is a dissociative leader. He thrives on forgetfulness, on lies, on distortions, on negating the truth and facts. Catharsis is tantamount in this narcissistic dramaturgy to self-annulment. Narcissism is nihilistic, not only operationally or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism, ostentatious rejection, and hatred of life. … Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the old ways, against the hegemonic culture, against the upper classes, against the established religions, against the superpowers, the corrupt order, the establishment. Narcissistic movements are pure, real, adolescent. A reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon narcissistic and sometimes psychopathic toddler nation-states or group or upon the leader himself.
What about minorities? What about others? Minorities and others are singled out, arbitrarily selected, and they constitute a perfect, easily identifiable embodiment of everything that’s wrong. Minorities, others, are accused of being old, of being eerily disembodied, cosmopolitan, part of the establishment, globalist, decadent, deviant, perverted, sick, dangerous, contaminants, polluting, et cetera, et cetera. …
These are projections. … Narcissistic leader and his fans are the ones who are aggressive and violent and dangerous and yet they claim that the minorities are aggressive and vile. It is the narcissistic leader that establishes an authoritarian surveillance state. He is everywhere. He has eyes everywhere. A system of snitching, a system of shaming and yet he blames the minorities, immigrants, others, of being everywhere. …
Narcissists thrive on hatred. They thrive on pathological envy. They invent enemies where there are none because it is by opposition that their fuzzy identity coalesces and crystallizes and congeals. Narcissists, of course, like borderlines, have difficulties with identity. They have identity diffusion or identity disturbance. And this is precisely the source of fascination with the epitome and the quintessence of narcissistic and psychopathic leaders, Adolf Hitler. …
The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and the glamor of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. The reign of the narcissistic leader is all smoke and mirrors. There is no substance there. It’s devoid of substance. It consists of mere appearances and mass delusions. And in the aftermath of the regime of the narcissistic and psychopathic leader, the narcissistic leader having died, having been deposed, having been voted out of office, it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation seizes the sleight of hand. The entire edifice crumbles like so much dust.
What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely held empires disintegrate, laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. Earth-shattering and revolutionary scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem. As their end draws near, as they come to the end of their regimes, narcissistic psychopathic leaders act out. They lash out. They erupt. They attack with equal virulence and ferocity, compatriots, erstwhile allies, neighbors, foreigners, minorities, loved ones, so-called nearest and dearest, intimates.
… All populist charismatic leaders believe that they have a special connection with the people, a relationship that is direct, almost mystical, a relationship that transcends institutions and the normal channels of communication such as the legislator or the media. And so a narcissist who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite, such a narcissist is unlikely to use violence at first.
But this pacific mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, that his constituency, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply, that they have turned against him. At first, when he develops this paranoid ideation, this persecutory delusion that everyone is against him, at first in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction, underline his chaotic personality, the narcissist strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. Why is he not popular anymore? What has happened?
He says, the people are being manipulated. Foreign powers are provoking them against me. People are duped by the media, by big industry, by the military, by the elite. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They are following this phase. They will revert to form. They will realize how good they had it with me. But when these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology, when these attempts fail, the narcissist is injured. This injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized is now discarded with contempt and hatred. Hitler gave instructions to destroy Germany days before he had died.
… The narcissistic leader is likely to justify the butchering and slaughtering of his own people by claiming that they had intended to assassinate him. They were about to undo the revolution, devastate the economy, harm the nation or the country. The small people, the rank and file, the loyal soldiers of the narcissist, his flock, his nation, his employees, they pay the price.
The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated, it’s a drawn-out process. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive complex post-traumatic stress disorder …
Flying blind, flying solo
All of this applies to Trump, to Elon Musk, and to the legions of Americans who have lost entirely their grip on reality so better to live in Trump and Musk’s delusions.
To Congress, if you’re reading this: You are patently evading a terrifying but obvious reality: Donald Trump is insane. You must come to terms with that, at long last. He declared a trade war on Canada—Canada!—then changed his mind the next day, declaring victory while achieving nothing save setting fire to our reputation internationally and taking us a another step closer to international pariah status—or worse.
He’s handed the United States Treasury to Elon Musk’s bagboys in the biggest security breach in American history. If China had done this, we would be calling it Cyber Pearl Harbor, and there’s no evidence that Musk is more loyal to us than he is to China. You can’t just sit there, slack-jawed, doing nothing while a hairless South African creep throws the full faith and credit of the United States in the crapper and wipes his ass with the Constitution.
You know perfectly well that the consequence of precipitously cutting off aid around the world will be famine and death. Do you really believe that men who think nothing of that will spare you? Trump already tried to have all of you killed and he just freed the men who were going to murder you. If only out of a reptilian instinct for self-preservation, you must stop him. Each time you put it off, shrinking into the wallpaper and praying he won’t notice you, you allow him to do more damage while ensuring the inevitable moment of reckoning will be even more apocalyptic.
He has already permanently alienated our allies. Our globe-spanning alliance system made us a superpower, and the damage he’s done to it can’t be made right. We might paper things over superficially, but they will never trust us again.
If you don’t grasp this, it’s evidence that you’ve entered his pathology. Trump forced Mexico and Canada to renegotiate NAFTA and declared the renegotiated treaty (which was the same as the old one) perfect—a total and complete VICTORY!!! Then, for no reason whatsoever, he declared the treaty null and void and not only launched a trade war with Canada, but accompanied this with repeated threats to annex it—then just as quickly changed his mind.This is not strategic genius, it’s a human Dali painting: melting, distorted, and utterly incomprehensible. The days in which Canada sends their sons to fight beside ours when we evoke Article 5 are gone.
But it’s worse than it would be if it were merely Trump who was insane. His insanity is contagious. Canada has been treated to a blast of this all week:
More Danes than Americans died, per capita, in Afghanistan. Canada too can suffer a narcissistic wound—which in this case, we would call “decent self-respect.” The next time terrorists strike our cities (or any other enemy, and we have a lot of them), we’re on our own. Our ability to call the shots around the world? Over. We’re the North American thugs, now, and we have less to offer than the Chinese thugs, who at least build their clients nice infrastructure before bankrupting them. We have threatened to invade Greenland. No one knows if we’re serious. This is not “thinking outside the box,” it’s howling-at the-moon, shield smashed, sword swinging, and no plan whatsoever insane. If you can’t see this, you’ve gone insane along with him. Snap out of it. Does this look like “respected around the world” to you?
Why would anyone sign a treaty with us now that they know Trump will just tear it up when he bores with it? Why would anyone keep a treaty with us when we practically ululate as we proudly, insouciantly violate the treaty commitments we made to our closest allies? Are you really prepared to live in a world with the only operative principle is, “Might makes right?” Russia just sacrificed 50,000 young men in a month without blinking and China has 314,459,083 men of military age. This won’t work out well for us. They both have enough nuclear weapons to end organized human society. When there are no more rules, the biggest thugs win. Who are the biggest thugs? Here’s how you tell: Look who Trump admires.
The international norms we’ve established and enforced for nearly a century are not some effete parlor game. They serve our interests. An eternal Hobbesian war of all against all does not. Trump can bluster all he likes, but everyone knows we have no taste for body bags. If we tell Russia, “Take Europe, we’ll go home and content ourselves with our greater American Reich,” how long do you think it will be before they remember their claim to Alaska?
Over the course of two weeks, we’ve shown the world that you’d be crazy to integrate your military with ours. Who wants to be dependent on lunatics for spare parts and resupply? If your country’s been invaded, you don’t want your survival to depend on Donald Trump’s latest mood. Who wants to host an American military base now? No one now trusts us to protect them from China or Russia, so why would they want us there? Our presence just endangers them.
We’ve got Trump yammering insanely about the Deep State, squirreling away top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago, and crowning it by putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our intelligence community. So we’ve blown up Five Eyes, too. You know no one will share intelligence with us now. It’s a hell of a time to be flying blind, given the wars raging across the globe and the wars soon to be raging because we’re leaving a superpower-sized power vacuum as we retreat. And we have no FBI now, either.
Susan Collins, Todd Young—seeing as you just gave Tulsi Gabbard the thumbs up, permit me to ask : Why did you want to be Senators? Washington is miserable in the winter and muggy in the summer. As far as anyone can see, you exist to furrow your brows in deep concern, then acquiesce to Trump’s latest insanity. You know Tulsi Gabbard has no business anywhere near classified information. Why didn’t you say “No?” If you’re too afraid of Trump’s thugs to do your job, why not resign and let someone else do it?
Don’t you worry about the consequences of this? You’ve got kids. Does it not occur to you that when the inevitable massive terrorist attack arrives, it could be them at our version of the Nova Music Festival? You know that’s what we’re inviting. It’s not a theoretical point. Countries with determined enemies do not have the luxury of descending into self-absorption, chaos, crisis, and madness. We can’t afford a break from reality. Our enemies—and boy, do we have them, even if Trump thinks they’re his friends—are watching. They know that the door is unlocked and the safe is guarded by a passel of Elon Musk’s Nazi-curious virgin nerds. We’re asking for it. That’s a hell of a price to pay for a tax cut, isn’t it?
Trump has touched off a race among our allies to reduce their dependency on the US. But it’s worse: It’s a truism of international relations that the allies we’re now bullying will form alliances against us. Some will seek the protection of a more reliable patron. Others will cut a deal with China or Russia. Those who can will build the Bomb. Or all of the above.
Of course they will: Behold the State Department’s new acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs—a Uighur genocide apologist who thinks we should deliver Taiwan to China:
He was fired from the first Trump administration because he was revealed to be a white nationalist, then rehired, presumably, for the same reason. In between, he refined his conspiracy theories about January 6. This is now the face of our foreign policy, and this is insane:
Meanwhile, our chief Pentagon spokesman will be wife-beater Sean Parnell. (The brand remains strong.)
You are watching a superpower commit suicide. Not since the Visigoths sacked Rome has a great empire suffered so much damage to its power and prestige in so short a time.
So, Congress, I implore you: Donald Trump is not strong, and he is not a fighter, and he does not have your back. He is severely mentally ill, and he’s taken half of America along on his psychopathological joyride while you blink like rabbits—stunned, bewildered, passive—and hope someone else will do something.
But you, Congress, and only you, have the power to stop this train to hell. You could bring it all to an end today. You could do your job and impeach him. He’s committed more impeachable acts than any of us can count since his inauguration: You have not only the right but the duty to end this madness.
Could you still be resisting the idea that he is out of his mind? His administration prevented studies about bird flu from being published as the outbreak escalates across the United States. He thinks that if we don’t know about it, it isn’t happening. He blames our health agencies for making a fuss about Covid and ruining his first presidency. Had it been up to him, a million-plus Americans would have died without ever knowing why they fell ill.
One of the studies that hasn’t been published would tell us whether veterinarians who treat cattle have unknowingly been infected by the virus. Another would let us know if people carrying the virus have infected their cats. Both were slated to appear in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published without interruption since 1952—until last week. Make yourself face it: Only a madman would prevent this information from reaching Americans.7
The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System has disappeared. So has the Agency for Toxic Substances. The landing page for HIV data has vanished. The AtlasPlus tool—with nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis—is gone. A hell of a price for getting rid of DEI.
Trump sent financial markets around the world into chaos for no reason at all. Same people do not do that. Nor do they turn over the Treasury—the nation’s checkbook—and every American’s personal data to a man who is, among other things, a font of Russian propaganda and a tireless promoter of Nazism.
No one elected Elon Musk. Congress makes these decisions. You make these decisions. Why would you abdicate your responsibilities to some creep who rips off Nazi salutes at the President’s inauguration? Why have you permitted him literally to seize the United States Treasury?
Why are you letting him insult and bully loyal and lawful employees of the United States government? Why are you permitting someone like Gavin Kriger—the twenty-something Musk acolyte who is now running amok inside USAID—to humiliate you? The guy is chums with Nick Fuentes and other proud, explicit neo-Nazis. Is there nothing about the thought of some hairless Baby Stormtrooper invading the US government and sadistically humiliating its employees that offends you? If you’re not willing to do your job, resigning is a perfectly reasonable option.
Republican lawmakers, including those most supportive of the president, are beside themselves with anxiety. When you speak to them—off the record, between friendly acquaintances—and ask how it’s going, they shift, look off, shrug: You know how it’s going. A GOP senator who supports the president had a blanched look. “He doesn’t do anything to make it easy,” he shrugged.
No, he doesn’t. And he never will, either, because he’s incurably insane. And if you think this is hard, just you wait—it only gets worse.
… I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that … the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun.
“Something new?” If you don’t have stable order and the rule of law, you have chaos and tyranny. That’s not new, it’s old as dirt. Congress, you are the guardrails. It is your responsibility to stop this.
People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.
It’s called “hell.”
… So far Mr. Trump is governing by executive order. This contributes to the uneasiness. … The heavy use of executive orders makes all politics personal, having to do with the man who orders and signs with a flourish. Making it personal distorts our understanding of what a leader can and should do. Executive orders ignore the branch of government called Congress and work against its authority, its role in the republican drama. They give the impression we are a government of one branch. Doing all this habituates the public to the idea of authoritarianism, of rule by the strongman. We will pick a new caudillo and he will save us with his pen! When you do away with branches and balances you cause trouble.
(No shit, Peggy!)
So wake up, Congress: Stop minimizing this. Days after Kash Patel reassured you that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution,” Trump decapitated the bureau and demanded the names of every agent who worked on the January 6 cases. When do you get tired of them making fools out of you? Days after JD Vance assured the public that Trump would never release insurrectionists who assaulted police officers—the police officers who protected you with their bloodied bodies—Trump released every one of them.8
Now Musk has seized USAID. Musk, by the way, is as delusional as Trump, but he may be even more dangerous because he’s young, and he understands what Trump calls “the computers,” whereas Trump is old and couldn’t rotate a PDF if his life depended on it. On the other hand, Trump has the nukes. Look at this lunacy. Stop pretending it’s no big deal!
Musk’s incels barged into a SCIF? They should’ve been shot on the spot. He set up private servers at the Office of Management and Budget? Hey—you! You, the one who couldn’t shut up about Hillary Clinton’s private email server! The word for it when a lawless, unelected mafia seizes control of your government is a coup. This will end up coming for you anyway, no matter how you fawn and grovel, so why don’t you reach down and see if your balls are still there? Come on, astonish us.
Do you not think you should hold hearings about reports that Musk picked Troy Meink for Air Force secretary because, when Meink ran the National Reconnaissance Office, he helped Musk land a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX? Or the fact that Musk now controls a government that is supposed to be regulating his businesses? He’s in industries—launching rockets, building AI—that are notoriously dangerous even when they’re properly supervised. Are you trusting that good old Elon Musk would never be reckless? He now has access to his competitors’ financial information. His adolescent devotees have downloaded all of this private information from supposedly secure servers. Does this happen in functional democracies? You know the answer to that question.
And why is the unelected man who now controls our Treasury and our data, and who is baldly and unconstitutionally usurping Congress’s Article I powers, promoting such well-known Russian lies? Who is he working for?
Could this be more outrageous? More insane?
The destruction of USAID—and Musk’s wild lies about it, broadcast to a massive global audience—are incomprehensible unless you assume he is collaborating with Russia and China. They are the ones who want USAID gone, not us. Why is Musk doing their bidding? Why is he smearing us? His propaganda on their behalf is making their intelligence services giddy. Aren’t you the least bit curious? Or do you think it’s just fine for us to have an unelected dictator who works for our enemies?
The US is now in full retreat from the world. Malnourished kids who depend on us will die. Our anti-terrorism programs will shut down. Diseases we were on the verge of conquering will rebound; one of them will show up not long from now in an unvaccinated America where, thanks to Trump and RFK Junior, we won’t have a surveillance system in place to detect it, and we’ll wind up treating it with tinctures of raw milk, powdered sow’s dung, and Kash Patel supplements. The outbreaks of monkeypox and Marburg we’ve been trying to keep from spreading beyond Africa? They’ll just spread. The Christians of the Middle East whose fate troubled you enough to appropriate the money to support them? I guess you’re not worried after all? The dissidents in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Myanmar? The Ukrainian civilians who were relying on our help to survive the winter? Combating the spread of fentanyl? Anyone?
China is salivating to fill the void. They’re now the only ones on whom developing countries can rely. While Trump invades Panama to wrest the canal from imaginary Chinese hands, China will scoop up every other canal, port, and harbor on the planet, not to mention every mineral deposit and rare earths mine. Our power will evaporate. Our jobs will be lost. The only American who would benefit from China’s victory is Elon Musk. Do you imagine he’ll share the spoils with you? He is not known for his philanthropy.
It is Congress that passes the laws governing asylum for immigrants—the ones Trump has unilaterally suspended because they’re “ineffective.” It is Congress that sets the length of service for the commissioners Trump just fired. You passed the Inspector General Act of 1978 and amended it in 2022. It requires the President to notify Congress 30 days prior to removal of an inspector general and provide “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal. It’s not a suggestion, it’s the law. He fired them all without warning. No one fires all of the inspectors general for any legitimate reason.
And riddle me this: If Elon Musk’s mission is to cut US$2 trillion dollars of waste, why is he beginning with USAID, which represents a mere 0.7 percent of the federal budget? Why, if he’s so savvy, is he doing this in a way that guarantees years of costly litigation—which the peremptorily and illegally-fired employees will win (if any rule of law remains)—and will saddle the taxpayer with the cost of the massive settlement?
Why is Musk lying, and lying, and lying about what USAID does, seeding his whole social network with wild conspiracy theories? Why is he promoting lies from the people who persuaded the world that the CIA created AIDS? Why is he disrupting Kenya’s security mission in Haiti, leaving police helpless as gangs terrorize Port au Prince? Why is he cutting security assistance to counterterrorism programs in East Africa? Why is he cutting counter-narcotics programs? Why is he cutting efforts to combat human trafficking? You would think a man with such a demonstrated interest in the abuse of girls and young women—someone so passionate in their cause that he denounced Keir Starmer as a “rape genocide apologist”—would hesitate abruptly to end such programs in countries where “rape genocides” are really taking place, wouldn’t you?
Why are you allowing Elon Musk to convey an unequivocal message of America’s utter irresponsibility, unreliability, and untrustworthiness around the world? Between 2013 and 2021, Beijing invested nearly US$700 billion in global infrastructure—nine times what we did. Xi just pledged more than US$50 billion in new financing for Africa. China is now the leading trade partner for many Latin American countries. We signed contracts, via USAID, with people who organized their lives around our commitment. They made hiring decisions. They purchased equipment. They moved their families. They made commitments of their own to local partners. We yanked out the rug from under them without any warning and those local partners will not trust us again.
Why are Musk’s operatives trying to gain access to classified information that they have neither a need to know, nor the appropriate authorization to view? Why were the officials who upheld their responsibility to protect that information immediately put on leave? Why does Musk get to decide that it is “time for USAID die?” Why does he get to decide that it is time for everyone who relied on our food and medical careto die?
Lifesaving health initiatives and medical research projects have shut down around the world in response to the Trump administration’s 90-day pause on foreign aid and stop-work orders. In Uganda, the National Malaria Control Program has suspended spraying insecticide into village homes and ceased shipments of bed nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children … Medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women and rehydration salts that treat life-threatening diarrhea in toddlers, cannot reach villages in Zambia because the trucking companies transporting them were paid through a suspended supply project of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. Thousands of people enrolled in the studies have drugs, vaccines and medical devices in their bodies but no longer have access to continuing treatment or to the researchers who were supervising their care.
… Many of those interviewed broke down in tears as they described the rapid destruction of decades of work.
All this to save less than one percent of the federal budget? This is not fiscal prudence. These are the works of a lunatic.
Isn’t it strange, too, that the State Department fired the contractors who work for its Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Bureau? You know who hates that bureau? Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán. You know who likes it? You do. That’s why you appropriated money for it.
All of these firings are illegal. The Supreme Court has been clear about this: Federal employees are entitled to due process. We—the taxpayer—will be sued seven ways till Sunday. Musk’s preposterous DOGE has not been established through any constitutional mechanism. Its attempt to gain access to federal systems is completely unlawful. Here’s a short list of the laws you passed that he’s violating or causing to be violated: the Federal Records Act (44 U.S.C. Chapter 31), which requires federal agencies to safeguard official records. The Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a), which protects personal data held by federal agencies from disclosure without authorization. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), which prohibits unauthorized access to government computer systems. The Fifth Amendment—due process—is being violated. The Fourth—search and seizure—likewise. Musk’s unauthorized, opaque, and manifestly sinister operations are intolerable. Begin the impeachment proceedings immediately.
We’re supposed to have three branches of government. You, Congress, are our legislative branch. You are supposed to be the most powerful. But you have no interest in asserting your prerogatives and you suffer from an abject fear of governing. You’ve saddled us with the most lunatic cabinet since Caligula and Incitatus—and we are growing mightily sick of you. It would be no very cynical asperity to wonder if Trump tipped you off before he announced then suspended the tariffs so you could make a boatload of money, too. Did he give you shares of his company, like the US$826,000 worth he just gave Kash Patel and Linda McMahon as “consideration for services provided?” Your constituents can hardly be blamed for wondering.
You mandated every penny of the spending that Trump has lawlessly impounded. You legislated the TikTok ban that Trump refuses to enforce. So why are you just sitting there? If you don’t plan to defend our Constitution—at long last—just go, you clacking ornaments. So long as we’re slashing government spending, why are we wasting it on you?
Beg pardon?
And what of the Fourth Estate?
These comments are for the editorial board of The New York Times, should you happen to be reading this. Don’t you think your readers should be informed that we’re in the grips of a massive constitutional crisis? Perhaps you could put the news in the space you devoted to that penetrating front-page feature article about upscale designer bongs?
Perhaps you’re so reticent to discuss the only news that matters because Trump is suing journalists as if he’d studied at the knee of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His new FCC chairman is making outrageous demands of CBS while Trump sues them on absolutely insane grounds. He’s launched investigations into NPR and PBS on a legally insane pretext. You know (or you should, for God’s sake) why he’s doing that. It’s Autocrat 101: Seize public media. Harass and sue private media until they censor themselves. But perhaps you should let your readers know?
Now back to Congress. I’m not the only one who’s growing concerned that perhaps you’ve been invaded by the body snatchers.
My sense is that you, like so many Americans, simply cannot bring yourself to believe the evidence of your eyes. Trump is not merely colorful; he is utterly deviant and out of his mind. He is no more capable of leading the country than those poor patients in California who pass their hours shuffling sadly past a the portrait of Ike, waiting for long-dead wives to return from their shopping excursions.
But if it is harmless to indulge the delusions of a patient who is safely sequestered, it is feckless and cowardly and dangerous beyond words to indulge the delusions of an American president. The world has never been more dangerous. His insanity is a risk to every living creature on this planet. Congress, you must act—and if you are too afraid to cross him, then in the name of God, go: Resign. Let someone who hasn’t yet lost his mind do your job.
Say, do you know anyone in Congress you could call?
The notable exception is Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who wrote the rules for diagnosing personality disorders in the DSM. He. has gone to war with some 20,000 other psychiatrists who have said publicly that Trump suffers from (at minimum) Narcissistic Personality Disorder so extreme that he’s incapable of executing his duties as president. He claims that this is impossible by definition, because a disorder must cause suffering and impairment, and as we can all see, Trump is not only happy as Larry but the President of the United States. Suffice to say this is an argument too dumb to refute.
Among other things, these kids have just become top priority targets for recruitment by Russia and China. They also risk spending a very long time in a federal slammer, or they would, had Trump not decapitated the FBI. This did not trouble Musk when he dispatched them.
Here, his thoughts complement and intersect Adam Garfinkle’s work on the rise of spectacleas a way of life—which, he argues is, is the result of the technology we’ve adopted: “The politics are downstream of a culture that has become so deranged over roughly the past quarter century by multi-gadget digidictions that it can’t find its asshole with an entire roll of toilet paper.”
Speaking of JD Vance, he just hired Tucker Carlson’s son “Buckley” (really) as his press secretary. Great to see merit returned as the criteria for hiring the federal government. Hey, did you catch Tucker’s latest? Where he blames the Jews for killing JFK?
Claire, this piece is absolutely riveting and —- entirely true. Unfortunately… for us and the world. I’ve been in a state of suspended animation, mild terror really — since Trump took office. Even a bit before. I’m considering leaving the country. As a trans person, I am very aware that my existence is — tenuous in this administration. Not to overstate it, but as you have pointed out so well, Trump’s hallucinations are not only ridiculous but they are cruel. We are all in danger though, no matter who or what we are. I hope that Musk and Trump are stopped and that sanity is restored. We are imperfect but we don’t deserve this. Though yes, apparently, “we” voted for it. Or, voted for Trump — I think many who did are in shock though too many still believe that he is Making America Great Again. Here’s to hoping that somehow we are spared the worst of it. And that the world is also.
Great piece, Claire. In an everyday world, what the orange doofus has done so far would be sufficient to invoke Article 25. I am all for impeaching the lunatic. My only concern is that we will end up with JD Vance, who is Peter Theil's monkey. Hard choice!
Claire, this piece is absolutely riveting and —- entirely true. Unfortunately… for us and the world. I’ve been in a state of suspended animation, mild terror really — since Trump took office. Even a bit before. I’m considering leaving the country. As a trans person, I am very aware that my existence is — tenuous in this administration. Not to overstate it, but as you have pointed out so well, Trump’s hallucinations are not only ridiculous but they are cruel. We are all in danger though, no matter who or what we are. I hope that Musk and Trump are stopped and that sanity is restored. We are imperfect but we don’t deserve this. Though yes, apparently, “we” voted for it. Or, voted for Trump — I think many who did are in shock though too many still believe that he is Making America Great Again. Here’s to hoping that somehow we are spared the worst of it. And that the world is also.
Great piece, Claire. In an everyday world, what the orange doofus has done so far would be sufficient to invoke Article 25. I am all for impeaching the lunatic. My only concern is that we will end up with JD Vance, who is Peter Theil's monkey. Hard choice!