The Coming Trump
Crackup
Jan. 23, 2026
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
Last week Minneapolis’s
police chief, Brian O’Hara, said the thing he fears most is the “moment where
it all explodes.” I share his worry. If you follow the trajectory of events,
it’s pretty clear that we’re headed toward some kind of crackup.
We are in the middle of
at least four unravelings: The unraveling of the postwar international order.
The unraveling of domestic tranquility wherever Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents bring down their jackboots. The further unraveling of the
democratic order, with attacks on Fed independence and — excuse the pun —
trumped-up prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the unraveling of
President Trump’s mind.
Of these four, the
unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others.
Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall
away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be
president of the United States.
Every president I’ve ever covered gets
more full of himself the longer he remains in office, and when you start out
with Trump-level self-regard, the effect is grandiosity, entitlement, lack of
empathy and ferocious overreaction to perceived slights.
Furthermore, over the
past year, Trump has been quicker and quicker to resort to violence. In 2025
the U.S. carried out or contributed to 622 overseas bombing missions, killing
people in places ranging from Venezuela to Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — not to
mention Minneapolis.
The arc of tyranny bends
toward degradation. Tyrants generally get drunk on their own power, which
progressively reduces restraint, increases entitlement and self-focus and amps
up risk taking and overconfidence while escalating social isolation, corruption
and defensive paranoia.
I have found it useful
these days to go back to the historians of ancient Rome, starting with the
originals like Sallust and Tacitus. Those fellows had a front-row look at
tyranny, with case studies strewed before them — Nero, Caligula, Commodus,
Domitian, Tiberius. They understood the intimate connection between private
morals and public order and that when there is a decay of the former, there
will be a collapse of the latter.
“Of all our passions and
appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature,
since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude,” Edward
Gibbon wrote in his 1776 classic, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
He continued: “In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their
force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of
contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past
injuries and the fear of future dangers all contribute to inflame the mind and
to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history
has been stained with civil blood.”
The 18th-century English historian
Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for
domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, since it can drive people to
serve the community in order to win public admiration. The lust for domination,
he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that causes us to “draw
every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify
every other passion.”
The insatiable lust for
domination, he continues, “banishes all the social virtues.” The selfish tyrant
attaches himself to only those others who share his selfishness, who are eager
to wear the mask of perpetual lying. “His friendship and his enmity will be
alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.”
Those historians were
impressed by how much personal force the old tyrants could generate. The man
lusting for power is always active, the center of the show, relentless,
vigilant, distrustful, restless when anything stands in his way.
Tacitus was especially
good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the
tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of
sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and
grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes
what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people
lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be
anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the
nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes
to seem unremarkable.
As the disease of
tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the
art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for
corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to
crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote.
“Indeed, there comes over us an attachment to the very enforced inactivity, and
the idleness hated at first is finally loved.”
I don’t have enough imagination to
know where the next crackup will come — through perhaps some domestic, criminal
or foreign crisis? Though I was struck by a sentence Robert Kagan wrote in an
essay on the effects of Trump’s foreign policy in The Atlantic: “Americans are
entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that
will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post-Cold War world like
paradise.”
And no, I don’t think
America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions
are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic
values.
But I do know that
events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record
many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly
regained his senses and became more moderate. On the contrary, the normal
course of the disease is toward ever-accelerating deterioration and debauchery.
And I do understand why
America’s founding fathers spent so much time reading historians like Tacitus
and Sallust. Thomas Jefferson called Tacitus “the first writer in the world,
without a single exception.” They understood that the lust for power is a primal
human impulse and that even all the safeguards they built into the Constitution
are no match for this lust when it is not restrained ethically from within.
As John Adams put it in a letter in
1798, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human
passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or
gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes
through a net.”
