Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.
It is not that there have not been mad men in power since. There have even been very powerful ones. But, at this moment in history, the fate of virtually everyone on the planet is being impacted by the toxic cocktail of character flaws, insecurities, and pathologies that are shaping the actions of the President of the United States.
Economic chaos and hardship ranging from spiking energy prices to the destruction of the global trading system; wars, military and diplomatic decisions that are causing death and suffering to millions and striking profound insecurity in the hearts of the rest of the planet; assaults on the rule of law and democracy that are not only causing misery and inequity for Americans but robbing the world of an important champion for a more just planet; attacks on science and medicine that are doing profound damage both to individuals and families but also the environment of the entire planet at a time of climate crisis; the active promotion of racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and hate that is inevitably altering global discourse and behaviors…look anywhere and there is evidence that a sick, sick man holds the most powerful job in the world.
This is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the mental defects and warped personalities of leaders have plagued humanity since the dawn of time.
Indeed, thinking of how Trump’s whims, impulses, ignorance, greed, malevolence, and hatefulness have shaped headlines and whipsawed the expectations of the world in just recent weeks—from launching wars or threatening invasions, turning pique into economic pain for entire nations, promoting the incompentent and the monstrous to do his dirty work, seeking desperately to steal glory he does not deserve while squandering recklessly resources in ways that will deny those in need what is essential to them—have made it clear to me where old worldviews featuring petty, jealous, mean-spirited gods came from.
The world has always been a place in which those with disproportionate power have been seen to live on an Olympus in which they were far from the grim quotidian existences of most of the human race. When average people looked around at their world, it was impossible to differentiate between the actions of the flawed men and women who held high office or controlled armies or great wealth and what otherwise might be considered greater universal forces.
How Far Above…or Below…Us is Olympus?
Greek and Roman gods, their behaviors, and those of many other societies worldwide, were hard to distinguish from the courts of emperors and kings. Perhaps that is because those were the only examples the authors of myths had to work with. Perhaps it is because it felt better to attribute fate to the peccadilloes or twisted nature of supernatural creatures than to realize that those who determined whether we lived or died, prospered or struggled, were happy or not, were just like us, just profoundly flawed assholes with too much influence and not enough wisdom or compassion to offset their profound shortcomings.
It is no stretch to think of the tales of ancient wars and disasters and how they were tied to the behavior of gods but were really the result of corrupt systems that elevated a few above the many and connect it to our times. As of one day last week, our allies did not expect a war to start imminently against Iran. Then within hours it did. Thousands of bombs rained down upon the streets, cities and towns of Iran. Parents kissed their children goodbye in the morning and did not see them again as “fate” wiped away the lives and promise of hundreds of young lives. Thousands of bombs rained down from the heavens forcing people to abandon their homes or worse. Chaos rained because of a far away power. An unarmed naval vessel full of musicians and others who had participated in a peaceful festival thousands of miles away was torpedoed, killing scores instantly and leaving scores more to drown horribly in the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, across the Middle East, people accustomed to peace were sent running for cover. There were nearly 3000 Iranian strikes at last count with over 1200 in the UAE, 600 in Israel, 500 in Kuwait, nearly 200 in Bahrain, and almost the same number in Saudi Arabia. Jordan, Qatar, Iraq, Oman, Cyprus, Azerbaijan and Turkey also were hit…spreading terror for thousands of miles to millions of innocents.
The price of oil has spiked 35 percent in a week, the most ever. Expectations are that it will go higher, potentially devastating the global economy. Markets shuddered. Savings were lost. Prices that many could already not afford headed up again.
Why?
Because of the impulses of a single man. We can only speculate at the reasons. Because there was no real reason for the war. The “imminent threat” cited by the U.S. administration as a justification for its actions was a complete fabrication. Trump’s assertion that Iran was two weeks away from a nuclear weapon was an unabashed, easily disproven lie. Indeed, Trump himself had unilaterally withdrawn from the internationally-agreed to nuclear deal struck over a decade earlier, triggering this madness. As he had last summer, even as a negotiated solution to concerns about Iranian arms was being discussed by diplomats, Trump decided to attack Iran.
Was he distracting from the Epstein Files? From economic decline at home? From plummeting poll numbers? Did he have some darker alternative motive? We can’t know. Indeed, all we do know is that his stated reasons for action changed so much—from concern about nuclear weapons to concern about missiles to concern about Iranian proxies in the region to support for Iranian protestors in the street to warnings of an urgent threat—were all embraced and discarded with such frequency that they certainly were just fabrications.
The Only Imminent Threat Was from Trump
Indeed, they were presented so preposterously that it almost became comic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that there was an imminent threat because we knew Israel was planning to strike Iran and that should they do that Iran would inevitably strike us. But then Trump, petty demi-deity that he is, was unable to tolerate the idea that he was led into this by the Israelis, asserted that he was the one who actually encouraged the Israelis to attack Iran in the first place.
Which, meant that the source of the imminent threat to which we were responding was actually…us, the White House, the president. It is said the gods laugh at those who make plans. Surely they were also laughing at this…and the absence of plans.
With no rationale to attack, we have no clear metrics for success. We went from trying to neutralize a nuclear threat (which we days earlier said we had obliterated) to destroying missile launching sites to promoting regime change. We said it was a war and yet it was not a war (lest it require congressional authorization). We said it would take days and then weeks and now possibly months. Trump most recently has said that he demands “unconditional surrender” in this non-war and also that he must have the ability to personally choose the next leader of Iran.
There are few issues that unite Iran’s hardliners and its courageous, battered pro-democracy demonstrators. But undoubtedly, opposition to having the next leader of Iran chosen 6500 miles away by a sundowning ex-reality show host in a cheesily gilded White House throne room is one thing about which they surely share a view. It is a terrible idea, a non-starter, especially coming from a country, the U.S., that set Iran’s modern tragedies in motion with an ill-considered effort to remove Iran’s prime minister and replace him with a brutal, corrupt monarch in 1953.
Now, there are multiple reports that Trump—who ran on being the enemy of endless wars in the Middle East—is contemplating putting US troops on the ground as a next phase in this conflict. He does that even though it now appears that there are intelligence reports asserting, in the words of a Saturday headline in the Trump-leaning Bezos Washington Post, “Intel report warns large-scale war ‘unlikely’ to oust Iran’s regime. A classified U.S. report doubts that Iran’s opposition would take power following either a short or extended U.S. military campaign.”
As many have argued effectively, this is not a “war of choice.” That implies too much thought was given to it. My friend Ed Luce of the Financial Times put it better when he called it a "war of whim." It is clear that while the military has prepared for such a conflict for a long time, there has been virtually no strategic preparation from a president who famously doesn’t care to listen to advice. Few discussions of contingencies and possible unintended consequences have taken place. Even intended consequences (like decapitating the regime) did not seem to have benefited from sufficient discussions to rule out the killing of all the people the U.S. government had hoped would replace Khamenei and his inner circle. As for impacts on American soldiers, the attitudes seemed even more careless. Trump shrugged that in wars “people die.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth rather repulsively attacked journalists who raised the cases of the first Americans to have died in the war for conducting gotcha journalism intending to make the president look bad. (Priorities, priorities.)
The war is already hugely unpopular, opposed by Americans across the board with support from just a quarter of those polled or less. As wars continue and the costs rise, they become even less popular. It is estimated that this war is already costing between $1 billion and $2 billion dollars a day. (A study by the Center for American Progress noted the daily cost of the war could provide SNAP food benefits for 2 million Americans for a year.) Now, rumors suggest Trump will be asking the Congress for $50 billion to fund the war. Congress, supine and irresponsible as it is, will almost surely provide this. Which could fund the expansion to boots on the ground. Which will lead to more deaths of U.S. soldiers and of innocent victims of the collateral consequences of such a conflict.
Unintended Consequences
But there are other worrisome consequences that were clearly not considered. Military leaders are reporting that our stockpiles of key weapons systems are being depleted…and we’re just a week into this war. Trump has called for new production of such weapons but that could take months or years to achieve. Resources from the Indo-Pacific region and the Americas are being diverted to the war zone. This, of course, puts other strategic interests at risk. Surely, for example, the Chinese are monitoring closely how the U.S. is weakening the assets with which it might have protected Taiwan by conducting this war without reason. So, too are the Europeans and Ukrainians, as they were purchasing U.S. weapons to help defend Ukraine (after Trump stopped providing such weapons as the Biden Administration had done). This war makes Ukraine less safe. It makes Taiwan less safe. It makes US interests worldwide less secure. It is opposed by some of our allies and the remainder are made very uncomfortable by it.
(It should be noted, apropos of Ukraine and the real impulses and agenda of the president, that when it was reported that Russia was helping the Iranians target American military assets in the war zone, Trump expressed irritation at being asked about it and his spokesperson shrugged it off. So what? So what that we are helping Russia in Ukraine and by weakening our Atlantic Alliance but they are providing intelligence to Iran that will likely lead to the deaths of American troops and our friends and allies in the region.
Similarly repulsive: It is now being reported that the State Department is using the war to justify providing Israel with 20,000 bombs. In the wake of Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza…and while it is also actively encroaching on Lebanese territory while trying to seize control of more of the West Bank…this too is egregious, insupportable behavior.)
But the potential negative consequences of this war extend further. It is quite possible that the Iranians will see this conflict as reason to reengage and accelerate efforts to develop a nuclear weapons. (After all, we don’t tend to attack countries with nuclear weapons, whereas those that give them up—like Ukraine and Libya—have suffered unhappy fates.) Or they may use partially enriched uranium to make dirty bombs. In either case, Trump’s actions in this case as well as his withdrawal from the last major strategic nuclear arms control agreement that existed between the US and Russia and his intent to modernize and expand America’s nuclear arsenal are pushing the world into a dark chapter many may have thought was of a type we had left behind: a new, global nuclear arms race.
Further, as Iranian weapons stocks are further depleted, they too may draw upon their long history of sponsoring terror to use unconventional means to strike out at American and allied targets worldwide. We have lived through a period insecurity about such attacks for most of this century and now it could be returning.
This list of potential consequences is long, so long it may be daunting or even impossible for the general public to synthesize. As bad, however, is the fact that such lists tend to be what newspapers and TV shows and podcasts focus on when they cover the war…and they are already showing they’re tiring of it and in search of new sources of endorphins for their audiences. Meanwhile, we ignore the human costs of these wars. We don’t see the torment on the faces of the parents who lost their daughters in the school bombing. The fact that over 1,000 Iranian civilians have lost their lives in the first week of this war is reduced to being a statistic and not the tale of the anguish and irreparable loss felt by their families, of the tragedy of lives snuffed out…for no reason.
For no reason. For no reason. Because of fate. Which is to say because these people had the misfortune to live during the time of Donald J. Trump.
Life in the Time of a Mad King
What is the reason behind the 3000 strikes on neighboring countries? It is because they were friends of the United States, because they hosted U.S. troops or naval bases. But, what about the human impact on those countries as well, the impact on lives that once felt safe and secure, or the impact on how they might view their relations with the U.S., a country that could launch a war for no reason that could turn their worlds upside down.
Among those countries is, of course, Israel, which is in a different category of “friend.” It has become a destabilizing force in the Middle East. It is a co-author of this conflict. Its warped leader shares responsibility for what is unfolding. And it must deal with another factor, that its influence on Trump and the US (including in recent Democratic Administrations) has been hugely damaging. No country has seen its stock in the US fall more rapidly than Israel in the past few years. This war of mental dysfunction will not help.
It is all shocking and appalling even as we recognize that we may not be seeing or considering its most shocking or appalling human costs.
But, even as the story of this misbegotten conflict is unfolding, Trump is illustrating the point with which I opened this column—the degree to which the dysfunction in his head is driving the global dysfunction of this era.
Even as this new unasked for, unneeded, illegal war unfolded, Trump has asserted that next he will seek to topple the government of Cuba. As if the job of presidents of the United States was to pick and choose who ruled the world and how. This is only weeks after a similarly illegal attack on Venezuela in which removed their leader. And that attack came only weeks after Trump speculated about attacking our own NATO allies and seizing Greenland. Previously, he also expressed ambitions to remake the governments of Colombia and of Panama. He has talked about intervening in Mexico. He has launched more military attacks in more countries in his first year or so in office than any other U.S. presidents. With this week’s other attack—on Ecuador (to go after the drug dealers we now call terrorists to enable the president to act without fewer constraints"—he has assaulted 8 countries around the world, 9 if you count his sending federal forces into US cities for no reason at all.
Wars worldwide for no reason. Lives lost. Pain and suffering.
The gods must be crazy, indeed.
But the madness of our mad king does not stop there. His psychological damage has driven a massive illegal attack on the global trading system, tariffs imposed by the president alone for reasons ranging from his mood to his misunderstanding of economics to a desire to extort foreign leaders to momentary fits of pique that have cost American consumers nearly $200 billion. When courts have ruled against them, he has proceeded nonetheless. When economists explained these were taxes on Americans and damaging to the global economy, he has proceeded nonetheless.
He has also, at the same time, waged a war against science and medicine, resulting in the spread of deadly diseases and the ignorant views that accelerate the damage they can do. He has rejected the conclusions of virtually every expert in the world to promote expanding our use of fossil fuels even though they are actively, visibly, profoundly damaging our planet. He has shut down US programs to protect our interests worldwide despite knowing that the consequence will be the death of millions upon millions. 400,000 children dead in 2025 from shutting down US AID programs. 600,000 people overall, dead. 14 million likely to die between now and the end of the decade for the same reason.
Why? Why? Why?
Because he’s insane. Because he’s venal. Because he’s a malignant narcissist. Because he’s a sociopath. Because he has a fragile ego. Because those around him exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether he is insane or malevolent or repugnant or not matters less than whether his actions will feather their nests, increase their power.
Because they, the billionaires, the Epstein class, are the warped demigods on the Olympus of the global economy. They play their games and the consequences for the little people down below, the consequences for us, hardly matter a whit.
Sickeningly, I still find that those who should know better, who should see all this for what it is—journalists and high-powered members of the policy and political communities, big thinkers, maybe some of the people you follow on Substack or listen to in podcasts or on television—continue to describe this in the language of normal activity in Washington or government.
They intone gravely and even the critics discuss all the above as though it were a matter of intellectual difference or different policy choices. Worse, some defend elements of this and say, well, Iran was bad so maybe violating the law and upsetting the region and pushing up prices and killing people and triggering a nuclear arms race and unleashing more terrorism in to the world is all justified on some level.
Yes, the Iranian regime was terrible. Yes, their treatment of their own people was despicable. Yes, we should have worked with our allies to use the tools at our disposal to rein them in and drive change. But there is a reason the U.S. despite four and a half decades of enmity with Iran has not gone to war—there was a sense of unintended consequences and of the impact on the rest of our interests worldwide as well as those of our friends and allies.
For all the power of the United States and all that invested in our president, neither we nor he should get to impose our will everywhere willy nilly without rhyme or reasons just because of that power. Not that we haven’t tried in the past. But even as we acknowledge the hubris underlying those past errors of judgment, we also must wake up to the fact that we have never seen anything like this.
Who and What Does Trump Think He Is?
We have, thankfully, never seen anything like this president who believes he is the last word on anything that happens in the world. A commander-in-chief who acts independently of our Congress as if he was king. A chief executive who believes his domain is limitless and behaves like the emperor of the world.
A man who behaves like a god, who gives and takes life like a god, who determines who to lift up and who to cast down like a god, who feels there is nothing to constrain him but his own conscience…but who is too disturbed and out of touch with reality to realize has no conscience or that he is just a man and a profoundly flawed one at that.
Throughout history, our myths and religions have told stories of higher powers that were in many ways modeled on the leaders we saw each day, here on earth. We would call them kings and lords. We would imagine their behavior like that which took place behind palace walls. This was a natural device. We could only write about and imagine what we knew or saw around us. But there was another reason behind it. It served the narratives of those ordinary people who actually ruled over principalities here on earth. They even sought to blur the line further between themselves with doctrines like “the divine right” of monarchs.
We lumped them all together, those who wielded the power to impact our destinies and those more elevated creatures we imagined were actually doing so.
But, of course, when studying history, what we learned that from time immemorial we have been plagued by those with the powers of gods who arrogated onto themselves choices that should be reserved either for gods or for ourselves…those who argued they were chosen by the heavens or anointed by God…and who thus said they deserved a place above us all, deserved to dictate the course of life on this planet.
And looking at what we are confronted with today and all the grim precedents in history for it, we also, if we are honest, realize that those who are most likely to argue they should hold a place above ordinary people are actually, in fact, the least of us, the most contemptible among us, the banes of our existence.
And given that, it is up to us, if we wish to contain and ultimately defeat such threats to our well-being and to our world at large, to demythologize them and their power, to demystify their actions rather than to cloak them in the somber grey cloth of polite political discussions, to see them for who and what they are—to acknowledge them as lunatics and monsters.
