Sadism, madness and America's psychotic president

Tonight of all nights let us speak plainly

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Civilised people don’t use crude words like “madness”. We talk of mental illness and have nothing but sympathy for its…Well, I was going to say “its victims” but we have been told to reject the pejorative language of victimhood. Instead we must say “people with mental illness.”

But not tonight. If this isn’t the moment to abandon euphemism and let judgmentalism rip, I don’t know what is.

Donald Trump is not a “person with mental illness”. He is a mad sadist, in love with violence, and deformed by the corruption of absolute power. The whole world must worry about this old man’s delusions because he can let loose the most powerful war machine the human race has ever constructed without anyone standing in his way.

It is a dereliction of duty to use tactful evasions to conceal the mental condition of a man whose behaviour is – to use another crude word civilised people are meant to shun – “evil”.

Imagine you are an Iranian who loathes the regime and wishes only that your country could be free and democratic. What must you be thinking now?

Once you might have had hope for the future. The Israeli and American attacks began in February with Trump posing as the liberator of the Iranian people.

“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said on 28 February. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

And now?

As it became clear that the war would not be a heroic story ending with the birth of a democratic Iran, Trump and his cabinet began behaving like incels watching a horror movie and finding erotic thrills in its every grotesque detail.

And it is worth emphasising that for Trump this war is a movie, not a real event. Each day his officials present him with a video that shows the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets.

As one explained to the US network NBC News, the briefings were not honest assessments of the state of the war but a two-minute series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

The talk of regime change has diminished. Instead Trump has sounded like a true psychopath. At one point he threatened to “bomb Iran into the Stone Age”.

“After that, they’re gonna have no bridges, no power plants. Stone Ages, yeah, stone ages,” he rambled like an incontinent bully loving the thought of inflicting pain. “We have a plan… where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock… where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, ­exploding and never to be used again”

Yesterday (Monday) he was screaming that

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

This morning he was threatening that “a whole civilisation will die tonight.”

I am as against rationalising Trump and men like him as I am against the use of sanewashing euphemisms to hide madness.

Before I go into the details, I want to make an obvious point that is too often missed.

If the United States were a rational society with a healthy political culture, we would not be having this conversation.

Seventy-seven million Americans would not have voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Even if they had, Trump’s colleagues would have intervened and removed a president making genocidal threats about civilisational destruction just as Liz Truss’s colleagues ended her spell as prime minister for the frankly lesser offence of crashing the British economy.

He’s 79 years old, they would say. He is possibly suffering from early-stage dementia, and certainly suffering from psychopathic delusions of grandeur.

And yet as we sit here tonight wondering whether Trump will unleash civilisational destruction or whether he is just bluffing, we know one thing for sure: he will stay in power. His handpicked cabinet of sycophants and nutjobs would never dream of invoking the provisions in the US constitution to remove a sitting president, any more than his Republican party would ever allow his impeachment.

Attempts to rationalise Trump therefore fall at the first hurdle. If the United States were a rational country, Trump would not be in the White House tonight or at all.

Beyond that grim fact lie the attempts to suggest that maybe his presidency won’t be so bad for all his insane bluster. I have written before about the inadequacies of the “TACO” thesis. The notion that, when the markets fall, “Trump Always Chickens Out” isn’t wholly wrong. It was developed by journalists at the Financial Times, the UK’s best newspaper. They are usually right and never wholly wrong.

But to believe that economics rules all and that senility, the lust for power, nationalist aggrandisement, militarism, vanity and madness count for nothing beside economic self interest is naive in the extreme. You have to forget everything you ever knew about the human race to believe it.

Maybe it won’t be so bad tonight. Maybe Trump will chicken out. Maybe he’s just pretending to be a madman as Richard Nixon once did and using the impression of madness as a negotiating ploy.

But one day he won’t chicken out. One day it won’t be a ploy, and he won’t be putting on an act. He will just be mad.

What is so terrifying about Trump is that, if that day is not today, then it could be the next day or the day after that. On one point we can be sure, however: that day will come.

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Below are two pieces for paying subscribers. The first is on the serious suspicions that Trump has entered the early stages of dementia. The second is on why European liberals must never forget that the American far right hates us.