Great editorial..One of the best [View all]
It has been clear for a long time that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how the president’s pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is because it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.
In the second term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since Day 1.
It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.
The Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February despite that fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it had been “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, and then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon, and that the war would end “when I feel it … in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”
Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before launching a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, and then sometimes rehiring, employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not supportive. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February, he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.
Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.
As the Trump era winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/opinion/trump-iran-psychotic-state-institutions.html
This is a condensed version but you get the point...The man is a dangerous psycho, without a clue as to anything but his own tormenting inner demons and his delusions of grandeur..
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