Trump: Why even old allies are questioning his sanity

Every day and every week, it becomes more alarmingly evident that in the White House “a mad king reigns, virtually unchecked,” said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. Since he launched the frustrating war in Iran, President Trump has “reversed and contradicted himself repeatedly” about its goals while descending into enraged, profanity-flecked threats of genocide. On Easter Sunday, with Iran defying his demands to open the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, our commander in chief posted on Truth Social: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He threatened to completely destroy Iran’s power plants, bridges, and infrastructure—leaving 93 million Iranians without electricity, running water, or functioning hospitals—and followed two days later with this genocidal vow: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” In everything the nearly 80-year-old Trump does, he shows the world “he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.” When Pope Leo XIV criticized the war in Iran and Trump’s brutal immigration roundups, Trump posted that the pontiff was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” before following up with an AI-generated image of himself as a robed Jesus Christ healing a sick man—later claiming it depicted him “as a doctor.” That was too much even for onetime acolytes, said Makena Kelly and David Gilbert in Wired. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, among others, denounced Trump’s depiction of himself as the Messiah, and called for him to be removed from office, with Greene suggesting that Trump may actually be the Antichrist. Greene told former MAGA allies: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

It’s no longer just Democrats and late-night comics questioning Trump’s sanity, said Peter Baker in The New York Times. Retired generals, former Republican officials, and foreign leaders are expressing deep concern about the “state of mind” of “the oldest president ever inaugurated.” In his second term, Trump “seems even less restrained and more incoherent,” publicly using profanity, wandering off at official meetings “into odd tangents” about poisonous snakes, Sharpie pens, and his White House ballroom, and repeatedly calling Greenland “Iceland” while insisting it should belong to him. He appalled allies when he gloated that liberal Hollywood director Rob Reiner had been allegedly stabbed to death by his son, and when, after the death of former FBI director and special counsel Robert Mueller, he said, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.” After Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran, Democrats have called on the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump for mental unfitness, but he has surrounded himself with fawning loyalists, “rendering that idea moot.” Trump’s “chest-thumping and semi-coherent bluster” are nothing new, said Becket Adams in National Review, but now that he’s started a war of choice in the Middle East, he’s provided “the added bonus of a ticking body count”—including more than 3,600 Iranians and at least 13 Americans. It’s “fully reasonable” to question why our president keeps “teetering frantically between talk of peace and threats, promising terrible outcomes that no American has had time to consider, let alone endorse.”

Trump haters may “clutch at their pearls,” said Hugo Gurdon in the Washington Examiner, but he has a long, successful track record of issuing “bellicose threats” and making “outlandish” demands to get the other side to the negotiating table. Hasn’t anyone learned “he should be taken seriously, not literally?” Sorry, said Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, but it smacks of “desperation” to claim Trump is cleverly using Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” to intimidate Iran into concessions. Trump’s wild, irresponsible threats “achieved next to nothing.” Iran did not reopen the strait or surrender to his other demands.

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All this “is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world,” said Sohrab Ahmari in Unherd. Trump owes his presidency to voters who grew tired of technocrats such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama overriding the public will to make trade, economic, and immigration policy, “often to the benefit of themselves and other elites.” But Trump “went into mad-king mode,” and the results make liberal technocrats “look better by comparison.” This is life “under a personalist regime,” said Lisa Needham in Public Notice, where all power is held by a cultlike leader “not accountable to the military or to a political party.” Trump “reverses decisions based on nothing but whims.” He demands that aides and followers show loyalty by “agreeing to believe the same lies he does.” When “Congress and the Supreme Court simply step aside and abdicate their power, then it’s all Trump, all the time.” Personalist government has brought us nonstop chaos, corruption, bitter division, and foreign conflict, and “it’s wrecking us.”