*** ‘people who don’t believe evil exists have clearly never encountered a psychopath, sociopath or narcissist.”
[ Morgan McKean ]

There have been multiple attempts to evaluate Donald John Trump as a human being. Bandy Lee’s. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”. provided analysis of “37 psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts”. [2017, 2019]. Then other mental health experts analyzed Trump’s speech patterns over a fairly long period of years. Omarosa Manigault Newman, in Trump’s presence for 15 years, wrote “Unhinged,” discussing the ways he changed “mentally and physically.” Mary Trump, Trump’s niece and a trained clinical psychologist, wrote. “Too Much and Never Enough.” Adam Gabbatt, in the Guardian, wrote. “Is Trump Mentally OK?,” providing a long list of 25 specific examples of Trump’s ‘unusual behavior in 2025,” some quite startling.

This post presents excerpts from: “Trump Is Turning America Into A Psychotic State” [ Jonathan Rauch, Peter Wehner; New York Times; 4/12/26]:

12] “Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always asserts 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.”

2] “The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.”

11] “America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.”

5] “Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, 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…using and threatening military force..seemingly every other month.”

***. “Emotionally he remains the thirteen-year-old troublemaker his father sent off to a military academy..Being stuck in the awkward year between childhood and maturity for nearly six decades..has twisted Trump’s personality and explains much of his narcissism..” [Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston: “It’s Even Worse Than You Imagine”]

1]. “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 his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized.The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot.”

3] “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.”

4] “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.” [Note: this is often called ‘shooting yourself in the foot” !!!!]

*** Dictionary and thesaurus definitions of ‘psychotic”: “insane, mad, psychopathic, crazy, schizophrenic, maniacal, unbalanced, unhinged, mentally unsound, bereft of reason, deluded, disordered, nutty, screwy, half-cocked, unglued, not playing with a full deck…” [NOTE: this is what the above paragraphs – and much more, discuss and imply when t hey discuss Trump’s mind, and that of those around him.]

6] “Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. one of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and the White House itself. a single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people..” [in a “normal administration’..”

7] “The policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wide presidential judgment. But it is vital. It asks hard questions and assesses competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify and prepares for contingencies. In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind; a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality.” [NOTE: does a Psychotic State” operate rationally???]

8]. “In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless….irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.”

***. “Whatever big crisis comes, the one thing we know is that Donald Trump lacks the deep knowledge, critical thinking skills, emotional maturity and ability to separate sound advice from nonsense that are needed in a crisis.”
[Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston: “The making of Donald Trump”]

9] “..until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.”

10] “As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist. – a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays the hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.”

*** “People should not vote for ANY Republican because they’re dangerous, dishonest, and self-serving…Republicans care most about those who will only get richer because of government help. The government is truly broken, particularly in dealing with national security, and another four years, and heaven forbid not eight years under the Republicans, and our grandchildren will have to build a new government, because the one we have will be unrecognizable and unworkable.” [NOTE: these words were spoken by a “lifelong Republican’ who knew G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney personally. He spoke anonymously because one of his sons had an important nonpolitical government post “and we both know that Republicans will seek revenge wherever they can find it.” it is the closing quote in John W. Dean’s. “Broken Government,” published in 2007. It was the last of three books Dean wrote about the corruption of government by Republicans.”

***. [NOTE: The United States is now one year into the 5th year of the 8 years under Republicans that this man feared.We have 3 years more of the Trump DICTATORSHIP. Under “Project 2025” guidance, Trump and his “Project 2025′ Rasputins ARE destroying the American system of democratic government. – as the man predicted. – making YOUR American government “unrecognizable and unworkable.” AND. – YOUR children and grandchildren WILL have to build a new government that works ‘of the people, by the people, for the people”. – OR American democracy WILL. “perish from the earth.” ]. [ What are. YOU. going to do ????? ]

***. “Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.”
[ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ]

this post is the 5th in a series examining the conduct of Donald John Trump, unfortunately president of the United States. Many have concluded Trump has serious mental issues. In 2017 and 2019, 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts expressed alarm in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Several years later, another group examined Trump’s speech patterns over a multi-year span. – expressed alarm. Even if Trump is “norma,” there is NO debate he is THE anti-George Washington. Now, he has embroiled America, the Middle East, the world in a war of choice. And, of course, he has already told numerous lies and falsehoods.

This post presents excerpts from: “Americans Deserve The Truth About Iran” [ New York Times Editorial; 3/22/26 ]:

10] “Whatever short-term gain mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost, for him, the country and the world.”

3] “..lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, her undermines American values and interests.”

9]. “Lies about war also make it harder to achieve victory: The more one spreads falsehoods, the less one feels obligated to face reality. In one respect, Americans understand that their leaders’ refusal to confront the truth in Iraq and Vietnam led to strategic errors. This pattern is repeating. Before Mr. Trump began this war, he brushed aside warnings from his top military advisor that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to traffic it does not approve. The global economy is now dealing with the consequences of his overconfidence.”

4] “There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat. – to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon…. Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, an an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.”

***. “The first casualty of war is truth.” { Aeschylus ]

1] “From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war..”

2] “Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course. His political career began with a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, and he has lied about his business, his wealth, his inauguration crowd size, his defeat in the 2020 election and so much more. A CNN tally of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods during one part of his first term found that he averaged eight false claims per day.”

5]. “the president was only minutes into his Feb. 28 announcement of the start of the conflict when he offered an obviously contradictory rationale for it….The lies have continued since then.”

*** “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” [ Adolf Hitler ]

6]. “he has also asserted that “nobody” believed Iran would retaliate by attacking Arab countries. On Monday, he said that “no, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit” neighboring countries. In truth, some experts had warned of precisely this scenario.”

7]. “In another instance, Mr. Trump has used false information to continue his alarming penchant to portray people who contradict him as un-American.”

8]. “A shocking falsehood came on March 7, when Mr. Trump claimed in his typically offhand way that a strike on an elementary school in the town of Minab in †he first hours of war “was done by Iran.” …The U.S. military has conducted an investigation and preliminarily concluded taht an American missile mistakenly hit the school.”

***. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
[ Theodore Roosevelt; Republican; 26th U.S. President ]