Clowns in a Hall of Mirrors—With Guns
Why the Media Keeps Getting the Trump Regime Catastrophically Wrong
We’re just six months into the Trump regime, and the institutions of democracy are already crumbling beneath our feet. The government of the United States has been captured by a hostile force, a fifth column of arsonists who seized power through greed, submission to a degenerate conman, and a bottomless willingness to lie, cheat, and steal to serve him.
Nevertheless, the media, to the extent it still functions at all, has not changed the way it thinks, and talks, about what’s going in America. They still cannot, or will not, face the facts that this is not a group of rational actors, it is a troop of evil clowns in a hall of mirrors—with guns.
We are not watching 4D chess or “Art of the Deal,” the entire US government, and now the nation along with it, are an unstable formation hastily fashioned onto the disintegrating psyche of a malignant narcissist in collapse.
Donald Trump has, through purges, propaganda, and the elevation of loyal incompetents, effectively fused his own psyche—and all its attendant pathologies—to the machinery of the U.S. government. What now governs America is not a coherent system of policy and process, but a state mirroring the ego, paranoia, cruelty, and collapse of a single man.
If you don’t grasp this foundational truth, everything you observe will be filtered through a lens that distorts rather than clarifies. You will see chaos and mistake it for strategy. You will see sadism and call it policy. You will see collapse and label it politics.
And if you report what you see through that faulty lens, you are not just misleading your audience—you are robbing them of the only framework that makes sense of this collapse. At best, you’re depriving them of clarity. At worst, you’re trafficking in disinformation that could get people killed.
As I have written, the U.S. government is currently undergoing a form of governmental decompensation—a psychological and institutional breakdown where the state mirrors the disorder of its ruling ego.
Bureaucracy has become theater. Policy has become ritual suffering. Propaganda has become state religion.
You cannot apply the standards of journalism to this scenario by staying “neutral.” In a system where the epistemological foundations of society are being challenged by chaotic, genocidal forces, staying neutral is actually total capitulation.
First, you have to learn about and talk about psychology and psychiatric disorders.
Donald Trump exhibits a textbook case of malignant narcissism, including:
Grandiosity: “Only I can fix it”, “the most persecuted man in history”
Paranoia and Projection: Constant accusations, scapegoating, conspiracy theories
Antisocial Cruelty: Vicious attacks on immigrants, women, dissenters
Sadism: Public glee in humiliating perceived enemies
Although it is existentially dangerous for a man of this personality type to be in power at all, he has now been deeply and grievously wounded by the Epstein story and other failures, so he has entered the unmistakeable late-stage signs of narcissistic collapse. You don’t have to be a clinical psychologist to understand the science, use the methods, and report about the logical conclusions from applying them.
The regime now lashes out not because it is confident, but because it is cornered. There is no grand strategy—only psychological survival through domination.
Yet the press continues to misread these spasms of collapse as strategy or tactics. That’s not just a failure of political understanding—it’s a failure of epistemology, a failure to understand anything at all.
Here are a few examples of people exhibiting deep and dangerous symptoms of governmental decompensation.
Dan Bongino — FBI Deputy Director
Today, professional liar Dan Bongino tweeted out a message that perfectly models what happens to a government in collapse.
“We are going to get the answers WE ALL DESERVE. Not ‘my truth,’ or ‘your truth,’ but THE TRUTH. What I have learned… has shocked me down to my core. I’ll never be the same.”
Dan Bongino’s statement functions like an official Q drop and reflects multiple symptoms of governmental decompensation including implied retaliation against political enemies, weaponizing institutions, and elevation of “THE TRUTH” to a moral absolute instead of a legal evidentiary standard.
He is acting like a gnostic apostle who has “shocking truth…” that only special insiders and true believers have access to, a core exploit of cult leaders for millennia. He is helping them get through their incipient doubts about Trump by validating their conspiracy thinking and giving them a massive helping of hopium to choke it all down. He may have an official title but his communications cannot be analyzed for political or strategic content without understanding the primary dynamics at work. It’s narrative, psychological warfare.
Tulsi Gabbard — Director of National Intelligence
“The attempted coup was led by Barack Obama… The American people have launched the counterrevolution.”
This is not political rhetoric. It is revolutionary theology, designed to eliminate the legitimacy of constitutional government and replace it with mythic vengeance.
Nevertheless, the media still doesn’t get it. They insist on seeing it through a political lens, or a strategic one, when what she’s doing is acting out Trump’s collapse by proxy.
Stephen Miller — Architect of Cruelty
“We’re going to flood the zone. If they don’t give us the criminals in jail, we’ll take them from the neighborhoods. Sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want.”
This is not immigration policy. This is ritualized state suffering, enacted for symbolic domination. For Trump, Miller, and the regime, these purges—whether of immigrants, the unhoused, or the mentally ill—are sacrificial blood rituals, a way to trauma bond the cult into a shared, deviant sadism.
This regime does not govern with ideas, or even influence, it rules through the psychological bondage of fused identities, cult dynamics, and traumatizing displays of power. If the press cannot learn to speak this language, and we cannot develop the collective vocabulary to identify how this works and fight back, we are guaranteeing our permanent victimhood.
As a final (maybe literally) example of why we need to understand this.
Peter Thiel Is Engineering the Eschaton
In a move that should end every illusion of “normalcy,” it was announced yesterday that Peter Thiel—JD Vance’s owner, one of Trump’s ideological sculptors, and in my opinion, the closest living approximation to the Antichrist—is funding the first-ever privately developed U.S. uranium enrichment facility.
WKMS Report Billionaire Peter Thiel backing first privately developed US uranium enrichment facility in Paducah
General Matter is led by former SpaceX employee Scott Nolan, a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund.
Formed in 2024 in San Francisco, California, the company announced itself on the social media platform X in April as being “incubated within” Founders Fund by a team of people from SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, national labs and the U.S. Department of Defense. That VC fund was co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who World Nuclear News reported joined General Matter’s board earlier this year. Thiel – who also co-founded the controversial data-mining firm Palantir contracted by the U.S. government to track migrant movements – is also listed as a director among the company’s initial officers on General Matter’s business filing with the Kentucky Secretary of State’s office, which was filed Tuesday.
If you don’t understand Peter Thiel’s psychology, if you don’t understand how a psychopathic malignant narcissist operates, you might just look at this story as an interesting energy investment. It’s not. Peter Thiel is engineering his “escape”—one way or the other. Allowing a man who openly wants nothing less than the Apocalypse to get his hands on nuclear enrichment capability is quite literally suicidal, for everyone.
If you don’t know how he got this way, you might miss what his father Klaus did. Klaus Thiel moved his family, including his 1-year-old son Peter, from America to apartheid SW Africa (now Namibia) to built a uranium mine using Black and brown slave labor for apartheid South Africa‘s secret nuclear program. As a boy, while his father was at work, Peter went to German school where they greeted each other with “Heil Hitler.”
Peter Thiel’s Radioactive Childhood
In 1968, Susanne and Klaus Thiel left Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, with their 1-year-old son Peter for Cleveland Ohio. There is little information about Klaus, other than what Peter himself has offered to his biographers—which is that Klaus was a “chemical engineer.” One detail we don’t know, for example, is
The biggest error the media has made is treating this as politics rather than epistemic war. If you don’t learn the tactics of psychological warfare, cult dynamics, and identity manipulation, you will lose not just the narrative, you will lose reality itself.
If you still believe this is politics, you’re already inside the blast radius.
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Thank you Jim. This is brilliant. As always. The sophisticated psychological piece is needed and you supply it. Just want to add that on top of that- there’s the old school psych stuff, the group dynamics. We humans are hard wired not to go against the “group.” I truly do not understand why everyone is not citing and quoting your columns. You know the big picture in depth, more than anyone IMHO
I do think it’s taking a while for this shit to truly sink in. It’s sinking. In me at least. I’m protesting more, reaching out more. To the barricades!
I used to think that it was a lack of political acumen by major media but right now I think with each piece that is written, reviewed by the editors and published it’s like someone on a high wire… How far can we push the envelope on this one before we take a deep dive? Their jobs are on the line and many of the large networks surrendered in advance or they paid huge amounts of money to remain in business.
To read something today from the mainstream press that actually expresses truth and honesty about the subject matter is like an uncommon commodity.