Orange Man Bad: Disintegrating Into Mega-Crisis
Trump experiences reality as it warps around his self-image, not as it actually exists.
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Disinhibition
You don’t have to be a psychologist or a doctor to understand that the President of the United States is not functioning normally—even for him. Donald Trump said this at a rally Friday night:
“I don’t like friends that become very successful. I like people that are just OK. Even if they’re terrible, I like that, too. I hate like when I have lunch with somebody that’s really, really successful. I hate it. Because he or she is bragging about how great they are. And I hate that when they do that. Because they stopped me from talking about the fact that I became president.”
This is not Trump being Trump. It is the inevitable acceleration of a process I’ve documented for several years. This is extreme disinhibition due to dysfunction in his frontal lobe; it is the raw machinery of his amygdala exposed.
Donald Trump is clearly battling progressive dementia, very likely the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).
This means he has little to no remaining ability for reflection, logical trains of thought, or emotional regulation. When something enters his mind, he just says it—or does it—without regard to consequences. Given the power of the U.S. president, this has existential implications. We have already seen this play out—countless people are dead because of it—in the Caribbean, Iran, Venezuela, Minneapolis, and soon Cuba.
Self Diagnosis
Remarkably, Trump’s quote is a self-diagnosis of malignant narcissism. He is saying what even the most extreme narcissists still consider to be the quiet part: the entire world must be beneath him. His superiority is all that matters, regardless of whether others are “OK” or “terrible.” Literally everything must be about him because otherwise someone else is getting attention.
Consider what he’s saying to America, our allies, and his employees—in and out of government. He is making a declaration of uncaring, an abdication of any pretense that he should give a damn about anyone else. He’s proudly displaying his solipsism.
Of course, most people know Trump feels this way, but he’s never just come out and said it so plainly. In a way, it’s the most honest he’s ever been—like a three-year-old is honest. But it should not have to be said that a three-year-old’s mentality should not command a nuclear superpower.
Here are a few of the dozens of memes the president has posted over just the past 24 hours.
These are not just memes to tweak the libs. Trump truly believes he has the right to seize any territory he wants, to humiliate or arrest any political opponent he decides to, and to stay in power forever—bunkered under his golden ballroom if necessary. He is no longer capable of hiding any of his delusions. He experiences reality as it warps around his self-image, not as it actually exists.
That’s why Trump has pushed ahead with his $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off the January 6th rioters for the inconvenience of going to prison for him. He simply cannot fathom that there will be consequences for installing his personal defense lawyer Todd Blanche as Acting Attorney General to raid the Treasury in order to pay hush money to terrorists.
The Blob
Physically, the president continues to deteriorate as well. He sits during nearly every press conference with people strangely gathered behind him. The swelling in his ankles and the bruising on his hands continues to grow, which has visibly expanded to his neck and face.
Trump has every appearance of incipient heart failure or some other acute circulatory problem. The only other obvious possibility that comes to mind is an unknown medication that might cause him blow up like a pufferfish.
Regardless, the president’s chronic pathologies are evidently merging into a critical condition, just as the nation is facing a similar convergence—entirely because of Trump’s own choices.
Mega-Crisis
This weekend, Trump faces a series of impossible-to-solve problems which would be a challenge for the greatest presidents in history to navigate. Yet all of it is the result of his own failures, or deliberate sabotage.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that Trump had to skip his eldest son’s wedding due to “circumstances pertaining to Government.”
The crisis in the Middle East that Trump caused, and then profited hundreds of millions of dollars from through stock and bond trades, has reached the point that with every day the Hormuz Strait remains closed, the oil shock will kill more and more people.
There are two historic, converging phenomena at work: 1) Trump choking off 30% of the nitrogen fertilizer to the world by blockading the Hormuz Strait; and 2) the onrushing El Niño, which looks to become an extreme Super El Niño, surpassing the 1877 event which led to millions of deaths in a worldwide famine.
Every day the Hormuz Strait stays closed, more food is removed from the world’s supply, not just for one season, but potentially impacting prices for many years as production drops, crops fail, and farmers go bankrupt. The potential of major droughts, flooding, and extreme storms from the Super El Niño threaten to make that shortfall exponentially worse. Together, this double whammy threatens the lives of hundreds of millions.
Through Saturday, Trump repeatedly claimed, for the umpteenth time that Iran and the U.S. were close to an agreement to open the Strait—but Iran has a different story.
Lunacy
Having someone with Trump’s self-evident disorders try to negotiate a deal with the lives of countless millions in the balance is, of course, sheer lunacy. Iran has outplayed Trump for months because he no longer has the ability to make good judgments. Trump’s condition makes people gullible, erratic, and apathetic.
Nevertheless, the world is involuntarily reliant on the worst man, at the worst time, to do what is impossible for him to do: compromise—to have a dialogue with people who don’t worship him, who won’t position themselves beneath him.
So he will, without a doubt, keep making it worse. It is the only thing he remembers how to do.
“There are other examples in history of megalomaniac leaders who ‘cured’ their narcissism by transforming the world to fit it.”
—Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man, 1964
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