“She can take out a country”: The Psychodynamics of Regime Collapse

In clinical psychology, grandiosity by proxy occurs when a narcissist begins to unravel

It’s been an eventful day in the news. Here are a few big stories that contribute to what I see as a cascading psychodynamic emergency—that unfortunately may mean a real emergency for the rest of us:

• Tulsi Gabbard went to the White House briefing room and gave a performance that would have been embarrassing on a QAnon podcast, in order to give additional news cycles to Trump’s ludicrous (but serious) attempt to “Arrest Obama.”

  • At her news conference Gabbard attempted to claim that the Russians had no preference in the 2016 election, which would be hilarious if it were not coming from the actual Director of National Intelligence.

• Pete Hegseth was exposed as having gotten the text for his Signal chats from an email that was labeled “SECRET/NOFORN.” This means he is prima facie guilty of two crimes:

  • perjury for his false congressional testimony

  • violating the Espionage Act for his illegal handling of classified data

• The Wall Street Journal published a report that says Trump was told in May by Pam Bondi that he was named in the Epstein Files, a few weeks before Elon Musk blurted it out on Twitter.

Despite the hyper-accelerated Trump news cycle, any one of these things would be a hair-on-fire, endless story just last year, and all of it strikes directly at the regime’s core load-bearing myths:

• Myth of persecution by the Deep State

• Myth of superiority and competence

• Myth of sexual and moral superiority over “degenerate liberals”

After all of this, Trump went to a press event this evening to promote executive orders about AI, and said this:

“By the way, the most powerful woman in the world is here today. Susie Wiles stand up, please. Susie Wiles. Chief of Staff.

She can take out a country with a mere phone call. Now, they just voted her the most powerful woman anywhere in the world. She might be the most powerful person in the world, I think. But she's done a fantastic job, though, huh?”

In clinical psychology, grandiosity by proxy occurs when a narcissist begins to unravel and they project their fantasy of power onto others in their orbit. This is what it looks like.

“She can take out a whole country with a phone call.”

This isn’t praise. It’s extending Trump’s imagined omnipotence through her. He’s vividly demonstrating his own power and making it clear that there is no rule of law or process in government. Just takes a phone call, nothing more.

But perhaps more concerning is the specificity of his warning. This appears to be one of the options he’s been thinking about to get himself out of the Epstein scandal. The line between his internal alternate reality and the rest of the world is gone. He has no filter.

Psychological decompensation can be categorized into five phases:

1. Functional Stress Response

2. Defensive Realignment

3. Feedback Collapse

4. Emotional Dysregulation & Paranoid Projection

5. Structural Breakdown or Authoritarian Reboot

As I wrote, governmental decompensation is a model in which the leader’s psychology is so fused to the levers of power that the government itself begins to decompensate when in crisis. Trump, and therefore the country is currently in Phase IV.

Governmental Decompensation

So, how can we use this model? Well, in theory, as in psychology you can use it to predict the behavior of the patient. What does a paranoid, dysregulated government do? They criminalize dissent, persecute journalists, deepen cult rhetoric, and promote magic thinking and conspiracy theories as a replacement for reality. And they increasingly project their own crimes onto scapegoats, like “illegals”—or Obama.

But what if this disease keeps progressing to Stage V governmental decompensation? What might cause a structural breakdown in government or a wide-scale societal reboot? Here are some possibilities:

• Suspension of elections, declaration of martial law

• Flight or martyrdom of the leader

• Institutional replacement by cultic or military structures

• Massive false flag or staged emergency

I asked ChatGPT what it thought the most likely category of event the regime might try, and it said a false flag event was by far the most likely, and for solid reasons. Here’s is a comprehensive list of known false flags, categorized by credibility. They are actually not that rare, and it doesn’t take a madman to try one.

I don’t say this to be an alarmist, but I can’t emphasize enough that Trump is in a psychological trap, a dark spiral that there appears to be no escape from.

In the psychological model of governmental decompensation, false flag operations would be the ultimate form of projection, where a collapsing regime externalizes its internal guilt, weakness, or criminal exposure by staging a symbolic trauma while blaming its enemies.

In moments of existential threat like the rolling Epstein revelations, the regime will need to completely reset the information space, displace guilt, and reassert dominance and there is no reason to think that Trump won’t manufacture another crisis. It’s what he does. But he needs something spectacular.

Some kind of shock crisis or false flag strategy:

• Justifies emergency powers

• Crowds out media cycles

• Consolidates loyalty

• Radically reframes the narrative

As Trump personally decompensates, his government is going with him—and its citizens. I offer these insights not as a prediction of what he will do but as a warning that he will do something. He must.

It is the nature of these things to be chaotic, and to be impacted by exogenous events, so we can never know exactly what will happen. But if we can learn and pattern-match from the right fields of knowledge we might be able to make better decisions for ourselves as we ride this out.

So, fair warning, in simple language, he’s going to do something even crazier. His psychology literally gives him no choice.

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