Donald Trump Is Losing What Little Mind He Has Left

Hey, Donald Trump, you just launched a war that you’re losing, that’s costing you millions of supporters, that’s tanking your standing among even Republicans, that has the likes of Alex Jones accusing you of contemplating “genocide” and Tucker Carlson labeling your comments “vile on every level.” What are you going to do for an encore?

Hey, I know. How about breaking up NATO and trying for regime change in Cuba?

He may, he may not. Who ever knows with this guy? But both are live possibilities. Trump threw a tantrum about NATO this week, issuing an “ultimatum” to European countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bellyaching about their general lack of support for his war. Cuba is largely under a U.S. blockade that has resulted in massive energy shortages. A month ago, before the reality of Iran had quite set in, Trump bragged that Cuba was next, saying, “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way.” Just yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said he wasn’t going anywhere.

Here’s the important thing to understand about Trump at this particular point in time. He does not think like a democrat (small d). He thinks like a dictator. A democrat who understood his obligations in a democratic system to the voters who put him in office would stop and think: Gee, the people don’t approve of what I’m doing. Maybe I should pull back a little. And who knows—maybe he will. There are peace talks with Iran this weekend in Pakistan, even though Iran is walking into them with a 10-point plan that Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) want no part of. But there actually is precedent for Trump seeing that what he was doing was unpopular—the ICE disaster in Minneapolis, most notably—and making a course correction.

Granted, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of other situations in which he’s responded to public opinion. America doesn’t like anything he’s doing, except on sealing the border. Otherwise, he’s in the tank. And by the way, I alluded above to his weak numbers among Republicans: In one recent poll, he’s down to 81 percent among Republicans. That may sound high, but in fact, for that particular category, it’s low. A president’s support within his own party ought to be close to or above 90. Here’s a little context. The 1988 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was a blowout, right? Right. Dukakis got 83 percent of Democrats’ votes. And he got shellacked. That’s what 80-ish percent among your party leads to.

But even as the walls close in on him, Trump is no more likely to think like a democrat. He will think like the dictator he imagines himself to be. He will think, as dictators do, about three things: To the extent that he cares what the public thinks, he will focus his thoughts on how best to distract their attention and get them thinking about something else; he will think about ways to clamp down on dissent (and more specifically in this case, leakers); and finally, and never to be forgotten with this grubby mountebank, how to make a buck off the current mess.

Let’s break these down. The first thought is the one that will carry Trump to try something with Cuba, or to try to bust out of NATO. He needs headlines that aren’t about Iran. But he also needs headlines that start “Trump moves to” and “Trump declares.”

That’s what matters. It scarcely makes any difference whether these moves are popular. Busting up NATO would of course be monstrously unpopular (and the president cannot simply leave NATO, though laws haven’t stopped him before). Toppling the Cuban regime might in fact be somewhat popular, depending on how it goes. But again, we’ll need to see what China and Russia have to say about that before the final verdict is in. It is liable to be more complicated than Trump imagines, simply because these things usually are.

The second thought is one to take very seriously right now. Zeteo’s Asawin Subsaeng reported this week that Trump is directing a furious hunt for people who leaked info to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for that huge piece about how Trump decided to start this war. The piece is actually an excerpt from their upcoming book, which is expected to contain still more embarrassing details about the Trump regime. “In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed” to the reporters, Swin wrote. This is the sort of thing that obsesses dictators.

And finally, never forget that Trump is always on the lookout for his next swindle. Coming up on April 25 is a luncheon at Mar-a-Lago billed as “the most exclusive crypto & business conference in the world.” The announcement of the luncheon jacked up the price of the $Trump meme coin for a minute. It’s not 100 percent certain Trump will be there. But where else would he be? Maybe the golf course.

Consider this week in full. The abominable Easter Sunday social media post that dropped the f-bomb and mocked Islam. The far more abominable post two days later about destroying one of history’s most accomplished civilizations. The complete and utter backing down from it hours later. The phantom ceasefire, which Netanyahu obviously intentionally wrecked. The phony peace plan, on which the belligerent nations are miles apart. Anemic economic growth (0.5 percent, and yes, that’s point-five). Inflation above 3 percent.

And perhaps most of all, Trump’s wife appearing to throw him under the bus. Not that she’s any hero. But she’s pretty clearly preparing for the day when the Epstein files are made public and she may have to cut bait, depending on what’s in them.

To any other president, this would be the time to straighten up and fly right. To this one, it’s the perfect time to blow up the most important and durable military alliance in the history of the human race.

In every age, there are moments large and small that somehow manage to capture the regnant ideology in all its proud and decadent vulgarity. You know these moments when you see them because your first reaction is not intellectual but physical—you feel that involuntary revulsion not in your brain but somewhere down around what they call in the Yiddish language your kishkes. I believe the modern word for it is cringey. It’s like watching the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office, except it’s not played for laughs. Those involved couldn’t possibly be more serious—and oblivious to how they look to the rest of the world.

A lot of important and appalling things happened this week that ought to be preoccupying me, but somehow, I have not been able to free myself from thinking about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s presentation to President Trump of the first annual “America First” award on Wednesday night. Future historians will ask, as many of us have asked in our own time, how this ridiculous cult could have grown around this ridiculous fraud of a man—how these Republicans could have decided that their pride, their virtue, their consciences are so worthless to them that they willingly participate in such staged exercises in hollow flattery.

There are longer clips floating around of Johnson discussing this award and praising Trump, but in the interest of sparing your mental health, I’ll expose you only to the brief, 30-second version here. Trust me, it’s enough to make the point.

“The president has done so much for the American people, and we want to honor him in some small way, some token of our appreciation for his leadership,” Johnson beamed at the fundraising dinner of the National Republican Campaign Committee in Washington. “And so tonight, we have created a new award. We’re going to do something we’ve never done before. We are going to honor him with a new award that we will present annually from this point forward. But he is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First Award. We can think of no better title for what that is. That’s this beautiful golden statue here; appropriate, for the new golden era in America.”

Disappointingly, the golden statue was not a calf. But these people lack the sense of humor and self-knowledge to have done that. It was, predictably, an eagle—wings spread, talons exposed, prey about to meet its fate. Kind of like Trump imagines himself vis-à-vis Iran, with the difference that eagles have been known to stalk prey for hours, whereas Trump can’t keep any single thought in his head for longer than 10 minutes and has, in the month since the war started, announced about four different rationales for the war and changed strategy roughly every half hour. Any eagle with Trump’s attention span would starve to death in a matter of days.

That aside, there are two points to make about this. The first concerns Johnson’s oleaginous sycophancy. The quote above in print doesn’t quite do it justice. You have to watch it, experience his self-satisfied smarminess, his bottomless self-abasement. Remember, this is a man who has compared himself to Moses. If Moses had behaved toward Pharaoh the way Johnson does toward Trump, his people would have needed to wait for another deliverer.

The second concerns the need to treat Trump like a 5-year-old. It’s a need the corrupt FIFA head Gianni Infantino recognized when he awarded Trump the preposterous FIFA Peace Prize in December, and that Trump’s Cabinet members intuit at those laughable meetings where they try to top one another in offering him false and flatulent praise. It’s hard to know, of course, whether these people have no idea how pathetic they look to the rest of the world, or they do know and just don’t care.

Either way, it’s a sight to behold: the awarding to the president of the United States a series of participation trophies. I thought conservatives hated participation trophies, which derive from that oh-so-liberal instinct to protect children’s feelings. This is one point on which I actually kind of agree with the conservative position. No, every child who participated in the swim meet didn’t win. Someone won. The others lost. The winner should be recognized. And kids are smart; they pretty quickly cotton on to the fact that if everyone is getting the same trophy, the trophy is worthless. Trump is either too vain or too dumb to understand what most 7-year-olds grok after about three swim meets.

We also learned this week that Trump will add his signature to our currency. This comes on the heels of last week’s news that the United States will mint a Trump coin, which the Commission on Fine Arts, a seven-member panel appointed by the president, recommended be made “as large as possible.” Said Vice Chairman James McCrery II: “In terms of the diameter, I think the president likes big things. Generally, I do too.” I’ll let that one pass.

All this is happening, of course, while Trump’s poll numbers are tanking—even over at Fox News—and the country is in collapse. This war is a mess. You’d hardly know it from most news coverage, but Iran’s attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East have been successful enough that many troops have had to evacuate, working remotely from nearby hotels and office buildings. Trump thought the war would be over by now, but it isn’t, and he’s at sea—tugged in one direction by Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman to level Iran, and in the other by his desire not to go down in history as the man who brought the world economy to its knees. And then there’s the airports, inflation, immigration, and everything else on which the American people are giving him failing grades.

What a perfect time for a new award! Actually, by fascist logic, it is: As material conditions for the people worsen, the leader must be praised all the more fulsomely, the make-believe enforced all the more vigorously. Will anyone come along to shatter the myth—to be the Jan at the dinner party, throwing Michael’s Dundie against the plasma TV screen? Not likely, anytime soon. Cults only intensify until the moment they explode.

I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about Donald Trump’s invocation of Pearl Harbor during his tête-à-tête with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. I mean, we learned that Trump actually knows who bombed Pearl Harbor. Shouldn’t we just take that W?

All right. Yes, it was a mortifying moment on so many different levels. A Japanese reporter asked him why he didn’t inform U.S. allies before starting the Iran war. Trump muttered a couple sentences about the element of surprise and then said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

First, of course, is how deeply offensive this was to an ally of 80 years—an ally that lived under American occupation, albeit in a comparatively benign form, for seven years. Takaichi said nothing, and indeed later in the day she flattered Trump in the appallingly fulsome way world leaders have learned they need to do, as with a small child. Reaction in Japan seems to be what we’ve come to expect: a combination of outrage and resignation that the president of the United States is both an idiot and a moral eunuch, from whom such simultaneously tedious and offensive bilge is expected.

For my money, one word in particular jumped out: “me.” Really? On December 7, 1941, Trump was four and a half years short of being born. But that small detail didn’t prevent him from conflating himself with the state. Someone else once did that. The Parlement of Paris contested certain royal edicts in 1655, and that’s when Louis XIV supposedly delivered his famous “L’état, c’est moi”; we knew that Trump believes he is the state, but he’s never expressed it quite so nakedly.

Then there’s the fact that the United States wasn’t an ally of Japan in 1941. Kind of an important difference. But most of all, in likening the U.S. attack on Iran to the Japanese attack on Hawaii, Trump was saying it was a good thing that the United States emulated the actions of a fascist regime that had killed millions and raped infants in China. Still, the details of history mean nothing to Trump. History is only about great men, and whether they win or lose.

Speaking of which: Trump’s reliably windy and adipose rhetoric notwithstanding, this war is not going amazingly well. The American and Israeli militaries are good at what they do. We know that. But what, exactly, are they doing? And are they actually seeking the same objective? Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does, and it likely involves occupying big chunks of southern Lebanon and toppling the Iranian regime, which will almost surely require the ground troops Trump has gingerly begun to mention.

The potential lack of coordination between these two armies and their governments opens the way for some huge problems ahead. Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field provoked a rare rebuke from Trump because Iran responded to the strike by hitting Qatari natural gas facilities. The attack wiped out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity for the next five years. Experts say this is likely to impact many kinds of energy-related expenses, and for a lot longer than three months.

Look: For the sake of the people of Iran, I hope Trump’s gamble ends up paying off. But history tells us that all kinds of unexpected things happen in war. That’s why democratically accountable leaders generally don’t launch them without having really thought matters through (that the United States has defied this dictum twice in this century will linger as a dark stain on this country’s reputation for many decades to come).

Trump doesn’t think of himself as democratically accountable (and we can thank the Supreme Court for furnishing jurisprudential backing for that belief). The state, it is he. Any hope that he might learn something from history is of course delusional; to learn from history, he’d have to care about it. So he believed, or was convinced—and with the flattery that undoubtedly accompanied the advice he was getting in mid-February, it surely didn’t take much convincing—that he, the mighty Trump, the god-king, the Jesus-touched general in the Armageddon war against lunatic Peter Thiel’s Antichrist, could topple a government by sheer dint of his will.

That’s precisely the kind of thing you come to believe when you’ve cheated your way through life and never been caught; when you’ve fleeced hundreds of people and gotten away with it, with prosecutors deciding, as longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did, that you’re too powerful to indict; when you’ve lied habitually and seen that lying, far from imposing any price of social ostracism, actually works to your benefit virtually every time; when your social world consists solely of flatterers who marvel over your tacky taste and congratulate you when you insist your triple bogey was a par; when the founder of a leading network in a multibillion-dollar media apparatus essentially acknowledged under oath that said network’s stars lied on your behalf about a matter as consequential as a presidential election result; and when you and this armada of sycophants have duped millions of people who checked their common sense at the door that you have the unilateral power to lower gas and beef prices.

Am I overstating things? Do I suffer—gasp—from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Elsewhere today on this site, Simon Lazarus issues a sharp and necessary reminder to liberals not to get overly obsessed with Trump himself—to bear in mind the movement and the intellectuals that support him.

He’s right about that. At the same time, though, I’d say that we shouldn’t even accept the presumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome applies to people like us. It does not. The people who suffer from TDS in this country are the ones who support him. And it’s getting worse: This week, Nate Silver found Trump’s approval slipping into uncharted territory, and approval of the war generally polls in the 30s—but at the same time, an NBC News poll discovered that among self-identified MAGAs, Trump’s approval stood literally at 100 percent to zero.

They’re the ones with TDS. You and I have Trump Awareness Syndrome. We see his un-thought-out war—and by the way, if it’s almost over, why is he asking Congress for $200 billion?—and we hear him utter vacuous and offensive statements like the Pearl Harbor remark, and we know all too well what he’s doing to this country. Awareness is a far heavier burden than derangement.

You’ve surely seen or read about the video the White House put out last week that interspersed bombing footage from Iran with punishing hits from NFL and college football games, over AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” You can see it here. You will also see that it was posted on X from the official White House account, which added one word to the visuals: “Touchdown.”

Football can be an ugly business, but it does not as yet involve the bombing of schools and the killing of innocent schoolgirls. Fortunately, several of the players highlighted in the White House post have decried the use of their images in this way. Former Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis told HuffPost: “I did not approve my image or football highlights being used to compare football to war. The game I love is about discipline, brotherhood, and respect. War is something entirely different. Lives are at stake. God bless our troops and their families.” His old teammate Ed Reed, after being alerted to the use of his image by journalist and Ravens fan Ben Jacobs, wrote on X: “I do not approve this message.” And former Nebraska Cornhusker Kenny Bell told The Washington Post: “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick. I don’t want anything to do with images like that.” The cowardly NFL has yet to speak.

You may say it’s just a 30-second video and it’s about what we’d expect from these people. And you’d be right on both counts. But it seems to me this video is worth a little more exploration than that because it reveals a lot about what these apes are doing to our country. Actually, that’s insulting to apes, who live in quite sophisticated and empathetic societies. Let’s just call them vermin, although that’s probably insulting to rats too, but since it’s one of their favorite insults, let’s just turn it around on them.

Imagine being the juvenile White House staffer who came up with this idea. Imagine thinking that that was cool. How can that even happen? You have to have a love of gladiatorial violence. You have to believe that the lives of the people you’re killing have no value whatsoever. You have to revel in causing death. You have to see it all as a big joke. And you have to subscribe to a view of the world in which power, the ability to dominate and to rain down violence in extreme cases, is the only thing that really matters. And then you run it up the flagpole for approval, and everyone else thinks it’s cool too. How did we get here?

This has been the Trump ethos from the start. It would be funny, coming from such a weak and sad man: a draft dodger, a serial abuser of women (and maybe girls), a nonstop liar who’s spent 40 years hiding behind slick lawyers. But this weak and sad man, who probably couldn’t do five pushups if he had a gun held to his head, has convinced a third of the country that he’s a tough guy, and his propaganda outlets and the even weaker and sadder men in his party (the disgraceful Senator Lindsey Graham) have reinforced this hideous image.

Democracy is supposed to exist in conjunction with certain moral values. One core idea is that might does not make right. This is an old, old notion that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The Sophist Thrasymachus argues that justice is nothing more than “the advantage of the stronger.” Plato has Socrates responding that this is wrong and defining justice in the ways most of us understand the word today—as believing and doing the right thing, irrespective of power relationships. Remember: This is the foundational text of Western philosophy. Thrasymachus was the bad guy. There’s a reason history has chosen to venerate Plato and Socrates, and not him.

You don’t need me to tell you which regimes in the history of the world have subscribed to Thrasymachus’s definition. It’s an ugly roster—to which we must now add the government of the United States of America.

The Trump regime has proven over and over that this is its morality. The DOGE cuts that have resulted in the deaths of poor children in Africa (as many as 700,000 a year). The repulsive cruelty that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan and ex–Border Patrol head Gregory Bovino have imposed upon people living law-abiding lives. The lawless and amoral murders of the people on those boats in the Caribbean.

And now, the prosecution of this war. It’s not that so far, we’ve killed “that many” civilians—around 1,300, although the killing of those schoolgirls will be a historic blot on this country’s escutcheon for the ages. It’s the certain knowledge that this crew will do anything it decides it needs or wants to do because, for them, justice is exactly the advantage of the stronger; nothing more and nothing less. And that’s how people can decide that war has no more gravity to it than a football game, and that equating the two is funny. What a sick bunch of people.

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.

I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?

Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, trying to help Trump: “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.

With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.

Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

As for the media takeover: What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, in trying to take over both CBS and CNN. But he wouldn’t stop. Netflix bid $83 billion. Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion, and Netflix dropped out.

And somewhere in there, Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address, and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board. I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships, or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.

So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping. The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.

And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.

That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post, to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier.

That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.