President Donald Trump is threatening a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against the Center for American Progress (CAP) after the think tank published research challenging his claims that National Guard deployments have reduced crime.

The report, released July 13, examined deployments in Washington, Memphis and Los Angeles. It found no measurable impact on violent crime and estimated the deployments cost about $1.7 billion.

Trump’s personal attorney, Alejandro Brito, gave the organization until 5 p.m. Friday to retract the report, apologize and compensate the president. If it did not, he wrote, Trump would pursue a lawsuit seeking at least $5 billion in damages.

CAP declined. Attorney Kevin Metz called the threat “utterly absurd,” writing that truth is not and cannot be defamation. CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden said the lawsuit threat was “a transparent attempt to silence us” and that the organization would “neither cower nor bend.”

The legal odds favor CAP. As a public figure, Trump would need to prove actual malice, meaning CAP knowingly published false information or acted with “reckless disregard for the truth.” That is a high bar, and it has doomed similar suits in the past.

This is not an isolated tactic. Trump has sued The New York Times for $15 billion, The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion and CNN for $475 million, in each case after the outlet reported something true that he wanted the public to forget. He has also used executive orders and subpoenas against law firms and universities. Most of these suits have failed in court, but that has not stopped him. Losing is beside the point because the lawsuit itself is the punishment, paid in legal fees and wasted staff time before a judge ever makes a ruling.

CAP’s report did not attack Trump personally. It looked at crime data before and during the deployments and found the crime rates did not change. Disagreeing with a president’s account of his own policy is not defamation. It just confirms how little patience this White House has for facts it cannot control.

Sources:

• Mediaite, “Trump Threatens $5 Billion Defamation Suit Over Report Saying National Guard Didn’t Reduce Crime,” Aug. 21, 2026

• CBS News, “Trump threatens defamation suit against left-leaning think tank,” Aug. 22, 2026

• The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Trump threatens suit over report he doesn’t like, aiming to intimidate a critic,” Aug. 21, 2026

Pathological lying

Pathological lying refers to a pattern of habitual, compulsive lying, often without a clear external motive. It is not the same as strategic lying, which serves an identifiable purpose such as avoiding punishment or securing an advantage.

A pathological liar is one who lies often and over a long stretch of time, not just once or twice under pressure. The lies can be detailed and told without hesitation, and one lie tends to lead to another until an entire invented account takes shape. If the person is caught in the lie, they are more likely to keep going than to admit it.

Clinicians sometimes use the term pseudologia fantastica to describe this pattern in its more elaborate form. Amir Garakani, a psychiatrist who has written about this condition, noted that it can appear on its own or alongside other conditions, including some personality disorders. (It is not listed as a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5.)

Malignant narcissism

Otto Kernberg, a psychoanalyst, developed the concept of malignant narcissism to describe a more severe variant of narcissistic pathology. Four elements make up the pattern: grandiosity and entitlement, a willingness to exploit or harm others without guilt, chronic suspicion of others’ motives, and satisfaction drawn from others’ submission or distress (hence the “malignant” qualifier).

Like pathological lying, malignant narcissism is not a formal DSM-5 manual. Rather, it functions more as a clinical shorthand for a cluster of traits that, together, describe a particularly corrosive personality pattern.

Where they intersect

Lying shows up in both, but for different reasons.

In malignant narcissism, lying tends to be purposeful even when it looks excessive. It protects a grandiose self-image, manipulates others into compliance or serves as a form of control. The sadistic component can turn lying into something closer to a weapon, as it can be used to confuse or destabilize another person rather than simply to avoid a consequence.

Pathological lying on its own is usually less directed. It often serves the liar’s internal need to maintain a preferred version of reality, without the overtly cruel or controlling intent that marks the narcissistic version.

In practice, the two can look identical from the outside. A person with malignant narcissistic traits who has lied fluidly for years may no longer be using the lies in a strategic way. The lying becomes automatic, which is precisely the point at which it starts to resemble the compulsive pattern rather than a calculated one.

The distinction matters less for diagnosis than for understanding what the lying is doing. A strategic liar responds to incentives. A compulsive liar often does not, making it unlikely that the lying will ever change.

Sources

• Otto F. Kernberg, psychoanalyst, “Malignant Narcissism and the Differential Diagnosis of Antisocial Behavior,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

• Amir Garakani, psychiatrist, and colleagues, “Pseudologia Fantastica and Factitious Disorder: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Psychiatric Practice

• American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition

• Theodore Millon, psychologist, Personality Disorders in Modern Life

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Wednesday, July 29 and invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times rather than answer a single question about COVID-19’s origins. Several Republicans on the committee treated that silence as proof of guilt.

They have been far less consistent when it was one of their own doing the exact same thing.

• Donald Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 440 times in a 2022 deposition tied to a civil fraud investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James, after years of arguing in public that doing so was itself a sign of guilt. “I once asked, if you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Trump said in 2016, in a clip that resurfaced this week. “I was asking that question. Now, I know the answer to that question.”

• Eric Trump invoked the Fifth in response to more than 500 questions in that same case.

• Roger Stone pleaded the Fifth to every question in a 90-minute deposition before the January 6 committee.

• John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Trump on challenges to the 2020 election, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, each reportedly invoked the Fifth roughly 100 times in their own testimony.

• Kevin O’Connor, Joe Biden’s former physician, invoked the Fifth Amendment during a closed-door House Oversight Committee interview. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee’s chairman, said at the time the move suggested “criminal liability.”

Republicans cannot have it both ways. If pleading the Fifth is evidence of guilt, then Trump, his sons and his closest allies have a lot to answer for. If it is not, then Sen. Paul used Wednesday’s hearing for nothing more than political theater.

Sources

• Associated Press, “’Pleading the Fifth’ invokes a constitutional amendment that has a long history in US society,” July 29, 2026

• The Washington Post, “5 takeaways from the Senate hearing where Fauci refused to answer questions,” July 29, 2026

• NPR, “Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment in Rand Paul Senate hearing,” July 29, 2026

• The Mirror US, “GOP slammed as hypocrites as clip of Trump pleading the 5th released,” July 29, 2026

• MSNBC/MS NOW, Rachel Maddow Show blog, “Trump’s history with the Fifth Amendment still isn’t doing his allies any favors,” November 1, 2025

• The Hill, “These figures in Trump’s orbit have pleaded the 5th Amendment,” August 12, 2022

Last night President Donald Trump delivered a 25-minute prime-time address from the East Room of the White House. His subject was the 2020 election he lost nearly six years ago.

Trump said he had declassified intelligence documents revealing vulnerabilities in American election systems, Chinese meddling and noncitizens on state voter rolls. He claimed China illegally acquired the voter files of 220 million Americans, and he ordered the Justice Department to prosecute those he believes were involved.

He offered no evidence that a single vote was altered in 2020 or in any election since. Fact checkers challenged the claims within hours, and the intelligence community’s own assessment found that China did not interfere in the 2020 election. John Solomon, the conservative journalist who worked with the White House on the document release, acknowledged after the speech that there is “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote” in 2020, 2022 or 2024.

The absence of evidence may matter less than the repetition. Psychologists call this the “illusory truth effect,” the idea that a claim feels more credible each time it is heard whether or not the facts support it. Trump has called the 2020 election rigged for nearly six years, through dozens of failed lawsuits, the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, and the pardons and commutations he later granted to nearly all of those charged. Thursday night, he made the claim again in a formal address to the nation.

The speech came as polling shows Democrats favored to win the House in November, and as Trump pressures Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, an elections bill that Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has repeatedly said lacks the Republican votes to pass.

The networks handled the address with unusual caution, even after the White House took the rare step of formally asking them to carry it live. ABC and NBC declined to put it on their broadcast networks, showing it only on their streaming platforms, and CNN did not air it live. CBS and Fox carried it, though CBS joined late and cut away minutes before the end, shortly after Trump said ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses for refusing to air him. CBS spent the rest of its hour with election experts who disputed his claims.

Trump insisted his goal was not to weaken confidence in elections, but Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, disagreed, saying in a statement that the real threat is the false claims themselves, which erode voters’ trust and can be used to justify federal interference in elections.

Sources:

• CNBC / Trump doubles down on 2020 election claims in national address, alleging China meddling / July 16, 2026

• ABC News / Trump says documents show voting vulnerabilities, China meddling and fraud / July 16, 2026

• CNN / 5 takeaways from Trump’s primetime speech on elections / July 16, 2026

• NPR / Trump repeats claims, cites election ‘vulnerabilities’ in speech / July 16, 2026

• CNN / Trump delivers primetime speech, claims declassified documents show US election vulnerabilities / July 16, 2026

• CNN / Here’s how the TV networks handled Trump’s highly unusual prime-time address / July 16, 2026

Donald Trump spent the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 and 8 raging at allies for refusing to back his demand that the United States take control of Greenland, lecturing them about Hitler overrunning Denmark in a day and calling Spain a terrible partner in the alliance. By the summit’s close he had swung around completely and declared it a gathering of unity and “tremendous love.”

The heads of state see Trump for who he is. For two days they treated him like the crazy uncle at a holiday dinner, assessing his moods, placating him, tiptoeing around the outbursts.

Back home, Trump’s inner circle likely sees him just as clearly. The difference is that they cater to his fragile ego and his every whim, showering him with flattery no adult with intact self-respect could deliver, day after day.

Jennifer Welch, co-host of the I’ve Had It podcast, named the kind of person who makes that choice. On the May 1 edition of IHIP News, her spinoff show, she called Trump’s cabinet Fox News narcissists who failed forward by trafficking in “culture war ideals that speak to the rich, broken people” who own the networks that made them famous.

Failing forward means exactly what it sounds like. These cabinet members did not earn their positions through achievement. Many had stalled careers, personal scandals, business failures or thin qualifications. They continued to ascend because they offered something that the system they were rising through valued: culture war performance on Fox News, blind loyalty to Trump and the MAGA movement, and a willingness to say anything. Their failures never cost them their careers because merit was never the currency.

When Welch called them broken people, she meant it as an insult. It also happens to be an accurate description, and the psychology behind it is well documented.

The man at the center

Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst who coined the term malignant narcissism in 1964, called this personality disorder the quintessence of evil: grandiosity fused with paranoia, sadism and the absence of moral restraint. Otto Kernberg, the psychoanalyst who built the modern clinical framework for narcissistic pathology, added that the malignant narcissist cannot keep honest people close. He needs accomplices.

A leader with this kind of psychological profile does not hire people for competence because competence threatens him, as does independent judgment. He hires people who will feed him a steady stream of admiration and deference, the fuel that regulates a self too fragile to regulate itself. When cabinet secretaries take turns on television praising the president, they are doing exactly what they were hired to do.

The lying serves the same function. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, was asked at a March briefing which parts of the administration’s reported Iran ceasefire plan were inaccurate. “If you’ve heard it from the president of the United States, obviously it’s true,” she said.

Press secretaries have always spun for the boss. But Leavitt was asserting something different, that truth flows from the leader rather than from facts.

Around this president, lying becomes the loyalty test. Anyone can repeat true things. Saying false things in public, without visible cost to conscience, proves a person has surrendered their own judgment, and the more brazen the lie, the more convincing the proof. Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who chronicled the rise of totalitarianism, wrote 75 years ago that such movements prize followers for whom the line between fact and fiction has stopped mattering.

The people who stay

So, who takes a job like that? Generally, not a person with an intact sense of self-worth. The daily humiliations would wear on anyone with a moral backbone, which is why the first Trump administration discarded its generals and institutionalists within two years. The people who stayed, and the people recruited since, are the ones for whom proximity to power fills a void that nothing else ever has.

The Internal Family Systems model, a psychological framework developed by psychologist Richard Schwartz, offers one way to understand that void. The model describes grandiosity, contempt and cruelty as “protectors,” defenses built to guard something more vulnerable. Underneath there is almost always old shame. The swagger and bravado are a front for the part of themselves they most want to hide.

Call it psychobabble if you like, but it explains why these officials keep debasing themselves in public.

The evidence is on camera every day. The president rages when questioned. He humiliates enemies for sport. He spent two days in Ankara treating America’s oldest allies as predators and freeloaders. His closest advisors mollify him and dare not suggest that he is ever off base or wrong.

All of it looks ridiculous. Accomplished adults, people with law degrees and stars on their shoulders, address the president in gushing superlatives no adult uses in earnest. A sycophant performs for an audience of one, and what soothes a wounded narcissist looks grotesque to everyone else. These officials traded their dignity for the approval of one man, a bargain nobody agrees to from a position of psychological health.

While absurd, this type of behavior is not always harmless. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University historian and author of “Strongmen,” has traced this court dynamic across a century of authoritarian governments, and nearly every one of them looked absurd to outsiders until the absurdity stopped being funny.

In strongman systems, she shows, the cabinet becomes a court. Advancement runs through flattery and complicity rather than skill, and corruption bonds the members together, because a man who has compromised himself alongside you cannot easily turn on you.

Government officials who are driven by shame and grievance do not pursue policies in the national interest. Instead, they hunt perceived enemies, stage public cruelty as spectacle, and purge the insufficiently loyal. Mydelle Wright, a retired General Services Administration official, who was under oath in a federal court declaration about the White House’s plans to demolish historic federal buildings outside the required review process, stated simply: “Who in the agency is going to tell him no?” Nobody, it seems, and that is by design.

Sources:

NPR, “Trump wraps NATO summit on a positive note, after meeting Zelenskyy,” July 9, 2026

Al Jazeera, “Five key takeaways from the NATO summit in Ankara,” July 8, 2026

The Washington Post, “After America’s 250th, Trump will test how far he can push NATO allies,” July 6, 2026

HuffPost via Yahoo News, “Karoline Leavitt Cracks Up Critics With Her ‘Obviously...’ Defense Of Trump,” March 27, 2026

The 19th, “In three months, Trump’s Cabinet has lost four women,” April 20, 2026

NBC Washington, “Trump administration considers demolition of 4 federal buildings, former GSA official says,” Dec. 13, 2025

NewsBusters, Curtis Houck, “UGLY: Welch, Sidekick Hurl Vile Smears at Jennings, Trump, Confuse Scott with Donalds,” May 1, 2026

The Washington Post, “’I’ve Had It’ podcast hosts are highly effective political commentators,” Feb. 9, 2026

MS NOW, “’So emasculated’: Jennifer Welch from the ‘I’ve Had It’ podcast ridicules Trump’s ‘triggered’ cabinet,” Oct. 29, 2025

Erich Fromm, “The Heart of Man,” 1964

Otto Kernberg, “Severe Personality Disorders,” 1984

Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 1951

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” 2020

On the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, standing beneath the granite faces of four presidents at Mount Rushmore, President Donald Trump warned of a “resurgence of the communist menace in our land.” He called communism “a mortal threat to American liberty” and a greater threat to the country than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

He also offered a definition: “The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work,” he said.

That is not a definition so much as an enemies list. The timing of his remarks is worth noting because the speech came weeks after election victories by democratic socialist candidates in New York and Colorado and four months before the 2026 midterms.

Some Definitions:

COMMUNISM is a system in which the state owns the means of production. All of it. Factories, farms, businesses, housing stock. There is no private enterprise, no market pricing and, in every historical example, no competing political party. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Cuba. A centrally planned economy under one-party rule.

SOCIALISM is the broader category: collective or state ownership of major industries, with variations in how much private property and market activity remain.

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, the label New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani actually claims, means pursuing socialist goals through free elections rather than revolution, within an intact constitutional democracy. In American practice it has meant rent stabilization, publicly funded childcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and city-run services.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, often confused with all of the above, keeps a capitalist economy in place and taxes private income and corporate profits at high rates to fund a social safety net. Norway and Denmark are capitalist countries, as is Canada.

Measuring the claim against the definitions

When Trump first attached the “communist” label to Mamdani a year ago, PolitiFact rated the claim false. Anna Grzymala-Busse, a Stanford University professor of international studies, told the fact-checkers that communism requires a centrally planned economy with no market forces, prices set by a central authority and single-party rule without democratic competition. Mamdani, she said, advocates none of it. Oxana Shevel, a Tufts University associate professor of comparative politics, noted that Western democracies from France to Canada offer free or heavily subsidized childcare and public transit, and that under communism the government would own everything and control all prices, not regulate rents or run a few supermarkets.

Fox News published the correct definition on its own website while its broadcast hosts continued using the word on air.

Repeat until true

Fox host Jesse Watters has told viewers that a “Communist Revolution” is engulfing the Democratic Party. A Fox opinion piece went so far as to frame Mamdani’s election as the fulfillment of a KGB defector’s warnings about Marxist subversion of American institutions.

When Mamdani asked New Yorkers during a heat wave to set air conditioners to 78 degrees to protect the power grid, a request Texas grid operators make every summer, the online responses included “Welcome to communism people!” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate, wrote “Welcome to socialism.” As governor in 2015, Haley urged South Carolinians to conserve energy during an extreme cold snap to avoid straining the state’s electrical system. The request was civic duty when she made it and socialism when Mamdani made it.

The Department of Energy’s own website recommended setting summer thermostats between 75 and 78 degrees; the page was live as recently as mid-June and now returns an error message.

Why the word, and why now

The language echoes the Red Scare of the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin built a career on accusations of communist infiltration and the accused were blacklisted from work in government, education and Hollywood. The mechanics have not changed.

As in the 1950s, calling someone a communist requires no solid evidence, because the purpose is to frighten, and it works best on audiences who hear the word “communism” constantly but do not have an accurate definition. A viewer who absorbs hours of Fox News and other right-wing media each week can come away certain that communism is dangerous and infiltrating America without being able to say what it is.

A term that once defined a real geopolitical adversary becomes a way to make particular political candidates, neighbors, or celebrities seem foreign and scary. The Mount Rushmore speech echoed this by tying the “menace” to “newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life,” and the president suggested that left-wing political figures and certain undocumented immigrants should be removed from the country.

Let me repeat that: The president marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by proposing that Americans with the wrong politics be removed from America.

Three questions provide a litmus test about whether the label fits any American politician: Does this person advocate abolishing private business? Does this person suggest that we end free elections? Does this person promote one-party rule? If the answer to all three is no, the label is nothing more than a resurrected political tactic.

Sources

MS NOW, Clarissa-Jan Lim, Mara Mellits and Camille Ray, “’Communist menace in our land’: Trump’s July 4 rallying cry to America,” July 4, 2026

NPR, “In Mount Rushmore speech, Trump veers from U.S. exceptionalism to warnings about communism,” July 4, 2026

Al Jazeera, Heba Habib, “Trump praises army, rails against communism in US 250th anniversary speech,” July 4, 2026

CBS News, “Trump touts America’s ‘golden age,’ attacks communism in delayed July 4th speech,” July 5, 2026

Fox News, David Rutz, “PolitiFact rates Trump’s ‘communist’ claim about NYC mayoral hopeful false,” June 29, 2025

Fox News, Andrew Mark Miller, “Zohran Mamdani 78-degree AC rule draws conservative backlash online,” July 2, 2026

Straight Arrow News, “Critics mocked Mamdani’s AC request. Republicans made the same ask,” July 3, 2026

Latin Times, “Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz Face Backlash After Mocking Zohran Mamdani’s AC Conservation Request,” July 2, 2026

Two hundred fifty years ago today, 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and outlining 27 grievances against King George III, nicknamed “the mad king.” The 18th century language can be challenging for the modern reader, so here is each charge in plain English.

1. He refused to approve laws necessary for the public good.

2. He forbade his governors from passing urgent laws unless suspended until he approved them, then neglected to attend to them.

3. He refused to pass laws for large districts unless the people gave up their right to representation.

4. He summoned legislatures to meet in unusual and distant places to wear them down.

5. He repeatedly dissolved legislatures that opposed him.

6. He refused to allow new elections after dissolving them.

7. He obstructed the naturalization of foreigners and discouraged migration.

8. He obstructed justice by refusing to establish courts.

9. He made judges dependent on his will alone for their jobs and their salaries.

10. He created a multitude of new offices and sent swarms of officers to harass the people and drain their livelihoods.

11. He kept standing armies among the people in peacetime without their consent.

12. He made the military independent of and superior to civil power.

13. He subjected the colonies to a jurisdiction foreign to their constitution.

14. He quartered armed troops among the population.

15. He protected those troops, by mock trial, from punishment for murders of the inhabitants.

16. He cut off trade with the rest of the world.

17. He imposed taxes without consent.

18. He deprived people, in many cases, of trial by jury.

19. He transported people overseas to be tried for pretended offenses.

20. He abolished free laws in a neighboring province and made it an instrument of absolute rule.

21. He took away charters and altered the fundamental forms of government.

22. He suspended colonial legislatures and backed Parliament’s claim to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.

23. He abdicated government by declaring the people out of his protection and waging war against them.

24. He plundered the seas, ravaged the coasts, burned the towns and destroyed the lives of the people.

25. He sent foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny.

26. He forced Americans captured at sea to bear arms against their own country and become the executioners of their friends.

27. He incited domestic insurrections and attacks on the frontiers.

Source:

National Archives, Declaration of Independence: A Transcription, July 4, 1776

In the “Metamorphoses,” the Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Narcissus, who knelt at a still pool of water and fell in love with his own reflection.

Narcissus was unable to understand that the surface held only his image. He plunged his arms into the water to seize the figure he saw, and it scattered. He kissed the surface and embraced the water, trying to hold a body that was merely a reflection. He could not look away, and he wasted at the water’s edge.

The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall was built for the opposite purpose. It reflects the images of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, structures that honor two great presidents and the ideals they stood for.

Narcissus saw only himself in the water. The pool on the Mall was built so a nation could see more than one man and the principles they represented.

A leader who treats the renovation of the Reflecting Pool as a measure of himself asks the country to do precisely what Narcissus could not stop doing: to look at the water and see only a single face.

Source:

Ovid, “Metamorphoses,” Book III, circa A.D. 8.

Malignant narcissism* is the term for a severe and destructive cluster of personality traits, the most damaging form narcissism can take. Social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm named it in 1964 in his book “The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil,” part of his long effort to understand the human capacity for destructiveness, a question that had pressed on him since he fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg later developed it into a clinical framework.

Kernberg’s account brings together four components:

Narcissistic personality structure forms the foundation: grandiosity, a need for admiration, a sense of entitlement and a lack of empathy.

Antisocial behavior adds a disregard for the rights of others, manipulation, deceit and a willingness to exploit people without remorse. This overlaps with antisocial traits but stops short of full psychopathy.

Aggression and sadism turn hostility outward, sometimes as open satisfaction in dominating, humiliating or harming others. The cruelty can look purposeful rather than reactive.

A paranoid orientation completes it: suspiciousness, a tendency to perceive threats and enemies and a defensive hostility toward a world the person experiences as hostile in return.

What distinguishes malignant narcissism from ordinary narcissism is the combination of self-aggrandizement with genuine antisocial cruelty and paranoia. A person with narcissistic personality disorder alone may be self-absorbed and difficult, but a malignant narcissist actively derives gratification from aggression and may cause serious harm to those around them. Kernberg considered the syndrome especially resistant to treatment, in part because the destructive behavior is ego-syntonic, meaning it feels consistent with the person’s sense of self rather than distressing to them.

Two caveats matter here: Because it is not a formal diagnostic category, clinicians vary in how they use the term, and it is frequently applied loosely in popular and political writing in ways that outrun its clinical meaning. Diagnosing personality pathology in anyone, particularly someone who has not been evaluated directly, is difficult work and best left to a professional working with the actual person.

What anyone can do, short of diagnosis, is observe behavior, particularly of a public figure. The sheer volume of social media posts, recorded speeches and public video means a person’s words and conduct are widely available, and readers are free to weigh those patterns for themselves.

*It is not a formal diagnosis and does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Sources

Harper & Row / Erich Fromm / The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil / 1964

Yale University Press / Otto Kernberg / Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies / 1984

Psychiatria Danubina / Mila Goldner-Vukov and Laurie Jo Moore / Malignant Narcissism: From Fairy Tales to Harsh Reality / 2010

American Psychiatric Association / Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision / 2022

A 600-ton steel cage now sits on the South Lawn of the White House, ready for Sunday. The Ultimate Fighting Championship will stage seven bouts there, billed as a celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, though the date carries other significance. June 14 is Flag Day and the Army’s 250th birthday, and it is also the president’s 80th. The country’s ceremonial front yard, where heads of state are received and where Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands in 1993 to seal a Middle East peace accord, has been turned over to a pay-per-view fight night for the weekend of Donald Trump’s birthday.

This strikes me as incredibly tacky, but tacky is the least of it. The octagon is ringed with corporate logos, the fight will be streamed on a service owned by a company whose merger this administration approved, and VIP seats run past $1 million. Two Virginia residents, a Vietnam veteran and a civic activist, have sued to stop it, calling the event deeply corrupt, and the Justice Department’s answer is that they are snobs with superior taste who should look away.

Sources

News From The States, Corporate logos abound on White House grounds in prep for fights by Trump-allied UFC, June 11, 2026
ABC News, Trump administration lambastes lawsuit seeking to stop White House UFC event, June 10, 2026
CNN, Trump argues lawsuit seeking to halt White House UFC fight was brought too ‘late’, June 9, 2026

Joe Biden has been out of office for 470 days. He is a private citizen living in Delaware. He does not set tariff policy. He does not chair Cabinet meetings. He is not on Truth Social at 2 a.m.

And yet, according to the Trump administration, he is still responsible for nearly everything going wrong.

Consider just a few examples.

On May 2, Spirit Airlines shut down, canceling all flights and stranding thousands of passengers. The airline’s own CEO said the collapse was driven by jet fuel costs that had surged because of the administration’s military operation in Iran.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, speaking to reporters at Newark Liberty International Airport that morning, offered a different explanation. “There was a proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit, and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, along with the Biden DOJ, decided that they did not want that merger to take place,” Duffy said. “This is not better for travelers. This is not better for pricing. This is not better for competition. Actually, it’s worse.” What Duffy did not mention was that the merger had been blocked by a federal judge, not by executive fiat, and that the judge cited concerns about higher fares and significant debt for JetBlue.

On May 3, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on Fox Business and told anchor Maria Bartiromo the collapse was “just more of the mess we inherited from the Biden administration.” The same day, a clip resurfaced from February 2025 in which Bessent was asked when the administration would stop blaming Biden for economic problems. “Probably six or 12 months out,” he had answered. That was 14 months ago.

On April 15, press secretary Karoline Leavitt stood at the White House podium and said: “Thank goodness we have a president and an administration that believes in American energy dominance in bringing down prices at the pump. Look at how gas prices decreased over the past year since this president was in office.”

Gas prices that day were $4.11 a gallon, up from $2.98 when Biden left office and more than a dollar higher than the same date a year earlier, according to AAA. The national average had surged 21% in March alone, driven by the administration’s own military operation in Iran.

Vice President JD Vance made the same argument on national television in March. “Joe Biden left us in a terrible situation,” he said, “and the reason why gas prices are where they are today is because of Donald Trump’s work to get them lower.”

Peter Navarro, the White House’s senior trade adviser, coined the phrase “Biden-era beef inflation” and has used it in press conferences, op-eds and on social media for months. In a December 2025 op-ed in The Hill he blamed Biden’s “Green New Deal policies” for record beef prices. Ground beef hit $6.69 a pound that same month, nearly a full year into Trump’s second term.

In March 2025, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Bloomberg Television that weak economic data was simply “Biden data.” “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” he told a reporter pressing him on a dismal jobs report. Two days later he told CBS News that “the only reason there could possibly be a recession is because the Biden nonsense that we had to live with.” He also moved to disband two federal committees that produced independent data on inflation, employment and GDP.

In January 2025, nine days after Biden left office, a U.S. Army helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet over the Potomac River, killing all 67 people aboard. Before the bodies were recovered, Trump blamed Biden and DEI hiring policies at the FAA, without evidence. The National Transportation Safety Board’s final report attributed the crash to systemic failures in FAA airspace design and Army safety oversight.

Blaming a predecessor is hardly new. Ronald Reagan invoked Jimmy Carter’s inflation well into his first term. Barack Obama referenced the 2008 financial collapse he inherited from George W. Bush as late as his third and fourth years in office. But both men had genuine crises to point to, and both changed course when they had records of their own to run on.

The distinction is this: neither man mobilized an entire cabinet to appear on television daily, in coordinated rotation, repeating identical phrases. When the Treasury secretary, commerce secretary, trade adviser, vice president and the press secretary all reach for the same language within days of one another, they are not arriving independently at the same conclusion. They are reading from the same memo. “The mess we inherited.” “Biden’s legacy.” These phrases do not emerge spontaneously. Few inside the administration have broken from the script.

The psychological term for what drives the underlying impulse is externalization, the defensive habit of locating the source of every problem outside the self. Biden becomes the container for everything that cannot be owned. Clinicians also recognize the pattern known as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The responsible party denies the problem, attacks whoever raises it, and reframes himself as the real victim. Bessent’s statement about Spirit Airlines is a near-perfect illustration, particularly given that his own six-to-12-month deadline for owning the economy expired months ago.

People adopt a group’s stated reality not because they believe it but because the cost of dissent is too high. One former Trump campaign official, speaking anonymously to The Hill last spring, said it plainly: “Anything bad is always someone else’s fault. Biden can’t defend himself. Always pick on the weaker kid.”

The goal of this strategy is not necessarily to convince anyone. It is to create enough ambient noise that accurate cause-and-effect thinking becomes difficult. Blame then gets assigned where it does not belong.

Sixty percent of respondents in CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey for the first quarter of 2026 disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy. The gap between the story and the lived experience of voters paying $4-a-gallon gas and record beef prices is widening and yet it is still somehow Biden’s fault.

Sources

CNN, “Inside Spirit Airlines’ Failed ‘Hail Mary’ to the Trump Administration,” May 3, 2026

MSNBC, “Team Trump Tries to Blame Biden for Spirit Airlines’ Collapse, But Reality Gets in the Way,” May 4, 2026

Mediaite, “Trump Official Blames Biden Admin for Economic ‘Mess’ as Resurfaced Clip Shows Him Saying Trump Would Own the Economy by 2026,” May 3, 2026

Daily Caller, “Karoline Leavitt Says With Straight Face Trump Has Brought Down Gas Prices,” April 15, 2026

Fox News, “From Biden’s ‘War’ on Energy to ‘Small Price’: Trump Shrugs Off Gas Surge Amid Iran Conflict,” March 15, 2026

Military.com, “Leavitt to Young Americans on High Gas Prices: ‘President Trump Is Doing This for You,’” March 25, 2026

Peter Navarro, The Hill, “Do We Need to Break Up Big Beef?,” December 2025

CNBC, “Trump Commerce Chief Lutnick Blames Biden for Economy,” March 5, 2025

CBS News, “Commerce Secretary Lutnick Says Trump’s Policies Are ‘Worth It’ Even if They Lead to Recession,” March 11, 2025

The Hill, “Trump Marks 100 Days in Office With Biden Blame Game,” May 3, 2025

NTSB, Press Release, “Systemic Failures Led to Midair Collision Over Potomac River,” Jan. 28, 2026

CNBC, “Trump’s Lack of Focus on Economy Is Spooking Republicans as 2026 Election Looms,” April 23, 2026

The federal government has spent years tightening access to mifepristone, a drug used to manage miscarriage and terminate pregnancy, through pharmacy restrictions, mandatory dispensing protocols and ongoing litigation designed to limit its reach. The argument from those driving the restrictions is that the government has a compelling interest in regulating drugs that affect reproduction.

So here’s a question worth sitting with: What would happen if that same logic were applied to Viagra?

Viagra enables sexual activity and thus affects reproduction, and it carries documented risks, including heart attack, sudden vision loss and dangerous drops in blood pressure. Mifepristone, by comparison, has a death rate of roughly 5 per million users. The risk of death from Viagra is nearly 10 times higher. Yet no one is proposing waiting periods, mandatory counseling sessions or telemedicine bans. When the drug in question is taken by men, suddenly the government’s interest in reproduction disappears.

Sources:

American Medical Women’s Association, “Mifepristone Safety: Comparing the Data to Viagra and Penicillin,” February 2026

ClickOnDetroit/CNN, “Study Suggests Abortion Pill Is Safer Than Penicillin, Viagra,” April 2023

Newsweek, “Is Abortion Pill Mifepristone Safer Than Viagra? What We Know,” March 2023

The Unbiased Sci Pod (Substack), “The Mifepristone Double Standard,” January 2026

The Powell Memo has been dissected by historians, documented by investigative journalists and cited in dozens of Senate floor speeches, yet most Americans have never heard of it, and that absence from public consciousness is itself a measure of how well the strategy worked. Here is what the strategy was, where it came from and why you are living inside its results.

The disorientation most Americans feel right now, the sense that institutions are failing simultaneously and that the ground has gone soft beneath things that once seemed stable, is not a misreading of events. The pace of what is happening is itself intentional, and it has a 55-year history.

Steve Bannon, who served as Donald Trump’s chief strategist, described the method with unusual candor when he told the journalist Michael Lewis that “the Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Bannon’s objective was to generate so much noise and chaos that no one can locate solid ground. And this makes sense from a psychological perspective: when people are overwhelmed, their capacity for sustained reasoning contracts and they “manage” the news cycle rather than understand it. This is not a personal failing but a predictable human response to sustained, high-volume threat.

Someone set up the scaffolding for this chaos deliberately, and the blueprint for it was written more than half a century ago.

The Man and the Memo

Written on Aug. 23, 1971, by a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell two months before Richard Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court, the document was marked confidential, addressed to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and titled, with considerable audacity, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”

Powell was not a fringe figure but a former president of the American Bar Association who had spent years as a board member of Philip Morris, serving as a legal strategist for the tobacco industry during a period when that industry was pioneering what would become one of the most consequential propaganda techniques in modern history. When scientific evidence linking cigarettes to lung cancer became impossible to ignore, the tobacco companies did not concede. They manufactured doubt, funding counter-research, flooding medical journals with competing claims and creating front groups that posed as independent scientific voices. The goal was not to win the argument but to forestall the moment when the argument was settled, and it worked for decades. Powell understood this playbook intimately because he helped run it, and the memo he wrote in 1971 applied the same logic to democratic institutions that tobacco had applied to public health science.

The fossil fuel industry later adopted the identical method to delay action on climate change, funding think tanks and advocacy organizations to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming with the same techniques Philip Morris had used to challenge the scientific evidence on smoking. The through line is not ideological but methodological: identify a threat to profit, discredit the science, exhaust the opposition and build institutions durable enough to outlast any single political moment.

The Antagonist

To understand why Powell wrote the memo, it helps to understand who provoked it. By 1971, Ralph Nader had become the most consequential consumer advocate in American history. His 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which exposed General Motors’ indifference to automobile safety, had triggered a wave of federal regulation and demonstrated that a single determined citizen could hold the most powerful corporations in the country to account. Nader had since expanded his reach, building a network of advocacy organizations that pushed for safer products, cleaner air and water and greater corporate transparency. To Powell, this was not civic engagement but an assault, and in his own words Nader had become “perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business.”

The Ecosystem

Powell’s answer was a coordinated, long-term counteroffensive across every institution that shapes public opinion and public policy: universities, think tanks, the courts, the media and the political process itself. He did not call for winning an election. He called for building an ecosystem, and the people who received his memo took him seriously.

Joseph Coors, the Colorado beer magnate, cited the Powell memo as the document that moved him to fund the Heritage Foundation, established in 1973. Within a decade of the memo’s circulation, the number of corporations with registered lobbyists in Washington had grown from 175 to more than 2,500. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, began training and placing a generation of conservative lawyers in the federal judiciary, a project whose results are visible in the current composition of the Supreme Court.

What distinguished Powell’s strategy from ordinary political advocacy was its time horizon. He was not asking corporate America to win the next election or defeat the next piece of legislation but to think in decades, building institutions that would shift the intellectual and legal climate so gradually that by the time the results were visible, the scaffolding that produced them would be invisible. Movements that operate in the open invite opposition. This one worked precisely because most people had no idea it was happening.

The Results

What made Powell singular was that he did not merely prescribe the strategy from the outside but spent 15 years executing part of it from the Supreme Court bench, laying early groundwork for what would become the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which removed limits on corporate spending in elections and completed, in a legal sense, what the memo had set in motion decades earlier.

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian whose newsletter Letters from an American reaches more than 3 million readers, has traced what she describes as the long consolidation of oligarchic power through American political life, identifying the Powell memo as a turning point after which corporate interests learned to deploy resources with a discipline and patience their opponents have rarely matched.

What Powell could not have anticipated when he wrote the memo was the arrival of social media and a round-the-clock information environment that would amplify its strategy beyond anything available in 1971. The think tanks supply the arguments, and the information ecosystem keeps American citizens too overwhelmed to connect cause and effect. That is not a flaw in the current system but the system working precisely as intended. And that helps explain the disorientation we all feel in 2026.

This history has been documented in considerable depth by others, and the following are worth your time if you want to go further.

David Sirota, editor of The Lever, produced “Master Plan,” an investigative podcast series that traces the Powell memo through the corporate task force meetings it generated and forward to Project 2025. It is the most thorough treatment of this history available in an accessible format.

Jane Mayer, staff writer for The New Yorker, documented the funding infrastructure behind the conservative movement in her 2016 book “Dark Money,” which remains the essential text on how the Koch network and allied donors operationalized what Powell described.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has delivered a series of Senate floor speeches he calls “The Scheme,” documenting the capture of the federal judiciary in detail and citing the Powell memo directly. Transcripts and video are available through his Senate website.

The memo itself, all 34 pages, is publicly available through the Lewis F. Powell Jr. Archives at Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Sources:

Lewis Powell Jr., “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Aug. 23, 1971

The Nation, Jeet Heer, “The Powell Memo Helped Create Project 2025,” Sept. 6, 2024

The Lever, David Sirota, “Master Plan” podcast series, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson, “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America,” Viking, 2023

The Intercept, Ryan Grim, “Deconstructed,” Aug. 31, 2024

Jane Mayer, “Dark Money,” Doubleday, 2016

There is a word for what Donald Trump is doing to Washington, D.C., and to this country: defacement, which Merriam-Webster defines as “injury to surface or outward appearance” — the deliberate marring of what belongs to all of us.

The East Wing of the White House, situated on grounds that landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed in 1934-35 around a careful series of ellipses, was demolished last fall without congressional authorization, without historic preservation review and without public notice. Magnolia trees planted in memory of Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt came down with it, as did the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and the Olmsted driveway ellipse that had defined the South Lawn for nearly a century — all of it cleared to make room for a $400 million ballroom the president designed himself, down to the marble selection.

The Rose Garden, a fixture of presidential history since the Kennedy administration, had already been paved over the previous summer, its lawn replaced with white stone and fitted with patio tables and yellow-and-white striped umbrellas modeled after the Beach Club at Mar-a-Lago.

Those losses are just some of the visible wounds in a wider pattern of erasure. Trump now proposes a 250-foot gilded arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, more than twice the height of Lincoln’s own monument, crowned with golden eagles and lions and inscribed with “One Nation Under God.”

The sight line between Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial has been preserved for over a century as a symbol of national reunification after the Civil War, and Trump’s arch, partially taxpayer-funded despite his pledge of private financing, would end that.

A triumphal arch is a conqueror’s monument, and the founders knew it. They understood that the visual vocabulary of imperial power was incompatible with the democratic principles they were encoding in stone and landscape. The Mall’s sightlines, the memorials’ relationships to one another, the human scale of the grounds were deliberate choices that encoded a particular understanding of power: that it is temporary, accountable and held in trust.

Rob Cagnetta, a building restoration specialist and president of Heritage Restoration, told CNN that architecture communicates meaning, and that any new construction at the White House should reinforce that meaning rather than dilute it.

What is being constructed now goes far beyond dilution. It is replacement, and what it replaces is not merely aesthetic. It is moral, democratic and spiritual, the collective understanding that the 250 years of this republic belongs to its people and not to the man who temporarily occupies its highest office.

When we allow a single leader to demolish pieces of our shared inheritance and erect monuments to his own taste on sacred ground, we are not just losing buildings and trees and sightlines. We are losing the story we have always told ourselves about who we are: a republic and not an empire, a democracy and not a dynasty. We are losing it not to history or the passage of time, but to one man’s appetite for monuments to his own ego.

Sources

CNN, Zachary Cohen and Katie Bo Lillis, “The other part of history demolished with the East Wing: a Jackie Kennedy legacy,” March 25, 2026

CNN, Kristen Holmes and Holmes Lybrand, “Trump’s ballroom gets the green light from loyalist-stacked commission,” April 2, 2026

CNBC, “Trump’s 250-foot ‘triumphal arch’ would loom over Potomac, new renderings show,” April 10, 2026

WTOP News, Associated Press, “Trump’s Washington arch plan includes golden-winged figure, eagles, lions and ‘One Nation Under God,’” April 10, 2026

NBC News, “Trump arch renderings offer new details on the president’s 250-foot project in Washington,” April 10, 2026

Merriam-Webster, “Defacement,” merriam-webster.com

White House Historical Association, “A Beautiful Spot Capable of Every Improvement,” whitehousehistory.org

Cultural Landscape Foundation, White House Grounds profile, tclf.org

Viktor Orban conceded his election loss to Péter Magyar less than three hours after polls closed in Hungary on April 12, ending 16 years in power with a statement that was blunt and gracious in equal measure.

“The election result is painful for us, but clear,” he said, adding that he had congratulated the winner. The man the MAGA movement held up as its governing template, the proof that illiberal democracy could work, just showed the American right something it seems incapable of doing: accepting a result that didn’t go its way.

Nearly six years later, Donald Trump still has not conceded the 2020 election, which he lost by more than 7 million votes. More than 60 courts, including those with judges he appointed, found no evidence of fraud. His acolytes keep the fiction alive to this day, using language carefully calibrated to sustain the lie without quite saying it outright.

JD Vance was in Budapest days ago stumping for Orban, and Trump called into a rally to declare him “a fantastic man” and pledge he was with him “all the way.” He has not commented on the loss.

Sources

NPR, “Hungary’s Viktor Orbán concedes defeat, ending 16 years in power,” April 12, 2026

Time, “Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Icon of the Far Right, Loses Election. Here’s What That Means,” April 13, 2026

Al Jazeera, “World reacts to Peter Magyar defeating Viktor Orban, Hungary’s longtime PM,” April 12, 2026

On April 10, opinion writers Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, published a piece in the New York Times that named what many Americans have been circling around for months. Trump, they argued, is not simply a disruptive leader with unusual instincts. His pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized.

“The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term,” they wrote: “a psychotic state.”

That piece appeared three days after Trump posted to Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He was talking about Iran, a country of 90 million people and one of the oldest civilizations on earth. No congressional committee has held a public hearing on that statement. Most Republican legislators have said nothing at all.

Rauch and Wehner are not clinicians, and they are not diagnosing anyone. They are instead making a structural argument: that an administration built around a disordered personality eventually absorbs and replicates that disorder. The institution stops being able to function because the pathology is now the institution.

As a licensed mental health counselor, I have written in this space before about the professional caution that should accompany any analysis of a public figure’s psychological state. The Goldwater Rule exists for good reasons (that may be increasingly irrelevant today.) But there is a difference between armchair diagnosis and the observation of patterns that, in any clinical context, would compel attention. What Rauch and Wehner describe, I recognize, as do many others.

What the silence tells us

When a Louisiana television station asked four senior Republicans to comment on Trump’s Easter Sunday threats against Iran, all declined. The lone Republican response of any kind came from Congressman Mike Lawler, who suggested Trump was referring to roads and bridges, not the annihilation of 90 million people.

Senator Lisa Murkowski has said publicly that she is anxious about using her voice because “retaliation is real.” Senator Thom Tillis’s office documented death threats against him, his staff and his family after he showed signs of independence. The retirement announcements of both Tillis and Rep. Don Bacon were widely read as evidence that Trump had eliminated tolerance for dissent within the party.

This is not ordinary cowardice. It is the behavior of a political institution that has reorganized itself entirely around one man’s moods and appetites. The legislators are not malfunctioning but they are doing exactly what people do when the cost of speaking up becomes higher than the cost of looking away.

Rauch and Wehner make the same point in structural terms: the administration so often does not act coherently because it cannot.

Sunday night into Monday morning

While Iran peace talks collapsed over the weekend, the president was up past 4 a.m. Monday on a Truth Social posting marathon that made the Rauch and Wehner thesis concrete.

Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV in a 334-word rant, calling him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and claiming credit for Leo’s election to the papacy. Massimo Faggioli, a papal scholar at Villanova University, said in a statement to Reuters that not even Hitler or Mussolini had attacked the pope so directly and publicly.

Minutes later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself in a white robe and red sash, laying his hand on a bedridden man as light emanated from his fingers. The pose drew immediate comparisons to Renaissance depictions of Christ performing miracles. The man in the bed appeared to observers to resemble a young Jeffrey Epstein. In the same posting burst, he shared a second AI-generated image: a golden Trump hotel on the moon. Both posts went up without comment.

By Monday morning the Jesus image was deleted. Asked about it at an unscheduled press conference outside the Oval Office, Trump said he thought it depicted him as a doctor. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better,” he told reporters. “And I do make people better.” He attributed the Christ comparison to “fake news.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has broken with Trump over his handling of the Epstein files, did not stay quiet. “It’s more than blasphemy,” she wrote. “It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

This is the president of the United States, in the middle of an active war, at 4 in the morning, casting himself as Jesus healing Jeffrey Epstein and planting his brand on the moon. The Republican Party has issued no statement.

The right-wing media picture

The silence is not uniform on the right, but the exceptions are instructive. Megyn Kelly accused Fox of “cheerleading” the Iran war. Tucker Carlson claimed the network was feeding Trump misleading polling on the conflict. Steve Bannon compared Fox’s Iran coverage to its early Iraq War boosterism.

These are not voices of conscience. A recent YouGov poll found only 28 percent of respondents supported the war, down from 76 percent of Republicans just weeks earlier. What looks like dissent is a polling calculation.

Fox is not having a conscience moment. It is having a ratings moment.

What it means

The Rauch and Wehner piece is significant not because it introduces a new argument, but because of who is making it and where. These are not partisan critics. Wehner served in three Republican administrations. Rauch has spent decades writing carefully about democratic institutions. When they use the word “psychotic,” they are not being hyperbolic. They are being precise: a state that has lost its connection to reality, that cannot process information accurately, that cannot respond coherently to the world as it is.

We now have a president who threatened to destroy a civilization, then spent the small hours portraying himself as a divine healer and a builder of lunar empires and faced no meaningful accountability from his party or his media ecosystem. The system did not malfunction. It performed exactly what a system built around a disordered center operates.

The question is not whether we can see what is happening. Rauch and Wehner can see it. Most Americans, at some level, can see it. The question is whether the people with the constitutional authority to act will decide, before it is too late, that they cannot afford not to.

Sources

Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, “Trump and Iran: A Psychotic State,” The New York Times, April 10, 2026.

Al Jazeera, “Trump on Iran: ‘A whole civilisation will die tonight,’” April 7, 2026.

Responsible Statecraft, “Did Trump just threaten genocide in Iran?” April 2026.

CBS News, “Trump faces backlash after posting AI image appearing to depict him like Jesus,” April 13, 2026.

The Daily Beast, “Manic Trump, 79, Launches Unhinged 4AM Posting Blitz,” April 13, 2026.

Newsweek, “Trump Sparks Fury With Image of Himself as Jesus: ‘Antichrist Spirit,’” April 13, 2026.

YouGov, poll on U.S. support for Iran conflict, April 2026.

Media Matters, Megyn Kelly comments on Fox News Iran coverage, April 2026.

A little-noticed legal maneuver in Washington could allow the Trump administration to destroy its own records before leaving office, and most Americans have no idea it is happening.

Liz Oyer, who served as U.S. pardon attorney at the Department of Justice from 2022 to 2025 before being fired by the Trump administration, sounded the alarm this week on Instagram. Her warning deserves far wider attention.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, the unit that provides legal guidance to the executive branch, has concluded that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, issuing a 52-page opinion arguing the nearly 50-year-old law exceeds Congress’s authority and infringes on executive power.

The law itself is straightforward. Passed after Watergate, the Presidential Records Act established that a president’s records are public property and must be turned over to the National Archives at the end of a term, meaning emails, memos, text messages and other official communications cannot be destroyed. The public gains access five years after a presidency ends.

No president before Trump has ever argued the law violates the separation of powers.

The timing of this opinion is notable given that the Presidential Records Act was central to the federal criminal case against Trump after his first term, when he was indicted for retaining classified material at Mar-a-Lago and the case was ultimately dismissed. The records generated during a second term would eventually face the same public scrutiny, unless the law is gone first.

Because memos from the Office of Legal Counsel are treated as binding on all federal agencies, there is a serious risk that the National Archives will halt compliance with the law altogether, including the rules barring officials from using encrypted apps like Signal for government business.

This law is why the public has had any insight into presidential decision-making, from nuclear negotiations to Supreme Court nominations, and if the DOJ’s position holds, that access ends, not just for this administration but for every one that follows.

The American Historical Association and American Oversight have already filed suit, asking a court to declare the law constitutional, block reliance on the opinion and compel compliance.

As Oyer put it: “If Trump gets away with this, it would allow him and his staff to destroy all of the evidence of their corruption and misconduct before they leave office.”

Call your senators and representatives. Tell them to enforce the Presidential Records Act and support the lawsuit filed by the American Historical Association and American Oversight. Then share this post.

Sources

The Washington Post, “Justice Dept. says the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional,” April 2, 2026

CNN, “Trump’s DOJ tells Trump he can hold onto government docs when he leaves office,” April 3, 2026

CBS News, “Lawsuit challenges Justice Department memo that declared presidential records law unconstitutional,” April 8, 2026

American Historical Association, “AHA Files Lawsuit to Defend the Presidential Records Act,” April 2026

The Intercept, “DOJ Wants to Scrap Watergate-Era Rule That Makes Presidential Records Public,” April 9, 2026

NBC News Opinion, “The law says Trump can’t destroy documents. The DOJ now says otherwise,” April 8, 2026

The words came on Easter Sunday, in an expletive-laden post on Truth Social. Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges. He ended the post with “Praise be to Allah.”

The next day he escalated. At a White House press conference, he said the entire country “can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” By Tuesday, he posted what may be the most chilling sentence an American president has ever addressed to a foreign population: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

He was talking about Iran, a country of 90 million people and one of the oldest civilizations on earth.

The legal question

Once a sitting president frames a military campaign in terms of civilizational destruction, accusations of genocidal intent are no longer fringe or polemical. Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and former National Security Council director for the Middle East under President Obama, was careful to note that a court would require more than a single statement to meet the Genocide Convention’s threshold, which demands proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group as such. But Simon was equally clear: Trump introduced this language himself. The logical response to the words used is to take them seriously.

Amnesty International’s senior director for research and policy was clear about the narrower question of war crimes. Even when power plants have some military utility, she said, attacking infrastructure essential to the basic survival of tens of millions of civilians would be disproportionate and unlawful under international humanitarian law.

Trump’s response when pressed on the war crimes question: the real war crime was “allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to answer the question at all, according to CNN.

The question no one in power will ask

Running alongside the legal debate is a question that Democrats have raised and Republicans have refused to touch: what does this behavior tell us about the president’s mental state?

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that Trump had “completely lost his mind” and was “so clearly deteriorating” on a “basic psychological level,” arguing that in a functioning political system there would be remedies for removing a president so obviously impaired, but that the Republican Party has “no interest in making the remedy work,” according to NYC Today. Dr. John Gartner, a former professor at Johns Hopkins University, said on a recent podcast that Trump’s grandiosity is becoming more “inflamed” and that he is becoming addicted to war, describing a president who “gets off on it,” according to Raw Story.

Senator Tim Kaine questioned whether Trump was “mentally incapacitated,” asking whether he was “too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up during his first term.” Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, who is of Iranian descent, called him “a deranged lunatic, and a national security threat to our country and the rest of the world” and called for invoking the 25th Amendment.

When a reporter asked Trump directly about calls for a mental health evaluation, he shrugged the question off. “I haven’t heard that,” he said, according to CNN. He then suggested the country needed “more people” like him.

Meanwhile, Time reported that Trump has been starting each morning watching video clips of battlefield successes compiled by military officials, that aides have been telling him what he wants to hear, and that chief of staff Susie Wiles had to urge colleagues to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks of the war. A president isolated from reality, watching highlight reels of his own war, threatening civilizational annihilation on a social media platform. The picture is alarming.

What Democrats said

The responses from Democratic lawmakers were swift and unambiguous.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride called the remarks “horrifying, illegal, and genocidal,” warning that “a president cannot be allowed to threaten genocide with the United States military.” Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer and centrist, said the threatened strikes would violate both the Geneva Conventions and the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. Bernie Sanders called Trump “dangerous and mentally unbalanced” and demanded Congress act to end the war.

These are not progressive outliers. This is the Democratic mainstream responding in real time to an unprecedented threat.

What Republicans said

Congressman Mike Lawler moved to reframe Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iranian civilization as a statement about targeting “energy and civilian infrastructure, including roads and bridges.” He appeared to frame this as reassurance.

Several Republican senators and House members, including Bill Cassidy, John Kennedy and Steve Scalise, were asked for comment by Fox 8 in Louisiana. None responded.

What Fox News said

The right-wing media picture is more fractured than simple silence, and the fractures are worth examining.

Fox News itself largely supported the war. But some of the loudest critics of that coverage were figures from within the right-wing ecosystem. Megyn Kelly accused her former employer of doing exactly what she herself once did: “I spent 14 years at Fox News cheerleading these wars. I take full responsibility.” She said Fox now had one message, and everyone knew what it was, according to Media Matters.

Tucker Carlson claimed Fox was telling Trump the war was “a 90-10 win for him” and that he was “getting fake polling.” Steve Bannon compared Fox’s Iran coverage to its early Iraq War boosterism, warning supporters they had “a long way to go on this thing.”

These critics are not motivated by moral revulsion at genocide language. They are motivated by strategic anxiety. The war is unpopular, gas prices are rising, and Republican voters are defecting. A recent YouGov poll found only 28 percent of all respondents supported the conflict, down from 76 percent of Republicans at the start of the war just weeks earlier, according to Al Jazeera.

The right-wing media is not having a conscience moment. It is having a polling moment.

What it means

There is a clinical term for what happens when a system reorganizes itself entirely around not disturbing the person who holds power: it stops being able to see what is in front of it. The silence of Republican lawmakers and the cheerleading of right-wing media in the face of explicit threats against a civilization of 90 million people is not neutrality. It is a form of complicity that depends on the collective decision not to call the thing by its name.

That includes the question of the president’s mental fitness. When lawmakers invoke the 25th Amendment as a political talking point but no one moves to act on it, when aides filter the president’s morning briefings into victory reels, when the press secretary shrugs off questions about a commander in chief who posts expletive-laden threats at dawn on Easter Sunday, the system is not functioning. It has organized itself around protecting the dysfunction.

Trump said a whole civilization would die. No one with the power to stop him said a word that mattered. Five weeks in, not one congressional committee has held a public hearing, and the television hosts are still cheering. The president introduced the language of genocide into American foreign policy. The rest of the country will have to decide what to do with it.

Sources

Time, “Every Bridge in Iran Will Be Decimated,” April 6, 2026.

Time, “Inside Trump’s Search for a Way to End the Iran War,” April 2, 2026.

Time, “Unbothered by Reality, Trump Gives Disjointed Update on Iran War,” April 2, 2026.

Al Jazeera, “Trump on Iran: ‘A whole civilisation will die tonight,’” April 7, 2026.

Al Jazeera, “Democrats blast Trump for Iran ‘war crimes’ threat; Republicans supportive,” April 6, 2026.

Al Jazeera, “Trump’s primetime speech on Iran war: Key takeaways,” April 2, 2026.

Responsible Statecraft, Steven Simon, “Did Trump just threaten genocide in Iran?” April 7, 2026.

CNN, “What to know about Trump’s threat to bomb Iran’s infrastructure,” April 7, 2026.

CNN, “Day 38 of Middle East conflict,” April 6, 2026.

The Advocate, “Donald Trump threatens genocide in Iran,” April 7, 2026.

Fox 8 WVUE, “President Trump doubles down on his profane Easter Sunday threat against Iran,” April 6, 2026.

Media Matters for America, “Right-wing media figures castigate Fox News for pushing ‘blatant propaganda’ on the war in Iran,” April 6, 2026.

NYC Today, “Trump Threatens Destruction of Iranian Infrastructure as Mental Health Concerns Grow,” April 6, 2026.

Raw Story, “Psychologist shares startling warning about Trump’s newest addiction,” April 6, 2026.

The Daily Beast, “Senator Blasts ‘Mentally Incapacitated’ Trump for Iran War,” Feb. 28, 2026.

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance…

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us — then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls…

“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

Source:

• Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995.

We are well into the second year of a presidential administration that has governed brazenly and outside the boundaries of constitutional authority, all of which has been well documented on video, on social media, in court filings, and in executive orders published on the White House website. Anyone who does not know what is going on at this point would have to be actively avoiding the news, incapable of processing it, or both. Such ignorance must be cultivated with intention.

The harder question is not what is happening, but how anyone can still actively support it. As I see it, there are three possible explanations, none of them defensible:

1. They simply do not know what is really going on. The information ecosystem many Americans inhabit is genuinely hermetic, a closed loop of rage, reassurance, and fabrication fed by Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, and a sprawling universe of right-wing podcasters. That narrative requires an enemy, and these outlets supply one reliably: anyone who dissents is a radical leftist, a globalist, a communist, or simply an America-hater. Dehumanizing the opposition is not incidental to this media ecosystem. It is its primary function, and what these outlets omit is as calculated as what they broadcast.

2. They know, and they’re fine with it, because the people being hurt aren’t people they care about. They are indifferent to the mass deportations targeting brown and Black immigrants. They do not care that the United States is building detention centers, concentration camps by any honest accounting, that hold human beings in cages without adequate food, medical care, or legal process.

   What is being carried out is ethnic cleansing, a term that scholars including Dr. Gregory Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch, and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention have applied directly to this administration’s deportation policies.

3. They’ve made the calculation that millions of ordinary people in collapsing democracies have made before them: that belonging, comfort, or economic interest outweighs principle. A well-known example comes from 1930s Germany, where swaths of the so-called Good Germans made the same bargain. They were not card-carrying Nazis. They were neighbors, shopkeepers, teachers, and clergy who told themselves it wasn’t their problem, that things wouldn’t go that far, that survival required silence, that someone else would speak up. They watched their Jewish neighbors disappear and said nothing. History was not kind to them.

If you still support this administration, at least one of these three descriptions fits you, and only you know which ones.

Sources

KFF, “Health Issues for Immigrants in Detention Centers,” September 2025.

PBS NewsHour, “Senate Report Details Dozens of Cases of Medical Neglect in Federal Immigration Detention Centers,” October 2025.

CalMatters, “California Lawmakers Blocked from Entering Otay Mesa Detention Center,” February 2026.

Political Research Associates, “’Remigration’ Is American for Ethnic Cleansing,” June 2025.

Truthout, “Trump’s Proposal for Office of Remigration Evokes Ethnic Cleansing, Critics Say,” May 2025.

Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, “Red Flag Alert for Genocide in the United States,” January 2025.

Genocide Watch, Dr. Gregory Stanton, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Ten Stages of Genocide,” 2025.

CNN, “Timeline Suggests Trump Team Changed Its Tune on Epstein Files After Trump Was Told He Was in Them,” July 2025.