Is Trump a Maniac? No.

Is he dangerous? Most certainly.

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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On Monday, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Dem, Mich.) posted on social media:

After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide. It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.

Is Trump a maniac? I’ve said often enough that he is not psychotic. He is a grotesquely narcissistic and psychopathic personality, with the emphasis on the former but the danger in the latter. He doesn’t have the steely resolve of the true psychopath, e.g. Reinhard Heydrich, Stalin, Bernard Madoff, because he is actually very anxious but he conceals it. He is scared of men and is therefore attracted to tough, steely men who he thinks won’t assail him or humiliate him. A very large part of his abuse of women is intended to make him feel tough but also to impress other men that he is really successful with women. He surrounds himself with men such as Hegseth, Bongino, Miller, Bannon and Patel who also treat women like objects whereas men who can relate to women reasonably normally, perhaps Bessant and a few others, are not central figures. Women in his life have only two duties: look glamorous to impress people how successful he is with women, and worship him. And come across, of course, except he’s now too fat and too old to try: a late night and a rough woman would be the end of him.

He is psychopathic in the sense that he has no capacity for feeling for humans, as his niece, PhD psychologist Mary Trump, says often enough. People exist to do as he tells them; if they don’t, he either walks away from them or loses his temper and starts issuing threats but when it comes to action, he goes to water and walks away, throwing insults over his shoulder. TACO (things have reached a sorry state when you have a Wikipedia page saying you’re chicken). His main goal in life is dominating people, either by having them worship him, by cheating them as that proves how clever he is, or by getting somebody else to bash them to the ground. He has never been in a fight in his life and would panic if anybody shaped up to him. Having the world’s largest nuclear arsenal makes him feel like he’s a real person instead of a hollow shell, as he has no self-esteem. He is not like a lot of people whose self-esteem is negative, as in “I hate myself, I’m a piece of shit,” but the concept simply doesn’t apply to him. There’s nothing inside, it’s just empty, echoing space which is why he has to surround himself with golden ornaments, attractive women and put his name on everything within reach: “If I have a gorgeous blonde on my arm and my name in gold on a big tower, that tells people I’m really somebody. Aren’t I?”

Throughout his life, he has relied on two things that allow him to dominate people: his inherited and/or borrowed money, and lying. He lies to cover his many deficiencies, to cheat people so he can gloat how smart he is, and because his money allowed him to get away with it. People have known since his schooldays that he is a liar but they hung around and agreed with him in the hope they could get their hands in the honey pot too. Now, they hang around because they hope some of his power will rub off on them, or through fear that he will use his power to crush them if they disagree. He doesn’t lie in the calculated sense defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, he is not a compulsive liar:

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship... [1].

Instead, he lies in the sense that he says anything that comes into his head that seems likely to get him what he wants at that time. He doesn’t remember what he has said because he knows he doesn’t have to, he can lie and people will fall for it and tomorrow he can say the opposite and they’ll lap that up, too. He thinks their applause means he is a “very stable genius” but mostly it’s because they like the way he hates their enemies. They also think he’s a complete idiot who says any bit of shit that comes into his head and doesn’t remember it next day but his supporters convince themselves he’s on their side.

He says he likes to surround himself with losers. That’s true. He can’t stand any competition, especially from smart people who can trip him up with words. That’s why he totally dominates meetings, by forcing people to remain silent while he rambles on. He is an instinctive racist, he doesn’t like foreigners of any sort, especially if they’re not tall white northern European males, but if those tall white northern European males are clever or good looking or athletic or betray any sense of not falling into line to worship him, he hates them too. Xenophobia is a normal human drive but his is exaggerated by his lack of self-esteem: he hates people speaking foreign languages around him because he can’t. Just as he can’t drive and can’t cook and has never planted anything or repaired a child’s bike or helped an old lady across the street or surfed or cleaned anything or done anything normal. Nothing. He can play golf but even at that, he is a notorious cheat. Oh, and all his so-called religiosity, with the lunatic and charlatan Paula White “blessing” him, that’s performative only. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, doesn’t know anything about it and doesn’t care but he will go along with it as long as he’s centre of attention and all the stiffs are standing around, eyes closed and touching his hem, and it gets votes.

Why then, do people vote for him when they know he is a cheat and a liar and a failure at businesss? Because he appeals to their prejudices, The reason he does this so astutely is because the prejudices of the working class, his MAGA base, are also his prejudices, he hates their enemies and he licenses them to hate openly. Why do they have enemies? Partly because the US has always hated outsiders, be they native tribes, black slaves or immigrant workers stealing their jobs, but the main reason is neoliberal capitalism exporting their factories and telling them to hate immigrants. Socially, Trump is a nobody and he has all the prejudices and hatreds of a nobody. His grandfather got his start running brothels; his father, Fred Sr, cheated and lied that to a sizeable fortune; and Donald inherited all their vices, including the need to be accepted by classy society. Somewhere along the line, somebody put the idea in his head: “You could be president one day.” That idea caught and grew and grew because if it came true, it would be the ultimate put-down for all the upper crust people who had sneered at his gauche behaviour or laughed at his ignorance or refused to return his calls. That’s the only reason he ever thought he could reach the White House. Oh, and the chance to make truckloads of money on the side, which he has left to his sons and his egregriously corrupt son-in-law. He was never interested in government, he has no idea how many government departments there are or what they do, all he wants is to get power, to humiliate his enemies and to reward the rich people who helped him scramble up the ladder in the hope they’ll like him. Again, this is the normal human urge to dominate people but turbo-charged to the point of a compulsion by his vast sense of inadequacy. Still, it’s not psychotic.

That’s his personality, so what’s going on now? Well, as I constantly say, he’s dementing. It was slow at first but since about mid 2025, it’s accelerated. He is forgetful but that’s not the dominant sign: for him, it’s the degradation of what has never been a strong sense of proprietary, of judgement and social awareness. We have to be trained to be aware of other people as creatures with minds of their own and rights of their own, it doesn’t come naturally, and he was never trained. Mary Trump said that in his family, money was everything. If you had no money, you were nothing but if you had money, you were Big. That’s it. No emphasis on honesty and integrity and empathy or any of that tender-hearted slop, just gimme the money and stand back. Fred Trump Jr, Mary’s father and Donald’s older brother, wasn’t much interested in money or business. He wanted to be an airline pilot so he was shoved out, lost his inheritance and died of alcoholism at 42, when Mary was still 16 and which, understandably, she will never forgive. Significantly, Fred Trump Sr, Donald’s father, died of Alzheimer’s Disease. Mary says she sees in Donald’s eyes the same sort of detached vacancy she saw in her grandfather’s eyes. She’s not wrong on that, you can see it when somebody else is talking and he fades out.

To me, his dementia was perfectly clear 3-4 years ago (I have extensive experience dealing with dementing and brain damaged people of half a dozen races and cultures). He should not have been allowed to stand the second time but by that stage, he had the wind in his sails, the voters in his pockets and the big donors lining up to shower money over him in return for favours. Given the bizarre, quasi-imperial American electoral system, nobody could stand against him for fear of reprisals, which are an integral part of his seamy background, and the rich donors knew they could make squillions out of him, so they didn’t support any competition. So, with a bit of help from cheating and lying and manipulating the voter rolls, he got back in but this time, his many helpers and hangers-on were ready. Driven by the reptilian Stephen Miller and a squad of equally poisonous individuals, they had all the lists of names ready, one list of toadies to be appointed to vital positions and the other of enemies to be persecuted to destruction. This is Trump’s paranoid personality but it is not a paranoid psychosis. Thus far, this would be a fairly simple story of a dimwitted and ignorant proto-fascist gaining power and making a huge mess of things until people got tired of it and turfed him out, but then there is Epstein.

For background on the cosmic levels of corruption in the US and so many other countries that allowed Epstein to get ahead, see Whitney Webb [2]. She also posts regularly on YouTube although she needs to be very careful of an accident with a speeding bullet. Epstein was a psychopathic crook and pervert, and also happened to be a Jew. That meant he was as one with the entire wealthy and corrupt element in the Zionist movement for whom perversion and criminality are not social disqualifiers. They could do their dirty work together to mutual profit but Epstein knew that if he dared put a toe out of line, they would glom him. While he did what they wanted, they would give him all the secret assistance he needed, and what they wanted was dirt, something in which he specialised and was delighted to cooperate. He was never an employee or “agent” of the Israeli state or Mossad or anything, but he cooperated by feeding them the dirt and secrets they wanted. In turn, they were happy to arrange for people to give him what he wanted, money and connections, up to and including the slimy Leslie Wexner, he of Victoria’s Secret fame, who granted Epstein power of attorney over his entire estate, then worth billions.

Epstein was not a lone wolf, he ran a sizeable business with premises in different countries and employees and agents and phones and computers and so on. His business was connections with people, trading favours, collecting dirt and selling it on. He became very wealthy but, of course, the people who made him wealthy have a strong interest in shutting down any enquiries, so we only know of the really stupid ones, like the bozo Andrew Windsor or the devious Peter Mandelson who can be sacrificed to keep the public quiet. And above all, Israel and Mossad and the entire Zionist movement have an immensely powerful interest in making sure nothing leaks but they’re in a strong position as they have all the dirt they need to keep the most stupid person of all dangling on a string, one DJ Trump. Every bit of information Epstein gathered from his myriad email spies and CCTV and hacked banks and so on, all per courtesy of the nice people in Mossad and Palantir and Microsoft and Oracle etc., all of that was backed up and stored on servers buried deep underground at Israel’s nuclear weapons site at Dimona. They have the lot proving that Trump has always been a sadistic paedophile and he knows they’ve got it, which is why he doesn’t sleep at night. So he does what Bro. Netanyahu suggests, which is anything needed to bring Greater Israel to reality so he can keep his fascist coalition together and go down in history as the greatest leader of Jews since Moses, and keep his own corrupt arse out of prison. If anybody wrote this sort of stuff in a novel, it would be laughed off the shelves; a factual account, such as Whitney Webb’s monumental effort, is just sickening.

Driven by various demons, Trump has indulged in increasingly impulsive and stupid moves, each of which he thinks will solve his problems but, because he can’t think ahead and his cabinet are too servile or self-interested or off with the pixies to say anything, each move makes things worse, so he becomes more and more agitated and says more and more ridiculous things like saying the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia had kissed his arse, or he will destroy the entire Iranian people, some of which come to pass but most don’t because he still has enough sense to realise he can’t do it so he backs down, throws insults and starts on something else, but it is all temper tantrum, not psychosis:

Truth Social: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

(April 5^th) Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

(April 7^th) A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This is a direct threat to use nuclear weapons to commit genocide. Fortunately, he backed down, because Iran didn’t budge and possibly because the Chiefs of Staff finally found their cojones and told him No. All of this is exceedingly dangerous to the world: the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. For years, I have been saying to anybody who would listen (full disclosure: not many) that I can remember them announcing the death of Queen Elizabeth’s father on the wireless but I am certain that things are now worse than at any stage in my life. And now, I can state with no fear of contradiction that this has been the most dangerous day of all. If Israel starts to lose seriously, like facing invasion rather than just not winning, Netanyahu is likely to start hurling nuclear weapons around. Trump could stop him, that’s technically very easy, just flick a few switches in the Pentagon, but he would be too scared of all the Epstein material being dumped in the open. If Trump were on the verge of losing, he would be highly likely to start firing them on the basis that if he can’t win, nobody else is allowed to. The entire world is being tossed around by a pair of unspeakable psychopaths as though it were a beach ball at a children’s party on the edge of a cliff in a strong wind.

Anyway, Trump backed down although Israel threw a tantrum and launched a massive wave of murderous attacks on Lebanon so the Strait remains closed. The result of all this stupidity is the international power-broker par excellence, the US is finished for all time. The US has shown itself to be utterly incompetent, dishonest to the core and utterly untrustworthy, and utterly contemptuous of all humans bar a few wealthy people connected to the president and his criminal family. This is not surprising. The country that could lie its way to war in Korea and in Vietnam and in Iraq and Libya and Syria, and then lie about the lies and blame its victims, should not have any power in the world. Time has come for the other 97% of people in the world to say: “Enough is enough,” and cut the US and Israel out entirely. If they want to be Exceptional Nations of Chosen People Fulfilling God’s Destiny, go right ahead but they can do it alone. Cease all trade, cease all banking, dump the US$ as reserve currency, replace SWIFT, swap from the American GPS to the European Galileo or Chinese BeiDou systems, end all military relationships, don’t let their planes land, move the UN back to Geneva, end all patent protection on drugs, close their embassies, nationalise their companies, don’t recognise their passports … oh, and release all the Epstein files. Then they can impose sanctions to their hearts’ content but nobody will notice.

Meantime, Trump is totally unfit for office. Is he psychotic? No, he is not psychotic. Is he dangerous? Yes, most emphatically. Does he know what he is doing? Hardly. Due to his rapidly failing intellect, his psychopathy and his agitation, he has practically no control over his actions. This puts the world in serious danger but he doesn’t give a shit. All he cares about is attention. He is a ridiculous, disorganised, self-involved, callous and heartless, fiendishly corrupt, sadistic child molester, but he is not psychotic. He must be removed from office immediately by any means necessary, up to and including one of the decapitation strikes he is so happy to use on others. The time for being polite has well and truly passed. If the US doesn’t act soon, it proves it has no moral standing, its “Christianity” is pure Hollywood.

A point to consider: Iran has just defeated the US-Israeli war machine by non-lethal methods. It must be unique in history that aggressors have been brought to their knees by people trying to keep to international law and basic humanity. All power to them. To see why their victory is important and what they are fighting, watch this.

References:

1. Frankfurt H (1986). On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6 (2): 81–100. (Fall 1986). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOB-3

2. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.