“Who’s Running the Country?”

It’s not who you think it is.

This file expands on the principles in my monograph on power, Narcisso-Fascism, showing how they apply in real life.

In a recent interview, Mr Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives (R-LA), recounted an incident from January 2024 when he met then Pres. Joe Biden. Despite his status (second in line to the presidency), Biden’s staff kept stalling him for months on meeting the president. When it finally happened, he asked Biden about an executive order relating to gas exports he’d signed a few months before. Biden insisted he hadn’t signed it. Johnson showed him a copy but he still insisted he hadn’t seen it. Johnson took this to mean Biden’s staff were slipping things into his inbox so he wouldn’t realise what he was signing. “Who was running the country?” Johnson asked rhetorically, clearly indicating the “deep state” had taken over. That’s one interpretation. Another, and about a thousand times more likely, is that Biden did sign it but he had no memory of it, because that’s exactly what happens in early to moderate dementia, as in:

“Mum, we told you this yesterday, it’s all organised.”

“No you didn’t. I’m not silly, you know.”

In my view, Biden was showing signs of early dementia during his acceptance speech on his election night in November, 2020. Over the next few years, it just got worse, culminating in his humiliating performance during his “debate” with Trump in June last year, and his little “senior’s moment” at the G7 meeting where he wandered off and clearly had no idea where he was. So who was running the country? Inertia mainly, massaged by the same Biden aides who blocked Johnson’s meeting. Here, I should mention that the American Psychiatric Association isn’t keen on long-distance diagnoses of public figures. This goes back to 1964 when the far right Sen. Barry Goldwater (AZ) won the Republican nomination but was crushed when he stood against then Pres. Lyndon Johnston. Earlier, some 1200 psychiatrists had signed a letter saying Goldwater was mentally unfit, which was thought to have influenced the vote. The APA later passed a rule requiring psychiatrists to have informed consent to conduct a full assessment before making any such decisions. Which, of course, doesn’t apply to the poor. Or when the only material used is already in the public domain.

So here we are, 2025 and Biden can wander happily into the sunset, leaving the stage to a waddling case example of the human lust for power set out in Narcisso-Fascism [1]. As everybody except Trump knew, Team Trump has been preparing for this moment for several years. Their vastly detailed and hugely expensive Project 2025, financed by billionaires for their personal benefit, is intended to restructure the entire US Federal Government. As the astonished world has already seen, it shifts the balance of power to the executive in order to enact a far-right program of cancelling anything that smacks of the twin evils of “socialism” and “internationalism.” That’s the public face of it; behind the scenes, it’s a case of “every dog for itself” in the scramble to loot the state and the world, because that’s what the rich do.

Thus, we saw the USAID program cancelled, which meant a lot of worthwhile programs such as education and health research ground to a halt, but it also meant that the vast American propaganda machine stopped. Oops. Don’t worry about what people say of his intent, it was because Trump hated the thought of US dollars going to the undeserving poor overseas. A few days later, his “tariffs” on Canada, Mexico and China were due to go into effect, despite the clear warnings that they would cause more of the rapid inflation that Trump had promised he would eliminate in a few days. Fortunately, the Canadians and Mexicans announced two can play that game and instituted tariffs of their own, plus boycotts of American goods and services, so the ball is still in play. There’s a whole lot more but the immediate question is: Didn’t anybody think of this? Hasn’t anybody in this Monty Python administration heard of the law of unintended consequences? Didn’t Trump think about it himself? No, he didn’t, and we don’t have to look far for the explanation. We don’t even need to get his consent for a proper assessment, not that he would ever agree, because it’s out there for all to see.

First point is that, as he has shoved up everybody’s noses for half a century, Trump is a most severely disordered personality. Second is that he is now dementing. All the evidence is in the public domain. That is a very serious state of affairs, not just for Americans but for everybody on the planet because what goes on in Washington doesn’t stay in DC.

For evidence of his personality disorder, we don’t have to look far. As his trials and convictions showed, he is seriously antisocial in his unremitting dishonesty to all and sundry. He cheats the tax department and city councils; he cheats creditors, especially small businesses; he cheats at golf, he cheats his business partners, his wives, everybody. He steals anything he can get his hands on then lies about it. He treats women like dirt and assaults them because he can, but nothing is ever his fault. He lies to the point where he wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him. He is grandiose (“a most stable genius”) and, like a lot of dim-witted people, thinks he knows better than any expert on any topic, a shining example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. He is impulsive, disorganised and has the attention span of a grasshopper. The extent of his involvement with the sex-trafficking, blackmailing, paedophile spy, Jeffrey Epstein [2], will probably never be known but it went far more than “I don’t know him.”

Everything, without let or hindrance, is for Donald Trump. If he wants something, he will lunge for it (“We need Greenland and Canada, and we’ll take the Canal back”) but if he can’t get it, he pretends he wasn’t interested because he can’t stand humiliation or loss of face. He has to be the winner, the Big Man, the man in power at the centre of the stage and everybody else can go to hell. In particular, his enemies can go to hell and suffer, and that’s the only reason he is where he is today: revenge, sweet revenge. Add to all this the fact that he is not very bright, he is poorly educated and knows nothing about history, geography, economics, science or technology. Literature, of course, is a closed book to him, mainly because he rarely reads anything, and the idea of him speaking another language is a joke. The only positive thing about him is that because of the early death of his older brother from alcoholism, Trump doesn’t drink or smoke.

Armed with all this public material, we take the score card for sociopathic personality disorder and, wonder of wonders, find that Donald J Trump ticks most of the boxes. Fantastic. And he has his stumpy little fingers playing with the big red button on his desk while he’s supposed to be listening to a briefing on the effects of his tariffs on USD-Euro exchange rate futures. Meantime, his “friends” are joyously looting the country and closing anything they don’t like, i.e. anything that helps the poor, the coloured, the foreign – everybody but the 1%.

As for his style, Robert Reich, author, commentator and Clinton’s secretary for labour says the point of Trump’s tariffs is to increase his power by showing that he is prepared to hammer smaller countries to get a better deal for the US. He uses his unpredictability to shock other countries into concessions:: he cancelled foreign aid to show he can so everybody needs to look out. He has withdrawn from the Paris treaty, WHO, UNHRC and the OECD tax reforms as “shows of strength” to aid him in future negotiations. Much as I like Mr Reich’s work, he’s wrong on this one. Trump withdraws from anything that he thinks will allow someone to profit at his expense. The thought of another person or company or country getting something that he thinks he should have drives him mad. He would have to be one of the most selfish people ever born.

Pace Mr Reich, Trump doesn’t use unpredictability as a negotiating tactic, he is unpredictable. He doesn’t bully people just to get what he wants, he is a bully, he can’t not bully people [3]. He doesn’t keep his opponents guessing his next move, he doesn’t know his next move himself. When he gets out of bed each morning, he doesn’t have a clear plan of what he will do for the day, he makes it up as he goes. He doesn’t think: “If I trash the Paris agreement, I’ll be able to get more concessions from NATO, and maybe scare Brazil into taking more of our cars.” He doesn’t think that far ahead. He isn’t imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico to reduce the flow of immigrants and fentanyl, he doesn’t give a shit about either. Fentanyl only kills poor white trash and immigrants keep the cost of labour down. No, all he knows is that they have a trade surplus with the US so they must be ripping the US off and he wants to get even. He doesn’t know anything about supply chains, that’s how he thinks. He isn’t a political genius who understands precisely how to appeal to people’s prejudices, he simply spills his own prejudices around the place and people who like that sort of poison vote for him. Everything he does is for D Trump: “What’s in this for me? How can I screw more out of them?” If he can, great. If he can’t, he loses interest immediately and stirs up something else to distract people.

None of this is planned. This is all 110% impulse, pure reflex with no thought or consideration. When it comes to dealing with other countries, he extends his sense of self to include the whole of the US: “How come we’re giving $100million worth of condoms to Hamas?” It was a lie but he throws this rubbish about because he knows intuitively that it will rattle people, they have to stop what they’re doing to check, by which time he has taken control and changed the subject to something he likes. He likes chaos as it is all part of the control game, which is the only game he knows (see this cruel incident with his wife, Jan. 2016). He likes to wreck things because it means he’s in control and it upsets his opponents. He doesn’t think or plan things ahead, he senses things just like a dog sneaking up on a rat, except his driving interest is “What’s in it for me?” If he thinks people are totally on his side and under his thumb, it’s “What’s in it for us?” but he will dump them when it suits him (ask poor stupid Rudi Giuliani, who was done like a Sunday dinner).

Readers should not be surprised that the “leader of the free world” is not a nice person. Central to the thesis behind Narcisso-Fascism is the idea that humans lust for power, just because it is so irresistibly exciting. In the course of a political career, the eager young politico has to make tough decisions: “Do I follow the rules or grab it for myself? Should I do the right thing or not, because if I do, I’m going to lose my place in the conga line that ends at the top job.” A thousand times, the people who get the top jobs have all faced that decision-point and given in: “Screw the poor, bugger the self-righteous, stuff the rules, I’m in this for me. Hand me the bribe and I’m yours.” This is invariable (see this example). The reason power wins so often is because it is hard-wired into us; altruism has to be learned so, more or less regardless of the occupation, a truly moral person will not get to the top, or if he does, he won’t last. He’ll be pushed aside by faster, smoother and less scrupulous operators. Perhaps that’s not true of the Pope but it used to be, just have a look at their history. Remember: there is nothing in the job description of US President that says “nice person.”

Nice people don’t get that far, they’re nobbled on the way by the scoundrels lurking in the shadows. The process of getting the top job selects for the unscrupulous, the scheming, the devious and manipulative, the mistrustful, the brutal and the paranoid. Trump says he wants Greenland. Have any of his aides or advisors or the Republicans in Congress said “Er, excuse me, but that’s a clear breach of the rules-based international order”? Be fucked they have, they’d be out with the rubbish in seconds, and they all know it. So Herr Drumpf says he wants Greenland. Instantly, they rush to find where it is on the map and how they can grab it for The Boss. Because that’s how sycophants think. The whole thing is personality disorder, Trump and the rest of them. There isn’t a decent person within a mile of the White House, they got crushed in the stampede or garrotted at the pissoir.

That material, however, is all public: there’s no dispute over whether Trump is a convicted felon. When it comes to his present state, there is more to debate because the evidence for early dementia is subjective. The earliest stages, before there are any signs on brain scans, and even before psychological testing can show it definitively, are subtle changes that normally only the family can detect. It’s a slight loss of social sensitivity, a disinterest in familiar tasks or hobbies, etc. The sense of humour coarsens, little lapses of memory intrude, concentration drifts while judgement deteriorates slowly, that sort of thing. It’s all subtle, it’s all subjective and there will always be argument over it, especially as the majority of people with early dementia don’t want to admit it. As with Biden above, they forget things and then deny they ever happened or shift the blame to people around them. Very often, they are aided by people who don’t want to know there is anything wrong with their father, wife, colleague etc. That’s when things really get paranoid.

With Trump, who is on camera up to 15 hours a day and unprompted, the whole world can look at the evidence. His inauguration speech was a rambling mish-mash of big-noting himself, mocking his myriad enemies, threats, lies and grandiose tomfoolery:

America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world … our manifest destiny … There’s no nation like our nation … the most extraordinary citizens on Earth … nothing we cannot do… Gulf of America…

Granted he didn’t write his speech but he told the script writers what he wanted in it and embellished it on the go. That afternoon, he signed two dozen executive orders but he didn’t know what was in them. He even opened them at the back, ready to sign, but he had to ask what they were about. Throughout the whole session, his face and voice were flat, totally lacking emotion or interest (mask-like face). Granted, Trump doesn’t smile, he has no sense of humour but this goes further. At one stage, he wondered whether Spain is a BRICS country (at 1.10, here). He appeared to be perseverating at that point (people may object that twice isn’t perseveration. Possibly, but it starts at two times, not at four, and given his position, we need a high index of suspicion).

A day or two later, he gave an interview to Sean Hannity, from Fox, but used the opportunity to rail against his enemies. At 0.45, Hannity says: “I’d like to talk about the economy.” With no sign of emotion or awareness that it might be important to other people, Trump replied: “I don’t care, this is more important.” All he could think about was his vendetta, which is his personality disorder exaggerated by early dementia. Even more obtusely, when the plane crashed into the Potomac River, he attacked the FAA recruitment procedures (at 2.30, here), blaming them for the crash and ignoring the fact that it was shocking to most of the population. He said: “I have common sense and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.” He couldn’t put himself in the shoes of the relatives of the deceased, couldn’t comprehend anybody else’s interests but his own. On the catastrophe in Gaza, he said it’s a very interesting place by the beach and they could do wonderful things with it after the population have moved to Jordan and Egypt. The idea that this is actually ethnic cleansing, a major crime against humanity, or that Jordan and Egypt had other ideas, was beyond him. All he could see was the dollar signs.

We could go on, there are hundreds of such incidents, all of which point to but do not prove early dementia. I’d say there are two chances of three that he will not complete his term due to cognitive decline. Only time will tell but the picture is clouded by the fact that he is surrounded by people whose sensitivity to and consideration for the interests of other people are inversely proportional to their proximity to The Boss (note that Musk has largely replaced Vance in the front seat of the clown car). The latest evidence here is his meme coin, Official Trump, which launched just before his inauguration (it had to be before as it was prohibited after he took office). I don’t know how many people worked to get it ready, organise the launch, etc. but his son Eric was in the thick of it. It has 200million coins, launched at about $7.50 and immediately shot to $75.00 before falling back steadily to $17.50 this morning. The people who held the coins at the launch, i.e. his family and friends, and dribbled them to the market, pulled in a shitload of money. The agencies behind it, one of them (CIC Digital) owned by the Trump family, made about $100million in trading fees. The millions of his poor supporters, who bought a few each at the peak, have lost their money. Trump didn’t organise any of this, he wouldn’t know how to, but he knew about it and was all for it. The fact that when poor people are struggling to afford eggs, the optics were appalling was clearly beyond any of the Mar a Lago crowd, who take their cues from the Big Man at the top, who couldn’t give a shit about the poor. For The Don, it was just another way of ripping money off poor people and shoving it in his pocket, just like Trump university, Trump steak, Trump casinos, Trump vodka, Trump shuttle, Trump cologne, Trump sneakers, Trump NFTs, and all his other failed scams.

As I said, and based on extensive experience of the elderly, the signs of early dementia are subtle but they are there for all to see. A quote from a hundred years ago, by the Sage of Baltimore, Henry L Mencken, is apposite:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Distinguishing between the moronic and the demented can be difficult, so we finish with the crucial question: Why is Trump obsessed to the point of mania with extending his power and money? To answer that question, just answer the next one: Why does the bull elephant seal want 100 females in his harem and fight all the other males to stop them mating? Answer: He doesn’t know why, he does what his hormones tell him: get to the top of the dominance hierarchy and stay there.

Trump’s entire existence revolves around being top dog. He does what he likes because he thinks he’s so important that no laws apply to him, but it’s all to increase his and the country’s power and status. He wants to be king of America, and America king of the world, that’s his megalomania, but he doesn’t have a plan of what to do with power. People say Hitler was a megalomaniac but he had a very clear plan. He wanted to extend Germany to the Urals, eliminate half the Slav population, enslave the rest and fill the space with 250 million Germans to build a Reich lasting 1000 years [4, p415]. He was very clear on this. Hitler was never rich. Trump is now worth about $6.5billion but he has no plans beyond “Gimme more and smash anybody who tries to stop me.”

The only way to deal with this is that old lesson: Don’t appease. Don’t react to his threats, walk away. If, instead of rolling over and pissing themselves like frightened puppies, the whole world walks away from the US, what will they do? Nothing. There’s nothing they can do. If nobody uses their dollar, what then? OMG, they’d have to live within their means. It’s time for the world to grow up and say: “Thanks, but no thanks. We can get by just fine without an indispensable nation pushing us around.”

References:

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

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.

3. Derber C, Magrass YR (2016) Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society. U Kansas Press: Lawrence, KS.

4. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition: Coda Books: Henley in Arden.