NonilexIt has been clear for a long time that #Trump is a person with a disorganized mind & a disordered personality. What the past few months & especially the past few weeks brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward & outward through his admin. They have become institutionalized. The reason it so often does not act coherently is because it cannot. The world faces something new & baffling & frightening in Trump’s 2nd term: a #PsychoticState.
This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of #Trump himself [though, if it walks like a duck & talks like a duck…]. The issue is that the admin as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to #reality & the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Trump’s grandiosity, his impulsivity, inconsistency & his outright breaks with reality have become state #policy.
In that respect, Trump’s 2nd term is different from his first. In 2020, he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But he could not translate his fantasies into reality—at least not usually [exception∶ #Jan6]. In the 2nd term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since Day 1.
It is the #IranWar that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the admin’s own incoherence.
The #Trump administration chose to wage a #war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself.
The goal was #RegimeChange — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued & then erased. Threats of total destruction were made & then pulled back. #Iran’s #nuclear program was a casus belli in February despite that fact that we were told by #Trump that it had been “obliterated” last June.
#Trump called for an international coalition to open the #StraitOfHormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, & then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the #war, that the war would end soon, & that the war would end “when I feel it … in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, Trump’s position on #Iran “can change by the sentence.”
Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about #gasoline prices, waived #sanctions on some Iranian #oil, “giving #Iran’s war effort against the #US a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the #StraitOfHormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades.
The admin might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Dept’s #MiddleEast desk, gotten rid of its #oil & #gas experts & eliminated its dedicated #Iran office. The admin handicapped its own #NationalSecurity Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a #conspiracy-minded internet personality, & undercutting its #independence — not a good idea before launching a #war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory & demented.
mrfoostang 🇨🇦 @[email protected] This is entirely the problem. One idiot president can still function with intelligent and experienced people around him (W is an example). But when that one idiot president surrounds himself solely with other idiots, we get this.
Zhao Mo
FurballsNHairballs@Nonilex
🚨cwaaaaazzzzzeeeeeee🚨
🚨cwaaaaazzzzzeeeeeee🚨
Waldorf
D. G. MarshallThe only sentence of Trump's that I want to hear is his life sentence.
John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺I was unfamiliar with the term "cause belli".
You prompted a good read:
RiaResists@Nonilex Hé already turned a third of america into psychotics.
MAGA is detatched from reality & will fight to the death to defend their imagined grievances.
MAGA is detatched from reality & will fight to the death to defend their imagined grievances.
Mimi... along with Netanyahu to turn Israel into Is-real-Hell. They are the 2026 Laurel & Hardy of horror tandem, giving a daily bloody horror show each day worse than the previous one.
CaptMorgan@Nonilex I think they have the cause mixed up with the effect. We have Trump BECAUSE the general population has become a bunch of psychopaths