General Discussion

Last edited Sat May 16, 2026, 08:39 AM - Edit history (3)

Sometimes there is a pretty fine line between mad and bad, and sometimes those things merge. True, most people with mental illness are not dangerous. On occasion, though, a person can be so delusional that they commit a serious crime, and in those relatively rare cases they are not held legally responsible for the crime on the ground that they were so mentally ill that they did not understand what they were doing or that it was a crime. But that's not Trump. He could never succeed with an insanity defense because he (mostly) knows and intends what he's doing. That's not to say that he's psychologically normal, because he clearly is not, even slightly.

The article in the OP recites a list of the many bad things Trump has done and continues to do, but offers no explanation for why he does them. He's a whole festering ball of personality disorders, DSM-V all condensed and shoveled into one person; and some personality disorders cause people to behave very badly. Since he has almost all of them, epic badness is to be expected, but personality disorders are not psychoses. He could choose not to do those bad things; he knows what they are and when he's doing them. He's not a classic schizophrenic; he doesn't really think he's Jesus, for example; only that he's just as good as and as worthy of worship as Jesus. I don't think he could be persuaded to walk on the newly-"improved" reflecting pool once it's filled or try to turn one overcooked hamburger into meals for the multitudes; he doesn't think he's the original miracle-doing Jesus.

This is where his personality disorders come in; as a narcissist he just loves it that MAGA thinks he's Jesus-like because he's a megalomaniac and a narcissist. He's completely self-absorbed and doesn't care who he's talking to as long as he knows someone is listening, which is why he saw nothing peculiar about talking to small children about Iran's nuclear weapons. He's all transmit and no receive, and he saw the children only as receivers for his transmissions. They could have been anybody with ears. He's a total solipsist, meaning that to him other human beings with minds and emotions and needs and agency don't exist, so he will do bad things on the regular because he's interested only in himself and other people are just tools for him to manipulate. None of that is normal, and it's the merger of mad and bad. The "madness" enables him to think that way, and the badness is that he could choose not to do the things he thinks about but does them anyway.