I’ve been following the recent dialogues with psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee. She has powerful and important things to say about Donald Trump, the cult of personality surrounding him, and the immediate danger of placing so much power in the hands of a clearly deranged person whose behavior is increasingly erratic, impulsive, and detached from ordinary restraints. Trump’s recent UN speech only intensifies this sense that the situation has gone totally off the rails as he deteriorates. Lee notes that pathological behavior becomes socially contagious — when a family has a deranged family member, often the whole family starts developing a similar mania. When a leader acts without constraint, their attitudes and emotional patterns spread rapidly through supporters and institutions. We now have a kind of collective psychosis among the ruling oligarchs, where most people not trapped in MAGA mind control are starting to back away as his support plummets. As Lee notes, Trump functions as a “thought reform machine”. Because his actions stem from raw emotional compulsion rather than political ideology, his pathology “bulldozes over people’s sense of rationality,” generating what she identifies as a “shared psychosis”. We see how this sickness has spread. It spread to the Burning Man hippies who became MAHA supporters. People still write on my Facebook posts trying to moderate or justify what Trump says and does, but their defenses are absurd: This is a very serious situation — a code red — and we should be sober, even solemn, about it. Lee is very concerned that Trump could initiate a nuclear war if he feels his power and control slipping away. I agree this is a massive danger. He needs to be removed from office immediately — the Republicans, of course, could mobilize to do this at any time. At the UN, Trump openly threatened to “annihilate” Iran if it did not reach an agreement with the United States. Lee highlighted the moment where Trump seemed to relish the idea of destroying the Islamic Republic. He said could “do it quickly” or “drive them into hell with no chance of survival” — at the UN, in front of the community of nations. This was a clear and utterly reckless allusion to nuclear weapons. Whatever one thinks of Iran or its government, there are ninety million people living there, most of them just normal human beings. Rhetoric of annihilation from the president of a nuclear-armed superpower is terrifying and horrifying. The United States is already engaged in an unprovoked war with Iran that Trump launched without Congress. The conflict has unleashed global chaos. It may cause mass famines across Southeast Asia among other impacts. When a leader with Trump’s temperament feels cornered, humiliated, or faced with his own mortality he becomes extremely dangerous. Lee warns that men with his psychological profile have no internal brakes. “He is driving the nation to destruction and death until we stop him,” she said, noting that there will be no self-imposed limitation short of total collapse. The nightmare scenario is that he escalates toward nuclear war rather than accept defeat or decline. History gives us deep reasons to take this psychological profile seriously. In the final stages of the Second World War, Hitler issued orders that would have destroyed Germany’s remaining infrastructure rather than allow a nation without him to survive intact. This pathology seeks ruin when it can’t get what it wants and faces its terminus. Nothing will ever satiate their internal abyss, in any case I partly write this because I know people tangentially involved in the Trump circus who I may be able to tap on the shoulder. There are other people I know with massive success in the tech world who could also seek to intervene. People linked to Peter Thiel’s network and crypto advocates apparently believe they stand to keep benefiting from the current arrangement. I find their position profoundly depressing. Their greed and self-interest seem to matter so much to them that they willingly accept policies that ruin millions of lives, torture innocent people in concentration camps, accelerate ecological destruction, and tear apart basic social institutions. Meanwhile, they gamble with everyone’s future by leaving an extraordinarily volatile, deranged mental patient in command of the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal. They play with fire. Interestingly, in his latest interview, Thiel seems to be backtracking a bit, which perhaps reveals he is starting to realize he may be sawing off the branch on which he sits. Suddenly he is recanting, to some extent, on his stated position of bringing democracy to an end: