The Right Amount of Crazy by Fintan O'Toole

 /

 Source: New York Review of Books

In January, when The New York Times asked DonaldTrump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.

Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.

To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”

But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:

He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.

One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”

Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “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.”

For Trump’s apologists, he is thus not a mad King Lear, an (almost) eighty-year-old monarch raving on the heath. He is a Hamlet who has chosen “to put an antic disposition on,” the better to achieve his purposes. There’s every reason to believe that this is the way Trump sees himself. William Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general in the latter part of his first term, recalls in his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another (2022), an occasion when Trump wished to make a public claim of vindication:

Then, studying me, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I am going to go and tweet about this.”

I glanced up with a look of discomfort. He smiled playfully. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. “Just the right amount of crazy,” he said.

Likewise, Nikki Haley recalled that when she was serving as his ambassador to the United Nations, Trump told her how to deal with the North Koreans: “Tell them you just talked to the president…. Make them think I’m crazy.” In 2017 Axios reported an exchange between Trump and his trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who was negotiating with South Korea: “I’ll tell the Koreans they’ve got 30 days,” Lighthizer said. Trump rebuked him: “No, no, no. That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell them they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.’” In 2024 Trump told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—crazy.”

The conviction that putting on an antic disposition is a winning geopolitical strategy has a long history. Henry Kissinger articulated it in a lecture in Peshawar in 1962. In the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union, he said,

the only way one can communicate one’s determination, I think, is by conducting a policy in which one indicates a high capacity for irrationality. What one has to do is prove that in certain situations one is likely to go out of control, and that regardless of what sober calculation would show one is simply so nervous that the gun is going to go off. A madman who is holding a hand grenade in his hand has a very great bargaining advantage.

In this theater of bluff, the president of the United States is Irving writ large. If he goes red in the face, uses every filthy word he can think of, and makes vile threats, he is in fact being coldly calculating and lucidly shrewd. According to this line of thinking, there is not just a gap between appearance and reality—the two are complete opposites. The rationale is that the higher the seeming capacity for irrationality, the more rational the president is because the more probable it is that the enemy will be terrified and make large concessions. By this logic, Trump’s genocidal ravings at Iran are proof that he really is, as he insists, a very stable genius.

The Chinese, of course, have a dismissive phrase of their own for the Madman Theory: paper tiger. Like all performances, the crazy act must be able to command at least a suspension of disbelief. In Trump’s case, his infinite hype produces diminishing returns of credibility. His warning in 2017 that “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” whose threats would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” was followed the next year by his declaration that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love” after exchanging letters. The paper tiger went into the shredder.

The odd thing, though, is that these two realities—that Trump is playing out his own version of the Madman Theory and that his act has long worn thin—seem to point toward the same apparent conclusion. The first appeals to his fans, the second to his detractors. But both suggest that there is only the show. Some think it’s a great show, some think it’s terrible. Yet the truth is that Trump is always acting in both senses. There is no border between pretense and practice, shadow and substance.

Shakespeare gives us more than Lear or Hamlet, real or feigned mental derangement. There is a third possibility. Titus Andronicus begins by pretending to be mad and then becomes so in reality. To translate this into the history of the American presidency, we need only return to Nixon. Just because you’ve invented and acted on the Madman Theory doesn’t mean you can’t go mad: Nixon’s paranoia, enemies lists, conspiracy theories, and seemingly drunken order to nuke North Korea do not speak of robust mental health. The Madman Theory, it seems, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trump’s genocidal threats are a much madder version of the theory than anyone previously had in mind. They go against two of its basic requirements. When Kissinger set it out in 1962, he added that unfortunately, “given the public opinion of Western democracy, this is not a policy that can be conducted.” The Madman Theory, even when put into practice by Nixon, is a strictly limited form of coterie theater. The performance is only for hostile governments. It must be kept from one’s own citizens because public opinion matters; the leader of a democracy does not want his voters to think he has truly lost his marbles.

Second, Kissinger suggested that since there were such limits on democratically elected leaders’ use of the strategy, the alternative for the US was to transform its alliances “from what were in effect unilateral American guarantees” into “efforts of real cooperation to prevent threats to countries from being overrun.” The US can’t have its allies thinking that its president has gone crazy either. So it must instead offer them real cooperation in joint efforts to deter invaders.

Trump’s homicidal hysteria breaks both of these rules. It is not a private performance for the benefit of a highly select audience (in this case the members of the Iranian regime). It is a stadium spectacular, simulcast live to the whole world. It displays psychosis to American voters and to America’s allies. It sunders any common interest with friendly European and Anglophone nations. It is thus unmoored from the constraints either of democracy or of alliance.

This does not merely indicate “a high capacity for irrationality.” It is actually and wildly irrational. It makes a kind of sense only if one’s own voters and one’s supposed international allies are also legitimate targets of the mad threats, if they too are to be terrorized by the specter of the deranged emperor. Trump’s mad act has a logic only if the performer this time really sees both voters and allies as enemies to be overawed.

Trump told Barr that a good tweet has “the right amount of crazy.” His capacity for that kind of calibration has never been impressive: if the original benchmark is screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls, fine gradations are probably not in his skillset. But however skilled he may once have been, it is now obvious that he can no longer control the dosage. Threatening genocide is the wrong amount of crazy—wrong in itself but also wrong because it tells those at whom the threat is aimed that they have nothing left to lose. They may as well bring as many of their enemies down with them as they can.

It would be impertinent to offer a clinical diagnosis of Trump, though that is not a courtesy he has afforded others. He reportedly called his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “mentally retarded”; repeatedly cast doubt on whether Joe Biden was “mentally fit to be president”; said his chief of staff John Kelly “wasn’t mentally fit for the job”; claimed that “Kamala Harris doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate against me”; and called his former national security adviser John Bolton a “total & unhinged WARMONGER, the red faced ‘boiler ready to explode’ was one of those very stupid voices that got us into the Middle East quicksand.”

But whatever its clinical definition, the political diagnosis of Trump’s form of madness was made a long time ago by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan:

The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madnesse, is either great Vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, and Selfe-Conceipt…. Pride, subjecteth a man to Anger, the excesse whereof, is the Madnesse called RAGE, and FURY.

Or, in this case, Operation Epic Fury.

Fury, Hobbes wrote, arises when a belief that one is uniquely inspired clashes with the refusal of others to bend to this exceptional insight: “If there were nothing else that bewrayed their madnesse; yet that very arrogating such inspiration to themselves, is argument enough.” While sane people “would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts…should be publiquely seen,” those in the grip of this delusion are all too happy to put them on display. Hobbes pointed out that if someone were to tell you that he “were God the Father,” you would require no further proof of madness. When Pope Leo XIV recently denounced “the delusion of omnipotence,” Trump replied by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a sick man in a bed while a soldier and a nurse look on in awe. Trump is the Savior whom Leo is pledged to serve—the ultimate in one-upmanship.

Rage and fury are the words Shakespeare most often associates with madness. We know that as soon as Trump was elected in 2016, those Republicans who saw him up close began to dread the eruption of his unbridled temper. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in Peril (2021), the then speaker of the house Paul Ryan felt it necessary to read up on narcissistic personality disorder: “Ryan’s main takeaway: Do not humiliate Trump in public. Humiliating a narcissist risked real danger, a frantic lashing out if he felt threatened or criticized.”

This frantic lashing out has been described over and over by those who worked with Trump in the White House during his first administration. “I thought about Trump’s anger. I heard his voice screaming in my head,” recalled the loyal White House aide Cliff Sims. “Trump was railing about everyone at that time. He called Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell ‘a dirty bastard, that motherfucker,’” recalls the former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in I’ll Take Your Questions Now (2021). The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley “was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the [2020] election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.”

The relevant point about these maniacal outbursts is that they are not performative. They are not strategic enactments of the Madman Theory. They are merely the way he is. Grisham believed that Trump’s public rages were performative until she experienced them in private:

I was not prepared for the way he spoke to or yelled at people, which I know sounds crazy when you consider his Twitter account or even his interviews with the press. But when I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.

This fury—constantly compared by those who worked with him to the tantrums of a toddler—is, as Ryan realized, dangerous, and all the more so when allied to another aspect of his character: his loss of a connection to objective reality. Rage has to be controlled when it comes up against outside limitations, but there is a sense in which, for Trump, there is no outside. According to The Divider (2022), Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s history of Trump’s first term, John Kelly and “other top officials who served during the Trump administration came to believe that Trump was mentally ill, unable or unwilling to process basic information necessary to do his job, and dangerously uninformed.” Kelly himself “considered Trump a pathological liar, not just someone disconnected from reality but someone who did not even seem to understand that there was a reality other than what he decided it was.”

These, bear in mind, are testimonies from Trump’s first term, when he was a younger man and showed fewer signs of cognitive decline. The fury of thwarted narcissism and the lack of any sense of an external reality can only be more dangerous in a second term, when Trump is even more disinhibited, hearing only voices that, in all their sycophantic echoing of his own desires, might as well be inside his head.

The case for invoking the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment and removing Trump from power is strong, and Trump himself joked about it during a cabinet meeting in late March. “I can’t say what we’re going to do, because if I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here for long. They’d probably—what is it called? The Twenty-Fifth Amendment?” Democrats in Congress have become much more willing to call openly for Trump’s ejection on the grounds of his mental incapacity to govern. But the same Republican obsequiousness that has made Trump’s madness ever more dangerous makes his removal a practical impossibility.

The madness, after all, is not just personal. It is structural. When the balance of power is lost and democratic accountability is replaced by a cult of the divinely inspired leader, the conditions that exacerbate derangement become the principles of governance. Writing of the Nixon White House, Arthur Schlesinger remarked:

In such conditions wish tended to rule fact and, in George McGovern’s phrase, government fell prey “to its own delusions and fantasies.” At the far end of this road lay the madness of totalitarian government, where leaders tried to remold reality by force of personality and terror.

Nixon fell, but the American republic itself fell prey to the delusion that the far end of that road could never be reached. The remolding of America and the world through the force of personality and terror is what Trump offered the American electorate in 2024, after the Madman Theory had been put into practice in the violent theater of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When a majority of voters decided to accept that this was just the right amount of crazy, they would have been mad not to expect an ever deeper derangement.