He is Seriously, Frighteningly, Utterly, and Completely Losing His Mind

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We are in great danger

By Robert Reich April 15, 2026

It’s a catastrophe on the way to becoming a cataclysm.

Trump is rapidly going stark-raving mad. He’s a clear and present danger to the United States and the world.

Yesterday he lashed out at The New York Times after its chief White House correspondent questioned his mental health and stability and pointed to his “erratic behavior and extreme comments.”

“HAVE THEY NO SHAME? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DECENCY?” Trump posted in CAPITAL LETTERS about the Times, inadvertently echoing the famous words of Joseph Welch when standing up to Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Trump went on to take issue with the Times’s coverage of his war in Iran rather than his mental state, as if to prove the Times’s point.

He keeps saying he’s “won” the war with Iran, although he’s never said what “winning” means. At one moment his goal is to free Iran’s people. At another, it’s to end Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. At another, to destroy Iran’s missiles. At another, to achieve “regime change.” At another, to open the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before Trump started his war). At another, he says he’ll know the U.S. military operation in Iran is over when he feels it “[in] my bones.”

He can’t even stay on the same subject for more than a few minutes. In the middle of a high-level Cabinet meeting about the war, he spends five minutes talking about his preference for Sharpie pens. He interrupts another Iran war update to praise the White House drapes.

He threatens that if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he says America doesn’t need the strait reopened. Then he says: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

He calls the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” because the Pope wants peace. He posts an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus, then says he was only depicting himself as a physician.

He won’t give up on his illegal and dangerous (for the economy) criminal investigation of Fed Chief Jerome Powell, claiming it’s not just about Powell’s renovations at the Fed but also a “probe on incompetence,” adding he’ll fire Powell if he doesn’t resign after his term as chair ends.

He claims that the United States “needs” Greenland. He confuses Greenland with Iceland. He says whales are being killed by windmills. He claims that he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. He says the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. He goes on an eight-minute ramble about poisonous snakes in Peru. He boasts of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Armenia.

After Robert Mueller’s death, he says, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” He blames the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle on “the anger [Rob Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” After Joe Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of Stage 4 prostate cancer, Trump says, “I’m surprised that the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to Stage 9, that’s a long time” (there is no Stage 9 cancer).

He’s been losing it for a while now, but in the last few months it’s become far worse.

In 2017, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals concluded in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that Trump’s mental condition posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation.

In 2021, members of Trump’s own Cabinet — horrified by the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and Trump’s lack of urgency in stopping it — discussed whether to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office due to mental incompetence.

During his 2024 campaign, he attacked Kamala Harris and then went into the stratosphere of his bonkers mind:

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world – sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

It’s no longer possible to overlook his conspiracy-obsessed paranoia, his uncontrolled rage, his emotional volatility, his delusional claims, his vengeful rantings, his foul-mouthed posturing, his increasing detachment from reality.

Yet his Cabinet members and aides keep their heads down. Republican members of Congress pretend not to notice. His billionaire supporters dare not speak of his rapid decline. The media tries to “sanewash” his growing incoherence.

But some voices on the right — people who have long been supporters of Trump — have had enough.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilization is “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Far-right podcaster Candace Owens calls him “a genocidal lunatic.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.” A White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, Ty Cobb, says Trump is “clearly insane.” Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says “he’s clearly not well.”

The public is catching on. Fully 61 percent of Americans think he’s become more erratic with age, while just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” (down from 54 percent in 2023).

For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we face the reality: The most powerful man in the world does not have the mental capacity to do the job. Donald Trump — who has a family history of dementia — is increasingly unhinged.

We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?

Don’t wait. Impeach him now.Source: He is Seriously, Frighteningly, Utterly, and Completely Losing His Mind

Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model, attacking Europe and aligning with Putin

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 13, 2026

On April 12, the day of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.

The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.

Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.

Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.

Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.

It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.

But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.

Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”

Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.

Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.

But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.

Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Why did Melania hold a news conference, denying any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?

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Some theories

Trump’s rule for “flooding the zone” has been straightforward: Whenever the subject that everyone’s talking about becomes too uncomfortable for him — he changes it.

Too much Jeffrey Epstein? Send federal agents to Minnesota to brutalize American citizens. Too much brutality by federal agents? Fire the head of Department of Homeland Security and start a war with Iran. War goes badly? (Well, we’ll soon find out.)

So, why did Melania Trump hold a news conference? Standing at a lectern in the Grand Foyer of the White House, the first lady labeled as “lies” unspecified allegations linking her to Epstein, and said they “need to end today.”

“The false smears about me from mean-spirited and politically motivated individuals and entities looking to cause damage to my good name to gain financially and climb politically must stop.”

But who’s even been thinking about Melania and her potential relationship with Epstein or Maxwell in the midst of Melania’s husband’s threat to obliterate 90 million Iranians? Who cares about Melania and Maxwell when the price of gas is through the roof? Why would anyone be interested in such “unspecified allegations” when Iran still possesses 970 pounds of highly-enriched uranium and now has more motive than ever to turn it into nuclear weapons?

Besides, there hasn’t been the faintest whiff of scandal about the relationship between Melania and Maxwell, let alone Epstein.

Back in January (which seems years ago), the Justice Department released an email Melania sent to Maxwell. But the email got little attention. It was part of millions of pages of correspondence released about the Department’s investigation into the disgraced financier. Also, the correspondence took place in 2002, more than two years before Melania became Trump’s third wife.

There’s not even a smoking gun in her email. Melania merely expressed friendliness toward Maxwell and says she can’t wait to visit her in Palm Beach.

Melania also refers to a “nice story about JE” in New York magazine — presumably the 2002 story in which Donald Trump indicated he knew about his former pal’s penchant for young girls. It was in that story that Trump boasted:

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Granted, this quote suggests Trump was on to Epstein’s proclivities and may have even shared them. But the quote is old news. It’s been circulating ever since Trump was first discovered to be cavorting with Epstein.

Why, then, did Melania hold this news conference?

I can think of three possible reasons:

1. She was urged to do it as a way to revive interest in the Epstein scandal. You heard me right. The White House figures that Epstein is easier to handle right now than the fallout from the catastrophe of Trump’s war in Iran. Plus, Pam Bondi is gone and won’t be testifying, and the emerging regime at the Justice Department — Todd Blanche and Harmeet Dhillon — can more reliably be counted on to bury anything in the Epstein files that might incriminate Trump. In other words, a great way to change the subject.

2. Amazon is now in negotiations over streaming rights to Melania’s 2026 documentary Melania, which has been a box office bomb, grossing only $16.6 million worldwide against a massive $40 million production budget and $35 million in marketing, and leaving Amazon with a significant financial loss. Amazon and Bezos urged Melania to stir up publicity for herself, and what better way to get attention than to deny any relationship with Epstein?

3. Melania is pissed off at Trump for any number of things, and the news conference was a way of letting him know she’s capable of making his life miserable.

What do you think?

Source: Why did Melania hold a news conference, denying any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?