Looking at the images released by the Trump administration of Trump and his team watching the apprehension of Nicolás Maduro last Saturday caused a creeping unease. It wasn’t just the impulsive pointlessness of the arrest and abduction of Venezuela’s brutal dictator, the latest, if the most worrying, demonstration of thuggish American chaos. It was the feeling that you had seen these images before. And you began to realise that you had. They were so similar to the images released by the Obama administration of Obama and his team watching the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 that they might have been deliberately staged. There was Obama sitting, second from left, watching intently, wearing a dark jacket and a casual white shirt underneath. And there was Trump sitting, second from left, watching intently, wearing a dark jacket and a white shirt with the top button casually unbuttoned underneath. Even in his moment of squalid triumph, Trump could not resist making public policy-making into a salve for the ego wounds inflicted by a hated adversary. His is a purely psychic presidency.
I doubt anyone, even Trump’s admirers, would disagree with a description of Trump as displaying a pervasive pattern of grandiosity and need for admiration. Or with the statement that he routinely overestimates his abilities and inflates his accomplishments, often appearing boastful and pretentious. Even diehard Maga people would almost certainly nod and smile at an account of Trump as someone who is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty. Not to mention Trump’s persistent pattern of angry and irritable moods, argumentative behaviour, or vindictiveness. You would have to be insensate to deny that Trump lacks remorse or guilt, is callous and lacks empathy, is unconcerned about his performance – he simply denies failure. In fact, he only expresses feelings in ways that seem shallow, insincere, or superficial, or when emotional expressions are displayed to manipulate or intimidate others.
All swirled together, it is the outlook of a megalomaniac, if not worse (I have summarised the preceding, incidentally, almost verbatim from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition). It is reasonable to assume that such a person would be discouraged from running even a small shop with people working underneath them, let alone leading the most powerful nation in the world. If such a person were to become the leader of a nation, one of their many pathologies would be, arising out of the narcissist’s inner emptiness, to mirror the actions of envied adversaries. Another would be to inflict on someone else the shame the narcissist felt inflicted on them. Some of the symmetries form themselves: Maduro will stand trial – if he does stand trial; the pathologically impulsive Trump could just as well trade him back in a “deal” – in a Manhattan courthouse about a two-minute walk from the courthouse where Trump stood trial. You cannot even start to understand Trump’s decision to attack Venezuela and abduct Maduro unless you grasp Trump’s warped mental state: the desperate reassertion of a grotesquely inflated ego humbled by impeachment, indictment and electoral defeat, by sinking poll numbers, by faint but unmistakable Republican defiance; by, most of all, Vladimir Putin, who is making Trump eat dirt before all the world day after day.
A child cannot help but assimilate some of the qualities of an abusive parent, even as the child becomes aware of them. And the overbearing, overwhelming, incessant enactment of Trump’s mental condition has had the effect of remoulding large swathes of the media around his self-image. The American press, seeking to preserve its access, anxious not to incur Trump’s wrath by appearing partisan, intent on not crying wolf as it hysterically did during Trump’s first term, has become an active participant in Trump’s ongoing lie about his normality – or rather, abnormality. Trump pretends that his disturbing flights of dissociation – these bizarre segues have included invented stories about the Unabomber, claims that wind turbines drive whales “loco”, and appreciations of how Obama descended staircases – are a rational strategy he calls “the weave”. Explaining it in September 2024 to a New York Times reporter eager for a scoop, Trump explained, “You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together.” The reporter’s ambition dovetailed with Trump’s, the result being that they both shared the same deceit. “In its disjointed way,” the reporter obligingly concluded, “it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.”
When Trump allowed the country to eavesdrop on his internal and eternal monologue – his administration calls this “addressing the nation” – hours after America’s illegal invasion of Venezuela and its illegal abduction of its president (illegitimately manipulated into power though he may have been) the American media yet again pretended that Trump’s actions were the result of rational planning and policy. There was, and is, no plan for governing Venezuela. There is no plan for allowing Venezuela to democratically govern itself. There is no plan for taking control of Venezuela’s oil reserves. There is no plan for unifying the country’s rivalrous armed factions should the current government collapse. Along with carefully and decorously pointing all this out, the media also excitedly took readers and listeners right into “Operation Absolute Resolve”, reporting that had the effect of making what amounts to a world-breaking criminal act not just legitimate and respectable, but strategic.
The Soviet daily Pravda ceaselessly projected images of sunny normalcy. In the same way, the American media normalises Trump’s instability by making historical analogies – the Monroe Doctrine, early American imperialism in Mexico and Nicaragua, the American capture of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in 1990. It publishes normalising “investigative” pieces about infighting among his aides. It speculates impressively about the options confronting actions that, in fact, are so insane it is impossible to rationally consider what could happen after they occur at all. It gleefully notes that Trump’s obsession with geopolitics has alienated much of his isolationist Maga base. It does not say what every ordinary American can see plain as day. Trump is obsessed with geopolitics because he believes he is king of the world. This isn’t a joke, and it isn’t a “feature” of his personality. An American president’s uncontrolled, virulent megalomania is an historical catastrophe. For Trump, using America’s unique economic and military might to cow other countries – any gangster could do it – is proof of his divine talent and skills.
This could well be the saving rub. Trump is acting like a dictator, but he is acting like a dictator in a country that is still a democracy. It is something new in the annals of tyranny: tyranny American-style. The only means by which Trump could successfully continue to act with unilateral force in this way is to not just limit, shrink, harry or repress democratic institutions but to abolish them. But he lacks the military or civic framework, as well as the sick, twisted grit – he is, thankfully, a coward – for that. He would have to, for example, not just buy CBS by proxy – and CBS, as well as CNN if he gets his hands on that, still has to make money in a democratic capitalist society – but replace it and all the other networks together with a state-controlled media. That is not going to happen in the context of the wild, unrestrained capitalism he has unleashed. An authoritarian revolution needs a through line. The mentally degraded Trump has no through line.
For now. In order to keep this American crisis from becoming a permanent condition, the media needs to show courage. It needs to forget about access – Trump’s hunger for attention will guarantee access – and it needs to stare down lawsuits and insults. The media must call out Trump’s mania whenever and wherever it occurs. It might not be a cute angle. It might not be impartial, whatever that means in 2026. It might not be “judicious”, a word that Trump startlingly used again and again in his remarks to the nation over the weekend. But it is the truth. The repetition, over and again, of the truth will unshackle Trump’s critics at home, it will liberate America’s allies abroad and, bit by bit, it will free America from the lie it empowers by its passive complicity. And if the American media does not tell the truth about Trump’s condition, then America’s sick, abusive new guardian will batter and bruise the country into a depressive, insatiable rage.
[Further reading: America kidnapped a president. Keir Starmer said nothing]
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