The Psychotic State

April 12 2026

In these posts, we aim to put developments in the national story into some kind of perspective. Recently we have described what is called moral injury--the despair and helplessness felt when a person witnesses, or has to take part in, acts that violate their foundational ethical values. We experience moral injury, for example, in watching Israel destroy Lebanon, or standing by while ICE murders American citizens and stores hundreds of children in prison camps.

The notion of moral injury helps explain the wearing away of our spirits in these nightmarish times. Putting a name to this phenomenon constitutes a first step toward staying sane.    Here we present a profoundly enlightening perspective provided by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner for the New York Times, called “The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State.”* It complements the “moral injury” idea to make sense of the world and our responses to it. In what follows, we quote their article liberally (without quotation marks), and we condense, add emphasis, and elaborate on it.

It’s clear that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. The past few weeks especially have brought into focus how his pathologies have cascaded downward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot.

The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.

This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. It’s not even a clinical diagnosis of the president. The point for Rauch and Wehner is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.

The Iran war is the most vivid demonstration of this institutional psychosis. In its actions in Iran, and its communication to the American people and the world, the Administration has acted with the incoherence of deeply disturbed mental patients. They chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, without a strategy, without planning for contingencies, or even being able to explain truthfully what’s going on.                 

The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total annihilation were made and then pulled back, once with only an hour and a half to spare.                  

Iran’s nuclear program was one reason given for the bombing in February, even though Trump told us that their nuclear capability was “obliterated” last June. And how many different things have we heard about the Strait of Hormuz? The president demanded an international coalition to open the Strait, then said the United States could go it alone, then blamed NATO and Biden, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself,” naturally.               

Trump claimed several times that the US had already won the war, several times that the war would end soon, and at least once that the war would end “when I feel it in my bones.”

The administration was clearly unprepared for Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier if it hadn’t made enormous personnel cuts in the State Department including its Middle East specialists and the National Security Council.

Incoherence is not merely a symptom, but a hallmark of this administration. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency brought chaos and ruin to federal agencies by firing, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending or efficiency. Trump has gone from his “no wars” position to using or threatening military force in Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, and Iran. He flips between supporting Ukraine and abandoning it. Tariffs go up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, now they’re sky-high.

Normal administrations--sane ones--set up policy processes that consider various viewpoints across multiple agencies and experts; they deliberate thoroughly before sending a range of options to the president to decide on. The normal review process anticipates how policies may play out, and prepares for contingencies.

This systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Trump’s second term, those functions can be short-circuited at any moment by the inner circle or the president himself. In that respect, the Trump administration is mind-less.

Trump has literally said that he can do anything he wants with Cuba, that he can learn Spanish and run for president of Venezuela, that the Pope is “weak on crime,” and that Iran should “open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards.”

As Rauch and Wehner put it, we should continue to expect “geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting.”

Scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to understand Trump 2.0 through a number of rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, imperialism, fascism. Or as one of the authors has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And since Trump becomes more desperate as he grows increasingly unpopular, the danger only increases.

Which leaves us all wondering: What are the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions, and not reliably in touch with reality? Impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential failings in the past, but there is no precedent for the institutional psychosis displayed by this administration, and therefore no rational system for dealing with it.

This puts the country and its allies in the precarious position of relying heavily on those rational guardrails that are still functioning. But there aren’t many left. The courts have largely remained independent and rooted in reality, but they’re slow. Congress has quietly nixed some of Trump’s wildest nominees and some of the administration’s most destructive impulses, but it remains generally complicit with the insanity. State governments, especially those of blue states, have been using their courts and setting their own regulations to resist Trump’s agenda, but as we’ve seen in Minnesota and elsewhere, they can’t protect themselves 100% from federal authority and federal harms.

But perhaps most important, the public supports rational government — and it is loudly making its feelings known. We will continue to protest, to grow in number and force, to wave signs, to occupy the streets.

We will deploy one powerful tool, a general strike, when the national groups such as 50501 and Indivisible have prepared and organized the nation to do so.  The most powerful tool of all to treat the psychosis is elections: Democrats have already taken remarkable new territory across the nation and swung the electorate as many as 20 or 30 points in local and regional contests.  

Here are three big caveats about elections. First, we must continue vigilantly to defend the right to vote—everyone’s right to vote—despite the Administration’s extensive efforts to curtail that right. Second, we have to maintain the momentum of the public’s enthusiasm for change, and the public’s mass participation in protest, until and through November. Third, you have not only to vote, but you have to know who you’re voting for—among Democratic candidates. There are self-interested corporate Democrats as well as Democrats who fight for the Constitution and diversity and justice; it is essential to get informed and make the wisest choices.

And so: what are our obligations? Education – educating ourselves and those around us. Activism – making public protests big if we’re able, but contributing in a thousand other ways to the national sanity and national resistance and taking care of our vulnerable brothers and sisters. Voting: our nation’s leadership begins at the local level-- at school boards, city councils, state representatives from legislative districts, county sheriffs.

It’s not easy to cure institutional psychosis. The “therapy” of education, activism, elections, and dedication will take time, just as it has taken a long time for the sickness of Trump & co. to flourish.  Get informed, stay committed, and spread the word!

*New York Times, Friday 4/10/2026. Jonathan Rauch is an author, activist, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Peter Wehner has served in three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer at the Times.