Is Donald Trump’s mind gone? Or is he playing a sophisticated chess game with us?

Read this excerpt from Trump’s recent speech at the United Nations.

They’ve given up their powerful edge, a lot of the countries that we’re talking about in oil and gas, such as essentially closing the great North Sea oil. Oh, the North Sea, I know it so well. Aberdeen [in Scotland] was the oil capital of Europe, and there’s tremendous oil that hasn’t been found in the North Sea. Tremendous oil, and I was with the prime minister who I respect and like a lot, and I said, “You’re sitting with the greatest asset.” They essentially closed it by making it so highly taxed that no developer, no oil company, can go there. They have tremendous oil left, and more importantly, they have tremendous oil that hasn’t even been found yet. And what a tremendous asset for the United Kingdom, and I hope the prime minister is listening because I told it to him three days in a row. That’s all he heard. North Sea oil, North Sea, because I want to see them do well.

I want to stop seeing them ruining that beautiful Scottish, English countryside with windmills and massive solar panels that go seven miles by seven miles, taking away farmland. But we’re not letting this happen in America. In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are.

Another U.N. official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening. You know, it used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago, in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, “Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something.” Then they said, “Global warming will kill the world,” but then it started getting cooler. So now they could just call it climate change because that way, they can’t miss. It’s climate change. Because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, it’s climate change.

It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people. But of course, their countries’ fortunes, and given those same countries, no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.

And I’m really good at predicting things, you know? They actually said during the campaign, they had a hat, the best-selling hat: “Trump was right about everything.” And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. And if you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail.

If you know just a little about the oil industry and climate science, it is clear to you that the whole thing just makes no sense. Every single line is wrong, false, or has no relation to reality, sometimes all three things together. To say nothing about the latest paragraph claiming that “Trump was right about everything.” Totally unhinged, you would say. Demented, crazy, far gone, or something like that.

But are you sure? Every human brain is a hugely complex system; every brain is different, and every brain has different ways to go astray. So, how can you say whether Trump is just far gone or is playing a sophisticated chess game?

What I can say is that in Joe Biden, I clearly recognized the symptoms of my father’s dementia when they were clear and unmistakable. My father, just like Biden, was detached from reality, only occasionally being able to emerge out of the fog enveloping his mind to say something that made sense. And then, submerging again, unreachable. Eventually, he stopped resurfacing.

But Trump? Clearly, he is nothing like Biden. There was an earlier phase in my father’s dementia when he would speak a little like Trump at the UN. My father was an intelligent and cultured person; so, his speech seemed to make sense. But, after a while, you would realize that he was just stringing sentences one after the other, without connectiona with reality, without any interest in those who were listening, without being bothered by anything like “facts.”

Is Donald Trump at that stage? That is, putting together an endless string of unconnected sentences, uncorrelated with reality? Or is he cleverly cheating his gullible voters, while at the same time doing a favor to the oil and gas lobby? For sure, every single sentence of the excerpt I posted above is likely to have generated a massive smile on the face of anyone whose wealth comes from fossil fuels. Can it be a coincidence? And it is surely appealing to Trump’s political supporters: the MAGA crowd.

So, is there some method in that madness? If you analyze Trump’s speech, you see how clunky and disjointed his statements are. Yet, they have a certain consistency. Trump starts with identifying the enemy: those stupid UN people, the scientists, the European governments. Then, he places himself squarely with the heroes fighting for the people to avoid the destruction that those hateful greens were intending to impose on us.

In narrative terms, it is the equivalent of a Warner Bros cartoon with Trump in the role of Bugs Bunny, and the European Bureaucrats as Elmer Fudd. These cartoons exist because they are effective at catching the viewers’ attention. They are condensed versions of Campbell’s “Hero Journey” without bells and whistles attached. Trump’s speech is not high literature, but, as a political speech, it is extremely effective. Read the whole speech. It is disjointed, chaotic, repetitive, but it has a certain hypnotic quality that you can’t miss. It is like chanting a ritual. And one characteristic of rituals is repetition. Repetitions enhance the power of the magic formulas they contain.

I think we can compare Trump’s present mental stage to that of Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. The Italian Duce never showed clear evidence of mental decay, but he became rigid, inflexible, and unaffected by data or facts. At some point, he became convinced that his historical role was to recreate the ancient Roman Empire. It was pure madness, but he acted consistently and even competently in order to attain that goal by military conquest. And he obtained what he wanted, even though the new “Roman Empire” lasted only four years and the effort ruined the country, one of the major causes of Italy’s defeat in WWII. Donald Trump may see himself as having the role of recreating the fossil fuel empire and acting consistently and competently toward that goal. He may succeed, even though he would ruin the US and other Western countries in the attempt.

In any case, dementia is one of the many examples of the “Seneca Effect;” when a mind starts to decline, ruin is rapid. We’ll see what happens to Trump’s mind in the coming years, perhaps months.

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Here is a post I published in 2023 about how dementia affects leaders; it deals in particular with Mussolini’s career.

From “The Seneca Effect,” December 2023 — A slightly edited excerpt

The last photo of Benito Mussolini alive was taken a few days before he was killed on April 28, 1945. He looks tense, even though he maintains his mask of a strong man. But it may be that his mind was already affected by an early form of dementia. Many modern leaders have been affected by similar problems, and I argue here that propaganda may be seen as a form of social dementia. Society, apparently, reflects the structure of the brain of its leaders.

Liminal Dementia

If you have experience with a relative suffering from dementia, you know how it progresses faster and faster until the person is nothing more than an empty shell. It is truly horrible to see that your father or your mother doesn’t recognize you anymore. It is an especially cruel way to die, not so much for the victim. but for everyone around them.

Before arriving at that, though, there is a liminal period on the cliff’s edge where the malady is hidden behind a behavior that superficially appears normal. The people affected still react and behave as they used to, but if you pay attention, there is something mechanical in their actions. Your relative looks now like a robot programmed to behave like the person you knew but without a soul: more assertive, more willing to take risks, less interested in hearing suggestions, and often unwilling or unable to change course. More than all, he/she has lost a fundamental characteristic of the human brain: empathy, the capability of understanding other human beings’ feelings and needs.

This kind of dementia may be much more common than most of us realize, and it is a dangerous period not just for the person affected but for everyone. The onset of the malady goes unrecognized, resulting in all sorts of mistakes and disasters. I saw it happening with my father. He had always been a generous man, ready to help others whenever he could. But, in his 80s, he lost the capability to evaluate the intentions of the people he interacted with. He fell victim to scammers and petty thieves who managed to cut a large dent in his savings. I think it is typical of the liminal dementia phase. Even good traits of one’s personality can be exaggerated and performed in a mechanical way so that they become liabilities.

Benito Mussolini’s Dementia

In some cases, dementia affects powerful people; heads of state are a typical example. I spent some time looking at documents about Benito Mussolini, trying to understand what led him to make the incredible mistakes he made during the last years of his rule — declaring war on the US, for instance. One possible explanation is that he was simply a mediocre mind influenced by a narcissistic personality. But it is also possible that Mussolini’s mind was slowly gnawed away by dementia. He was relatively young (62) when he was killed, and a post-mortem examination of a fragment of his brain didn’t reveal evident damage, but that doesn’t mean his brain was functioning well. The problem didn’t escape from the bright intelligence of Margherita Sarfatti, his former lover, who gave us a description of dementia as clear as it can be:

That Mussolini of the early years was now more than dead to me. I do not even consider him the same man of the later years: A different spiritual being, bound to his original identity only in the physical aspect. But even this one, as in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, had become weighed down and distorted under the influence of such a profound spiritual change. So I can think back, sadly but without hatred, to the man who once was, as one thinks back to someone long dead. The man who was shot by cruel and indignant patriots in April 1945 was only the degenerate shell of the first Mussolini, like cancer compared to the previously healthy flesh and limbs. Perhaps the disease was darkly at work even then.

Few in Italy realized what was happening at that time, but it was probably dementia that enhanced Mussolini’s personality traits in a grotesque manner. He used to be assertive, but he became aggressive. His willingness to take risks became recklessness. His habit of choosing goals and attaining them became a tendency to ignore all suggestions and to stick to flawed ideas. Just as an example, in 1941, he ordered the Italian air force to “destroy all Greek cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.” Fortunately, the Italian Air Force could not possibly have done that — but what if Mussolini had control over nuclear weapons?

Demented leaders of our times

Are the world’s governments in the hands of demented individuals? That would seem to be perfectly possible from the events we see unfolding in the world. The historical example that comes to mind is that of Ronald Reagan, who left the presidency in 1989 and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994. It is clear, though, that he already had symptoms of dementia during the final years of his term. As president, Reagan avoided major military engagements, but he was aggressive in foreign policy, and his “Star Wars” initiative could have destabilized the world’s global strategic equilibrium. It is a good thing that the US presidency has a limited duration.

An earlier case in the US is that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in office from 1933 to 1945. He almost certainly suffered from dementia during his last years. Of him, we have an unflattering portrait of a person “incapable of personal friendship with anyone” and an “egomaniac.” During WW2, he was a major force behind the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear bombs in history. He died before these bombs could be used, but his successor, Harry Truman, had little choice but to implement a plan that had already been decided. Before his death in 1945, Roosevelt approved the “Morgenthau Plan,” which would have led to the death by starvation of tens of millions of Germans. It is unclear whether Roosevelt understood what he was doing; his dementia was rapidly progressing. The Secretary of War of the time, Harry Stimson, reported that the president told him that he had “no idea how he could have initialed [the Morgenthau Plan].” The role of Roosevelt’s dementia in affecting his decisions during WW2 is hard to assess, but at least his death avoided the destruction of Germany.

Are there other examples? Yes, plenty. A table from a 2020 paper by Hans Förstl lists the cases of leaders of the 20th century who were affected by mental decline.

The table misses some notable examples, such as Mussolini, whose dementia is probable but not certain, and Adolf Hitler, who suffered from Parkinson’s during his last years of life. It includes several Western leaders and 5 US presidents. To that, we may add the current president, Joe Biden, now 81, clearly showing signs of cognitive decline. A post by John Rember argues that Donald Trump shows evident signs of dementia, too. So, it may be that voters will hand the country to a demented person in the 2024 elections.

Fortunately, though, in most cases, dementia leads mostly to reduced activity and stasis. So, there is a limited time window in which a leader is dumb enough but still aggressive enough to start a major war — that is what happened with Mussolini. But it is also possible for a demented leader to become easy prey for aggressive collaborators eager to implement their personal plans. It may have been the case with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Leonid Brezhnev, and Joe Biden. In the case of Donald Trump, he could do a lot of damage in several areas, but he was never a warmonger. So, dementia can’t reinforce a trait that he never had, and it is unlikely that he will pull the nuclear trigger. (hopefully).