As the war in Iran and Lebanon enters its eighth week, Donald Trump’s seesawing declarations of violence, peace, raining hellfire, ceasefire, civilizational destruction, and international comity—a manic approach to negotiating typically euphemized by reporters as “mixed messages”—have grown increasingly deranged. In the Review’s May 14 issue, Fintan O’Toole writes that it is high time to dispense with the notion that the president is simply feigning madness.

While Trump’s apologists suppose that in his “chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory,” a term coined by Richard Nixon to describe “a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy,” O’Toole argues that, far from a performance designed to forward American interests, never mind prevent horrific violence,

Trump’s homicidal hysteria…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.

Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are five articles from our archives about mad kings.

Fintan O’Toole
‘The Right Amount of Crazy’

In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality.

Fintan O’Toole
Like ‘Being Friends with a Hurricane’

One of Trump’s favorite sayings, which he misattributes to Abraham Lincoln, is “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” This is an accurate enough summation of the instrumental view of human relationships typical of autocrats. Trump’s problem, though, is that…his friendship is little better than his enmity. Even when it is obviously in his own interest to help those who are loyal and useful, he cannot be trusted to do so.

—July 18, 2024

Lisa Appignanesi
Is Trump Certifiable?

The misuse of power is not a free-standing psychiatric category, though power seems to exacerbate a whole range of existing “craziness,” whether it is that of movie moguls or politicians.

—January 8, 2018

Charles J. Sykes
Year One: The Mad King

Less than a year into his presidency, we hear the same question again and again: What has to happen for Republicans to break with their Mad King?

—November 10, 2017

Mary McCarthy
Postscript to Nixon

In the last weeks there have been newspaper stories of [Nixon’s] bizarre behavior at San Clemente: peculiar telephone calls to former colleagues on the Hill in Washington that seemed sometimes to imply that he thought he was still in office, vindictive tirades followed by apathy; we have had word-pictures of him poring over stacks of unopened mail, lonely walks on the beach, financial anxiety, fears of destitution; finally, and most oddly, as reported by the Washington Post, “inability to say the name of Leon Jaworski.” “He is emotionally depressed,” a visitor concluded.

—October 17, 1974

J. H. Plumb
A King’s Madness

In the early summer of 1788, George III was gently but steadily going off his head. He had been mad before, early in his reign shortly after his marriage, but only briefly, and his cure had seemed reasonably complete.… As this summer wore on, however, the signs grew ominous. George III may or may not have shaken the lower bough of an oak tree in Windsor Park thinking it was the King of Prussia’s hand and settled down to a long conversation with it, but certainly during his visit to Worcester he was extremely odd, climbing with the Queen all over a half-constructed china shop, up and down the ladders, bewildering the workmen with his rapid fire of questions to which he expected no answers. Then the physical symptoms started up—hives, swollen feet, cramp, bile, and chronic insomnia. After denouncing the importation of senna to his physician for three hours and sending a blank check to the actress, Mrs. Siddons, the Court and the politicians had to admit that the King was mad. And Britain was plunged into a major constitutional crisis.

—March 25, 1965

Why This War?
Pankaj Mishra, Ben Rhodes, and Suzy Hansen on Iran

Tomorrow, April 22, 2026, at 1 PM EDT

Join us for an online discussion on what the war means for the future of US politics and America’s place in the world. The conversation will last approximately ninety minutes, including a question-and-answer period. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public. Registration is required. This event will also be recorded, and registrants will receive a link to the recording shortly after it has completed.

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