This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

An old saying holds that “there is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep”. Who first said this is uncertain, but if they watched President Donald Trump’s press conference on Thursday, in which he showed himself sunk deep in delusions about his attack on Iran, they might confess themselves mistaken.

Far more terrifying than a deranged sheep is a US leader, a man able to destroy the planet, being detached from reality, looking increasingly paranoid, threatening violence against others and, in the most serious cases, committing actual violence against perceived enemies.

Though Trump showed signs of chronic instability during his first term in the White House, these have become more florid and consequential since he was re-elected in 2024, and especially since the launch of a surprise attack on Iran in association with Israel in the midst of diplomatic negotiations that were making progress.

Three weeks into the war, he still cannot give a coherent explanation as to why he started it and why it is in America’s best interest. As for its devastating impact on the world economy, his response has been to deny that his “short-term excursion” is having such a calamitous effect, though every screen in the world is showing towering flames and black smoke shooting up from the oil and gas fields of the Gulf.

I used to quote a former aide of Trump who described the President as “a cunning nutter” because the phrase succinctly summed up his bizarre mix of shrewd political operator and all-too-real nuttiness. Neither were to be underestimated, but it is in his second term – and above all in the last few weeks – that the shrewdness has diminished and the nuttiness deepened.

Deterioration in Trump’s judgement is often compared to the megalomania shown by several world leaders who came to believe that they possessed semi-divine powers. This led Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 and Vladimir Putin Ukraine in 2022 – and Trump to attack Iran on 28 February, 2026, in apparent expectation of a quick victory.

As with the disastrous Iraqi and Russian invasions, his decision was encouraged by his tight circle of courtiers, while sceptics were ignored or demonised as disloyal. Megalomania is common among the powerful, but in Trump’s case it combines with pre-existing traits, such as a lack of conscience, remorse, truthfulness or empathy which may go along with impulsiveness and over-confidence.

Yet, deeper questions must be asked about why a person with such a personality should have become US President? In many societies, his glaring faults would disbar him from holding any post of authority, but Americans have twice voted to send him to the White House. Why do his failings make such an exact – and for him productive – fit as an antidote or disguise for the failings of America? American and European commentators may be too invested in a benign vision of America – even when they detest Trump – to take an unsparingly objective view of what his imperial dominance tells us about the United States.

Profound, if unsettling, explanations for America’s embrace of Trump come from the Vietnamese political commentator, Sony Thang, who shows no such pro-American........

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