The mandate to speak: Before the world goes dark
In 2017, twenty-seven psychiatrists and mental health professionals broke their profession’s long standing ‘Goldwater rule’ against diagnosing public figures from afar. They published a book titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and in it, they wrote a sentence that should have stopped the world cold:
‘Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive , arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic , self-contradictory , self-important and self-serving. He has his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power’
That was nine years ago. Today, that warning is no longer prophecy, it is the reality.
The man who sits in the White House governs not by deliberation or diplomacy, but by impulsive digital barks fired into the atmosphere every few minutes, often forgetting what he himself said an hour earlier.
The man who sits in the White House governs not by deliberation or diplomacy, but by impulsive digital barks fired into the atmosphere every few minutes, often forgetting what he himself said an hour earlier.
He has embraced AI-generated deepfakes as a routine tool of political communication , blurring reality into propaganda. In his most recent foray AI kitsch, (April 12) while attacking Pope Leo XIV as ‘weak on crime’, Trump cast himself as a digital messiah. Yet, beneath this surreal veneer of virtual omnipotence, the world cannot afford to forget that the same man holds, in his trembling hand, the nuclear codes of the most powerful military the world has ever known.
READ: Trump orders Navy to shoot any boat laying mines in Strait of Hormuz amid ceasefire
I’m not here to repeat the obvious labels of ‘mad’ or ‘deranged’ that already saturate the airwaves. Stating he is ‘crazy’ is just describing the scenery. I am here to connect the dots and raise a warning: we aren’t headed for chaos—we are headed for catastrophe, and we are standing on the edge of something much worse than a personality flaw.
The Unprecedented Triple Threat
History offers echoes of erratic leaders: Caligula’s cruelty, Nixon’s calculated ‘madman’ bluff, the Cold War’s existential brinkmanship. But none of those parallels capture the lethal novelty of today. What makes this moment peculiar is the fusion of three elements:
A president whose........
