From its inception, the American presidency has bound immense destructive capacity to the temperament of a single individual. It is an office that concentrates not only authority but impulse, placing the machinery of war in the hands of an individual. The result is a system as mesmerizing as it is perilous. 

Alice Roosevelt once distilled this dynamic with biting precision, remarking that her father (Theodore Roosevelt) wished “to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” Beneath the wit lay an indictment of ego untethered from restraint.

Today, that strain of vanity appears meekly quaint. It has been eclipsed by Donald Trump, where ego is not a trait but an overarching principle. It has converted statecraft into a spectacle. Personal whims are treated as reality, and any contradiction as a threat. What emerges is more than political volatility; it is a destabilization that seeps outward, unsettling the fragile architecture of international order.

This pathology is not confined to one geography. In South Asia, Narendra Modi’s initiation of the failed Operation Sindhoor reflected a lethally untethered instinct. It manufactures crises on absolute concoctions just to consolidate its political position. In a nuclearized region, such theatrics are extremely reckless. It places millions of lives within the blast radius of a narcissist’s urge to appear unassailable.

Traversing to farther shores, clinical insight offers a useful lens. Mary Trump is a psychologist and Donald Trump’s niece. She describes a “monstrous ego” that has reduced the presidency into an arena of impulse and dominance. She argues that Trump’s core team is not a cabinet of peers but a collection of enablers. She calls them “weaker, more craven and just as........

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