Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – In Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa awakens to “find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin” — a terrifying metamorphosis that leaves him alienated and rejected by his family. Similarly, Trumpism rejects vast segments of the population as unworthy of belonging. Almost overnight, immigrants, government workers, scientists, lawyers, judges, political opponents, and international allies found themselves dehumanized, isolated, punished, and even eliminated by Trump’s delusional crusade, which is rooted in his malignant narcissism,
Like Gregor Samsa suddenly powerless to escape his new form, many of us feel trapped by the madness-enabling votes of 77,302,580 Americans, co-creators of America’s catastrophic metamorphosis. The transformation of America into a pariah state against its own people and most of the globe has been fueled by Trump’s dismantling of democratic institutions, his normalization by a compliant media and the appeasement of a craven Congress, granting him unchecked powers. “I run the country and the world,” Trump exalted in an expression of his inflated grandiosity.
America‘s transmutation is not just physical — the “Gulf of America,” for example — but psychological and social. Trump’s lies, propaganda, intimidation, and gangster-like threats of extortion attempt to ensure compliance, reinforcing the new disorder. Charging headlong into evil, America is undergoing a profound moral decay — pursuing pathological policies, such as punitive tariffs and foreign aid termination, that willfully hurt people and erode the positive aspects of the country’s global reputation.
Trump is the same old liar, buffoon, con man and narcissist that he’s been for 50 years. But his reelection propelled him to the psychotic edge of egomania with a deluded fixation on absolute power. When a narcissist gets their dysfunction rewarded, the “behavioral result is an intensification of their most toxic traits,” according to psychologist Melinda Smith. With actions that are not calibrated to reality, there’s no method to Trump’s madness. There’s just madness. And it’s getting worse: more vindictive, reckless, and sadistic.
Among the most heinous of Trump’s brutal edicts was the lawless banishment of 238 men, without due process, to the concentration camp persecution of CECOT prison in El Salvador. They are trapped in an incomprehensible arbitrary system — a Kafkaesque black hole. Beyond that extrajudicial travesty, Trump is defying a Supreme Court order to return one man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the Trump administration admits was wrongfully sent to the slave prison. This is terrifying Stalinesque madness.
Trump believes he possesses the god-like power to be judge, jury, and executioner of people he stupidly deems “bad hombres.” In Trump’s mind, the failed assassination attempt was thwarted by divine intervention. Even before that, supporters and especially evangelicals referred to Trump as the “savior.” His spokes-liar Karoline Leavitt says, “Trust in President Trump.” Fusing malignant narcissism and grandiose delusions with a Messiah complex, he told an interviewer, “God saved me so I can save the world.”
Underneath his deranged conviction of divine supremacy lies its complete opposite: low self-esteem, an ocean of insecurities, and an insatiable need for praise. For would-be advisers and Cabinet officers, the sole qualification is obsequious compliance; thus, the Administration is stocked with lapdogs.
Trump’s on-camera Cabinet meetings are occasions to gather the sycophantic members together so they can each extol “the greatest president ever.” Ritualized humiliation is essential to a narcissist and an authoritarian regime. Last week AG Bondi groveled further, claiming that Trump – “in only one hundred days” — had actually saved “258 million lives” citing recent fentanyl seizures. In other words, 75% of all Americans would be dead if Trump had not been elected.
Trump lives in a strictly controlled bubble “populated only by lackeys, flunkies, and sycophants” as reported in Michael Wolff’s recent book All Or Nothing. They protect him from any intrusion of the empirical world. Despite convincing millions to share his hallucinations, Trump’s fragile ego requires minute-by-minute bolstering. This is provided by Natalie Harp, a former right wing TV anchor. Known as the human printer, she follows Trump around with a wireless portable printer in a backpack, that includes extra paper, ink cartridges, and an auxiliary charger. On his endless golf outings, she races after him in her own golf cart.
Harp constantly feeds Trump her own letters of abject adulation as well as printouts of flattering, worshipful commentary from obscure, Trump-glorifying websites. “She was literally around all the time,” writes Wolff, “at his beck and call, utterly attentive, hovering and interrupting when others sought his attention; his muse, his whisperer, his security blanket and, during the campaign, likely the single greatest influence on the candidate.”
A reliable conduit of Trump-adoring crackpots, Harp ushered into the hermetically sealed Trumpworld the conspiracy nut and MAGA freak Laura Loomer. Openly racist, vindictive, and a toxic stew of grievance and hatred, she was the key promoter of the false rumor that Haitian immigrants were eating pets. Loomer’s malign disinformation led directly to Trump’s crazy rant during the debate with Kamala Harris. Two weeks ago, after an Oval Office visit with Loomer, Trump fired six National Security Council officials that she listed as traitors to him.
Last week she helped oust national security advisor Michael Waltz who was a “confirmed kill” for Loomer, according to Axios. For weeks, she had publicly accused Waltz of hiring people who didn’t align with the MAGA movement. So extreme that whack job Marjorie Taylor Green called her “mentally unstable,” the white nationalist Loomer amplifies Trump’s self-image as an omnipotent hero and promotes the warped vision of a dystopian America that requires Trump to pursue extra-constitutional arrests, purges, and crackdowns.
Trump’s reckless illegality and police state tactics have caused a majority of the public to turn against him. Besides the El Salvador horror, his fall in support is related to his deporting immigrants without due process, canceling international students’ VISAs, capturing and imprisoning Pro-Palestine students that are here legally, and arresting and cuffing a judge Hannah Dugan, accused of helping an immigrant avoid ICE. Numerous individual cases of specific outrage have also come to light, such as abducting and deporting — without due process — three US citizen children including one with metastatic cancer who was denied access to medication.
Trump arrives at his 100-day mark as the most unpopular president at that point in the history of recorded polls beating his own previous low mark in 2017. Currently, just 39% of respondents approve of his job as president. Detached from reality, Trump believes pollsters should be investigated for their negative polls.
Most Americans do not like that Trump’s tariffs are tanking an economy that, according to The Economist, was “the envy of the world”: the fastest-growing economy among advanced industrial nations. Afflicted by a tariff fetish since the 1980s, Trump proclaimed astronomical tariffs on nearly every country, including some populated by only seals and penguins. The mindless irrationality of his approach is to solve problems that do not exist with policy solutions that do not work.
The tariffs were “based” on a nonsensical equation acquired from his crackpot adviser Peter Navarro whose academic work is studded with footnotes referencing the work of a non-existent scholar named Ron Vara, an anagram of Navarro’s name. Navarro, who served a prison sentence for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about January 6, is considered a joke figure among virtually all professional economists.
“What President Trump is doing is insane. It is absolutely insane,” said CNBC economic analyst Steve Liesman, evaluating Trump’s rationality. “And insanity is not a strategy.”
Other journalists try to understand the motivation of the tariff “strategy” while avoiding the possibility that it is the policy symptoms of a madman with increasingly diminished mental faculties. A megalomaniac, he wants to control everything and wants everybody to submit. The disgusting purpose of his tariffs were revealed when he said: Other countries are all “kissing my ass.”
Economists agree that Trump’s tariffs are causing the US economy to contract while U.S. ports report plummeting shipments from China — all leading to empty shelves and a possible recession. In response, the reality-based Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced that the US now faced a “challenging scenario” of “higher inflation and slower growth” or stagflationary shock. Trump ruminated aloud that he wanted to fire Powell. The market tanked. CEOs freaked out. Trump backed down. The market went up. Exceptions were announced, then reversed. His whiplash gyrations have made business planning impossible. Uncertainty rules the day.
Trust has evaporated with America’s global trading partners. The world sees a lawless government and an erratic, economically illiterate president — whose policies reflect his narcissistic psychopathology — acting without restraints. The effects of his confusion and instability have shattered consumer confidence, upset the bond market, undermined the dollar, and forced other nations to reorganize global trade. Pressuring China to capitulate has been a humiliating fiasco. China ghosted Trump and busily made deals with our repelled allies. By destabilizing the worldwide economy, Trump turns the US into an oppressor, an embarrassment, a global pariah.
Leading a carnival of corruption and greed, Trump runs the country like a mafia state. He shakes down big companies, who are adversaries, and hands out sweetheart deals to his friends, such as tariff exemptions on metals and minerals that Elon Musk‘s businesses need. Abu Dhabi will make a $2 billion dollar business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins. That transaction, or bribe, would be a major contribution by a foreign government to Trump’s private venture and a clear conflict of interest that erases the line between government and business.
“Trumpolini,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
The public, according to polls, has not only soured on Trump’s handling of the economy but strongly loathes Musk — another angry megalomaniac — and Doge, his phony Department of Government Efficiency. An instrument of Trump’s berserk vengeance, Musk and Doge eviscerated government workers and services as well as committing mayhem against government agencies, such as USAID, that save countless human lives.
Everything attached to Musk’s name is actively despised. His prancing at a Republican rally in Wisconsin, donning a triangular cheese-head hat, and providing massive campaign money turned a state judgeship race into a referendum on him and Trump. The Democrat won by 10 points. Musk’s company Tesla lost 71% in profits this year amid consumer repulsion and constant demonstrations outside showrooms.
As a result, Musk confirmed recently that he intends to spend less time in Washington. Whether that slows down the Doge chainsaw massacre on the federal workforce remains to be seen. An ideological attack not a financial one, the butchering of government will end up costing more than it saves, adding in the costs of firing and rehiring essential people and lost productivity — not to mention the legal bills it has racked up defending its work.
Ominously, Doge is more successful in building a surveillance state by seizing control of people’s sensitive data. With no grudge too small for retaliation, Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his regime of retribution by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. Already the administration plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating.
Trump’s crusade has been made possible by his invocation of emergency powers — all rooted in fictions. Refusing to assert their constitutional authority, Republicans cede Trump autocratic power. These hollow men believe that any spark of independence will doom them politically, and perhaps even harm them physically. “We are all afraid,” said Republican senator Lisa Murkowski. The threat of retaliation is no joke, but the Senator’s plaintive cry does not meet the demands of the moment.
As for Trump’s so-called foreign policy, it is a fiasco that hurts and kills people. The talks to end the genocide in Gaza have gone nowhere fast — a complete failure. With Trump‘s silent assent, Netanyahu increases the genocidal assault on Palestinians and now plans to occupy Gaza.
Ukraine has further exposed Trump’s identity as a gangster, a malicious autocrat, and a narcissistic moron. Since Trump took office, the US has essentially switched sides in the battle between Russia and Ukraine, backing the invaders against the invaded. While extorting Ukraine for its mineral wealth, Trump endorsed Russia’s claim to the Ukrainian territory it seized. Shocking European partners, Trump betrays Ukraine and rewards Putin for his unprovoked aggression.
“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it,” Trump declared on UnTruth Social. His obsessions and impulses are now reshaping relations between Europe and the US more dramatically than at any time since the end of World War II. “While Trump’s grasp on reality may be unsteady, he has fixed ideas and unchanging instincts,” writes Fintan O’Toole in New York Review. “He is not walking away from Europe; he is trampling all over it. His regime has not lost interest in Europe; it has developed a malevolent interest in destroying the EU.”
In an upside down world order, America sides with other outlier, pariah states like Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Serbia, El Salvador and the like. In the United Nations, the US voted against a European-drafted resolution condemning Moscow’s violent conquest and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Joining the US was Russia, Israel, North Korea, Sudan, Belarus, and Hungary among others.
Trump has wasted no time in trying to remake the US in his image – vengeful, chaotic, exploitative, selfish, sadistic, paranoid, and vulgar. He has blinged the oval office with gold angels, gold eagles, gold figurines, and affixed gold filigree doodads to the walls and fireplace — literally floor to ceiling gold. With ostentation that recalls a 17th century French monarch, this gold symbolizes his belief that he is the sun king — a wannabe emperor who wields absolute power over a world that rotates around him.
Living inside a demented fantasy of righteousness and omnipotence maintained by bootlickers and ideological parasites, Trump has dismantled independent measures of checks and balances, illegally fired inspectors general, and installed loyalists at the Justice Department willing to carry out his war of retribution. Inexplicable in its lunacy, federal funding for medical research is undermined with massive cuts. The National Endowment for the Arts rescinded grants. Without fear of being held accountable, Trump extorts law firms, media companies, universities, libraries and museums.
The country is under siege by a lawless authoritarian with constitutional dementia. In a mendacious and incoherent interview on Meet the Press last Sunday, Trump was asked “whether he needs to uphold the constitution?” Trump replied, “I don’t know” — exhibiting dangerous cognitive decline in forgetting that he took an oath as president to uphold the constitution.
A recidivist, the criminal in the White House cannot help but break the law and attempt to justify his lawlessness. “He who saves his country does not violate any law,” Trump declared three weeks into his new administration. Obviously delusional, he’s not saving the country, he’s wrecking it.
The anti-Trump polls, Harvard’s defiance, the country-wide demonstrations, a few outspoken Democrats, and the widespread judicial rebukes offer mild vindication for the forces opposed to the MAGA industrial complex, but does not stop the onslaught. It is not enough.
“The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said in a famous speech before the Civil War, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” The psycho President will persist in his assault until he feels the massive resistance of a people who will tolerate it no longer.
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