The Room Where It Happens
Towards a new diagnostic manual of mental disorders — for U.S. politics
One thing I love about Brits is how often their stories about this historic figure or that distant relative end with the biographical footnote “he went mad.”
Like it’s a holiday destination, or a course of post-graduate work.
Oh, that lintel made of human femurs on the old pile in Derbyshire? Yes, the owner went mad. Those dinner parties she threw for dogs dressed in formal clothes with bespoke shoes? The poor women had gone mad, you see.
Your friend Geoffrey — what did he do after finishing with the service?
Went mad.
Oh, that’s all right then.
The diagnosis is obviously coded per income level, leaving working class people prone to maladies like “insanity” and “lunacy,” while those in the upper crust (and some U.S. zip codes) descend into mere “eccentricity.”
The preferred film citation here is, of course, Withnail & I (1987), that scene where the posh young wastrel Withnail brings his fellow unemployed actor (the titular “I”) to visit Withnail’s uncle Monty at the older man’s Arts & Crafts pile just off the King’s Road (iron-studded oak front door, saggy sofa, hothouse plants, cranked Victrola, bottomless sherry glass)
Here, the aging and elephantine Monty — clearly, what they used to call a “confirmed bachelor” — instantly imposes himself on his nephew’s fresh-faced friend, insinuating “I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium….There is, you’ll agree, a certain je ne sais quoi about a firm young carrot…”— after which dude pulls Withnail aside:
“The man’s mad.”
“Eccentric.”
“Eccentric? He’s insane!”
While this is a Victorian-sounding exchange from a 1987 film, I’ve definitely heard British people my age or slightly older use the same expression, which releases the human topic of conversation with a kind of benedictory wave. It’s as if the person were once a human agent, responsible for reason, decisions, and actions, and then, at some definitive point, just…weren’t.
Clearly, hundreds of years of cultural history are embedded in an expression like “he went mad,” which likely derives from being the most world-historically uptight human beings on planet earth. In fact, the mortal terror of being perceived as having lost one’s shit was likely rife throughout Europe for centuries, given the continental prevalence of that operatic fixture “the mad scene” (or scène de folie, scena della pazzia, or Wahnsinnsszene) in which a virtuoso soprano or tenor enacts their character’s tuneful and self-revealing episode of barking madness.
Which brings us to last week’s meeting of the UN General Assembly, where America resolutely stepped into its Strangelove era.
You’ve probably seen clips or read excerpts from the nearly hour-long mad scene our president performed for the world last Tuesday. But if, like me, you saw how it was described in major U.S. newspapers and TV news, you probably feel that this week the “mainstream media” truly earned those scare quotes.
I’m thinking of a Washington Post columnist, who wrote that the episode or the podium capped a “frenzied week for Trump on foreign policy,” in which he “stands astride the world community with a more commanding presence than he enjoyed in his first term,” but lacks “the foundational principles that historians might someday refer to as a ‘Trump doctrine.’”
Yes, you could say that. That windy, self-obsessed stream of consciousness certainly did lack foundational principles. Along with sense, reason, logic, coherence, the ability to self-regulate—C’MON!
I know “Trump Sounds Nuts” is the dog-bites-man story of our era, but we still have to do better when it comes to things like a speech that opens with a bizarrely E! Network-keyed opening boast — “we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world” — then goes straight into conspiracy theories about escalators and teleprompters and on to lunatic claims of having personally ended seven wars, to citations of MAGA merch as evidence of his own omniscience, to desperate chest-thumping that would shame Mussolini and dinner-party-ending gaffes like: “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”
Ting-ting-ting! The shitfaced 90-year-old old colonel from the Royal Corps of Halbardiers strikes a brandy glass in the corner, raises it, shouts “Hear-hear!” and gets quickly bundled off to bed by a nurse.
Everyone else sits silent, staring.
I’ve seen pundits compare this speech to Hugo Chavez’s at the UN General Assembly in 2006, when he cracked that George W. Bush was the devil. But that’s obviously wrong since Chavez’s line actually got some applause.
From what I’ve heard, this speech played more like late-50s/early-60s Kruschev, telling a bunch of Western ambassadors “We will bury you” in ‘56, or brandishing his shoe at a UN delegate he didn’t like in 1960 on his way to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So as American media treated this as yet another “norms-breaking” presentation by a maverick president, I became a bigger fan of the UN’s global coalition than I ever was before. Due to the ray of light that briefly pierced our dark fog of misinformation as WaPo’s Ishaan Tharoor relayed a text from a foreign diplomat who said, simply “This man is stark, raving mad.”
A friend of mine is a long-time UN diplomat whose early tenure was that of a walk-on character in later Le Carre. In the early-’90s, he was stationed in Sarajevo, where he was often in buildings as they got shelled and in at least one UN Hummer that got carjacked, whereupon he and a driver were tossed face down into a snowbank and had cocked guns held to the back of their heads before the assailants drove off and let them walk to the nearest town.
A later assignment saw him stuck in Baghdad when Saddam was in power, during which time he dodged official interactions, ate crap food, lost weight, and coped with weather so hot his contact lenses melted on the walk from car to hotel. Apparently, dues-paying assignments like these led to a much cushier gig in Rome, where he and I had dinner, drinks, and caught up in the summer before 9/11, which obviously changed things for the worse.
And yet one of the most hair-raising experiences he reports from the UN was in the GA in 2017, where he was among the delegates who sat watching open-mouthed as a foreign dignitary stood on the General Assembly podium that he somehow mistook for a charity Friar’s Roast.
The man opened with a bit about how his eight-month-old presidency had “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
Which…kind of landed!
At least it got polite laughter from the assembled leaders. Unfortunately, this prompted the comic to pout: “I didn’t expect that reaction…But that’s okay.” At which point, I’m told, the room temperature dropped about 20 degrees.
Watching the video and media coverage of this event from eight years ago, you might believe that little self-effacing quip saved the moment — maybe got the live audience back on his side for a moment. Trust your eyes, ears, and my friends in the UN when I say that it did not.
What in this early episode of media “sane washing” was reported as “provocative” statements from a new breed of U.S. leader laying out a “bold vision” for the nation’s place in the world, went over as someone’s drunk relative getting on the mike, and prompted nervous diplomats to check their ear-pieces for translations of what they assumed must be jokes, but weren’t. Not exactly.
So anyway, this Monday, after a weekend in which dude batted away voter anxieties about our imminently spiking health-insurance premiums by posting an AI-generated announcement that his administration will guarantee science-fiction “MedBeds” to everyone, then insisted that the FBI was behind January 6, then sent the U.S. military to “protect War ravaged Portland” because a Fox News report had spliced in riot footage from 2020, the media either ignored or metabolized these outbursts as “strategy.”
Which is why, again, I look to Brits and Europeans as guides for accommodating myself to the mental illness of a ruler, and note how deeply and subtly their culture has adapted around a ruling class that every so often goes nuts.
After all, are we so much worse off than the French subjects of Charles “Mad King Charles” VI (1380-1422) who often failed to recognize family members, claimed not to be king, and wore reinforced clothes to prevent himself from shattering since he was sure his body was made of glass? This kind of thing threw the government into chaos and, since the king was divinely appointed, they struggled internally for decades leading into the rupture that began the Hundred Years’ War.
What about the 18th-century Danish subjects of Christian VII, whose early onset acute mental illness — later attributed to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder — led to his doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, actually running the country, implementing Enlightenment-style reforms until he fell out of favor and they backslid into a harsher form of monarchy?
And then there’s the great mad king of the Enlightenment, King George III, whose episodes were caused by some combination of bipolar disorder and acute porphyria that really kicked off with a vengeance in the 1780s. And which forced British elites, like the French under Charles IV, to metabolize a divinely appointed ruler who was nonetheless plainly batshit crazy.
Apparently this was one of the first major disaggregations of royalty, reason, and stability, and elites found ways to narrate his illness — his majesty was “unwell,” “indisposed,” or suffering from a “disturbance of mind” — in such a way that preserved the dignity of the monarchy itself. His bouts of manic verbosity and public meltdowns were but tragic episodes of a virtuous and pious ruler. In some ways, this helped normalize the idea that mental illness was an affliction, not a sin or a curse, though, to say the least, this charity was not extended evenly across class lines.
I admit that this exercise gets less reassuring the further we get into the 20th century, where mental illness mixes with mass media and extreme concentrations of state power.
The Madness of Hitler or Saddam Hussein — yeah, we don't want to see those movies. In all these cases, “madness” is hard to discern from psychological effects of unchecked power, as isolation and sycophancy speed the expected progression toward megalomania, delusion.
If you’re reading this, you probably never considered Donald Trump a model of fitness in the first place. You probably aren’t shocked by what a decade in the spotlight has done to yet another person who was sick enough to pass the psych-screening reality shows give would-be cast members.
But it’s still fascinating to watch so many people struggle like members of a late-medieval court to manage his madness through metaphor, theology, politics, and distraction—anything to preserve the sacred image they rely on to remain employed.
And it’s awesome to imagine the strength and forbearance of the brave men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces (if any women were allowed), who got called away from active duty in foreign lands to sit in Quantico and watch the “Secretary of War” present with all the symptoms of acute contagious Trump Derangement Syndrome, lecturing people who outrank him by the equivalent of two PhDs and can actually do their jobs, about staying fit and not being such pussies.
And who then stood that position, unarmed, as their Commander in Chief uncorked another fruity 72-minute pour that would careen from praising tariffs to praising firefighters to all the usual bragging, lying, and smarm — plus a threat to send them to U.S. cities as “training” — but that began as if the speaker were almost, but not quite, actually picking up what the room was giving him:
“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before….This is — don’t laugh, don’t laugh, you’re not allowed to do that. You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want — you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”
For 10 years, professionals have twisted themselves into baroque pretzels of logic and terminology to not say what so many of the cabinet appointees in Trump’s first administration have said: that the man is a moron, an idiot, that he can’t process information, think logically, or tolerate unwelcome news. But as he enters this new phase, I suggest that we update our political terminology with a few terms from the Victorian age.
The movement may be autocratic, its proponents may be authoritarians, its flunkees may be racist, corrupt ideologues whose sole qualification is sucking at their jobs. But their boss is not a fascist. He’s not an authoritarian. He’s not even a politician. He’s simply mad.
Summon the alienist. Send him to Bedlam. And yes, by all means, lock him up.
And if I were a member of his court, I’d start working on my own mad scene right away.