If you begin to consider yourself solely responsible to a political party, you’re half-way to a dictatorship. -Clement Attlee
The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction [political party] more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. –George Washington
Unquestioned loyalty to a political party—any political party—is the bane of freedom. People with such unpatriotic and dangerous devotion elevate the interests of their party above the interests of their country. All political parties are fraught with foibles, falsehoods and failures. The previous presidency and Congress and the current presidency and Congress are quintessential examples of the wisdom spoken by the two men above.
During the last two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, Democrats (who also controlled the Senate) willfully and duplicitously fabricated, prevaricated and outright lied about Biden’s collapsed mental faculties. The entire party knew that Biden was unfit for office, but they said and did nothing—until they were unable to conceal the severity of Biden’s dementia in that infamous (for Biden) presidential debate with Donald Trump.
In like manner, Republicans today are willfully and duplicitously fabricating, prevaricating and outright lying about both Trump’s physical and mental deterioration. The entire Republican Party (that controls both houses of Congress) knows that Trump has descended into madness. They know that his lifelong malignant narcissism, along with his burgeoning frontal lobe dementia, has created an unhinged, arrogant, wannabe dictator completely detached from reality. They know it; and they say and do nothing.
Biden’s dementia made him reclusive and passive and turned the White House over to his subordinates, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Attorney General Merrick Garland—especially Blinken. But Trump’s frontal lobe dementia has coupled with his lifelong malignant narcissism to create an irrational, angry, malevolent monster—a diseased mind and body not unlike that of Joseph Stalin’s in his latter days.
And make no mistake about it: Donald Trump is every bit as dangerous as Stalin—or even more so.
Even though Wall Street and the media empire located in New York City refuse to expose Trump’s obvious unfitness for office (because they are controlled by the same Zionist billionaires that control both political parties), they know Trump is mad.
The blackout of truth regarding Trump by both the U.S. Congress and mainstream media contributes to the reality that Donald Trump has taken the United States to the very precipice of both economic depression (yes, depression, not recession) and global nuclear war. Either could occur not in a matter of months, but in weeks or even days. Truthfully, it is a miracle that one or both of these very present dangers have not already occurred.
I don’t normally do this, but I want to spend most of the rest of this column quoting one individual: Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. He is a professor and the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
Sachs made these remarks during a March 31, 2026, academic discussion on geopolitics and Iran hosted by the Master of Social Science in Global Political Economy program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was in dialogue with CUHK political psychologists Peter Beattie and Karim Bettache.
Peter Beattie is an associate professor of political psychology and the program director of CUHK’s Master’s in Global Political Economy program. His specialties include political psychology, global political economy, media studies and international relations. Karim Bettache is a CUHK assistant professor and member of the MGPE teaching team, specializing in cultural and political psychology, globalization, racism, colonialism and neoliberalism.
Would I agree with these men on every issue? Absolutely not! But if we don’t defend and support truth when it is spoken by whoever speaks it, we box ourselves into the narrowest of corners and become culpable in the suppression of truth. I may not agree with much—or even most—of what someone says, but when they speak truth, my fidelity to truth must acknowledge the truth even when spoken by people who err on other subjects. And who among us has not erred on something?
What Dr. Sachs says in this roundtable discussion is absolutely must-reading. MAGA Republicans and evangelicals won’t like it, just as Democrats and leftists didn’t want to listen to any criticism of Joe Biden. But his assessment of the extreme jeopardy in which we now find ourselves is absolutely spot on.
First of all, things are opaque, as is obvious, because we don’t have a word of honesty from the United States government or from the Israeli government. Everything is propaganda, morning till night.
Also, any statement by Donald Trump contradicts itself before the end of the sentence. So, he’s absolutely impossible to even understand on his own terms, much less on geopolitical terms.
So, the situation is very strange, very dangerous. I think probably the most dangerous moment in the world since World War II, probably even including the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I think Donald Trump is literally mentally ill to a very serious extent. He is, from a personality point of view, a malignant narcissist. Or, if you want a more classical diagnosis, a dark triad personality, which means that he is personally narcissistic.
He is Machiavellian, which means that, in I think psychological terms, he is manipulative, untrustworthy, deceitful, and he is psychopathic, meaning that there is no empathy for how many people he kills or how much damage is done.
The malignant narcissist definition adds paranoia and confabulation to this list.
So, I personally think we’re dealing with a psychologically deeply debilitated individual who happens to have a lot of power. According to one psychologist I was listening to yesterday that I thought made a lot of sense, there’s an element of frontotemporal dementia added to this that you see through the incoherence of the sentences, the drift of thought, and even the confusion of words so that the words don’t even end as they begin.
A man like this should not be president. This is the most basic point. He is president because of much deeper problems in the American political system. So, he is a symptom as well as a cause.
You don’t elect a person like this in a healthy political system. The American political system is deeply corrupted. The ability of a man like this to have the power that he does to order a war is a profoundly broken political order. It has nothing to do with our constitutional system where only Congress has the ability to declare war.
We’re so pathetic right now in our politics that the only thing Congress does is vote repeatedly that they don’t want to have anything to do with overseeing this war. It’s not a choice that they have under the Constitution. It’s a complete abnegation of responsibility. How can the Senate say now in three votes, “Don’t ask us. It’s none of our business. That’s just Mr. Trump’s business.” That’s exactly what the U.S. Senate has said.
So, I think that there are very particular circumstances right now. My own feeling is that Trump has actually, again, now I’m a completely amateur psychologist, but he seems to have deteriorated and lost any kind of self-control in the last three or four months. So, there’s a degree of impulsivity, which is absolutely beyond anything that I’ve seen before.
By the way, this is the second time in a row that we have had a president suffering from dementia. And what’s interesting also is that with Biden, who had dementia for the last two years, at least, of his administration, it was all covered up until he stood there gaping in front of a camera, drooling to all of the American people watching in a debate, and no one could hide it on camera.
My country’s pathetic right now in the political system. It’s a show. It’s PR. Anything can get said. There’s no planning. There’s no systematic review. There are no checks and balances. There’s nothing.
And this was true with Biden, but it’s much worse with Trump. Biden was not a nice person. I’ve known him for about 30 years. He never was a nice person. But he was not like Trump with a deeply antisocial personality disorder. And so, I just want to say we’re dealing with psychology here in the most individual sense.
This is denied every moment of public discourse. It’s just amazing.
I believe the following analysis by Dr. Sachs is the most profound, most important and most pertinent element of the real danger confronting us societally. Please read it carefully.
Take what happened in the last three days. First, the president said, “I’m going to blow up everything. I’m going to kill all of you.” Oh, then you have the commentators, “Oh, will he kill everybody?” Well, that’s an interesting question. Not, “Are we in the hands of a madman?” Nothing like that. Not one commentary says, “That’s a little strange for the president of the United States to be talking like that,” talking, sorry, like Adolf Hitler. No, not even a mention that this is a little strange.
Then two days later, when he decides he’s not going to kill everyone, he says, “Oh, we’re close to an agreement.” And of course, there was no negotiation, period. But what does the press say? “Oh, well, will Donald Trump be able to get an agreement?” Not, “What a loon. What a liar.” Nothing. It’s a complete normalization of something completely abnormal.
I’ve never seen anything like this. Who’s crazier, Trump or us? How can we not be grownups and say, “That man’s a loon! Get him out of there before he kills us all!” Nobody says this.
Sorry, this is not a partisan statement. I’ve hated all our recent presidents, because they don’t make us safe. They don’t tell the truth.
But this is something absolutely different, what’s happening right now. And it’s all normalized. And the New York Times story today, all I do these days is write irate letters to the reporters, whom I’ve known for decades, and they don’t write back. Because they don’t have the dignity to get into a serious discussion on anything. Sometimes, they write back, and they say, “Yeah, I agree with you, Jeff, but higher-ups edit my articles.” So, that’s the main thing: it’s a complete shutdown of truth at The New York Times, which used to be my go-to place to get just a straight story. It’s useless, completely useless right now.
But anyway, this story was, “Yes, will Donald Trump be able to negotiate a deal?” without mentioning how weird it is that there were no negotiations. But he said that there were. That’s the real story of the last day. That’s the really interesting story. Were there negotiations?
The story said, this is David Sanger, he’s an experienced journalist, 40 years. He says, “Well, Donald Trump didn’t tell us who he was negotiating with.” David, come on. Are you serious? You’re going to write back to me, “He didn’t tell who he was negotiating with”? Maybe, David, he wasn’t negotiating with anybody. Maybe he made it up. Can’t you ask a question as a grown-up, writing for The New York Times, who’s been doing this for 40 years?
So, I wrote to David this morning. I will not hear back from David—I’ve known David for probably 40 years—because they don’t talk, because we’re in really a crazy land right now, where anything goes, and the whole story is, “Well, what will Donald Trump do next?” As if this is a spectator sport. Not your life and not my life.
I’m more interested in when they’re going to take him away before he does more harm to us? When is some grown-up going to say, “This is a very bad idea?”
Okay, so that’s the immediate issue.
But the system is more deeply broken. There are no checks on presidential power to launch wars. And there haven’t been for decades, actually.
Congress basically doesn’t exist when it comes to foreign policy. It basically doesn’t exist. Because we live in a security state. Foreign policy is carried out by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Security Council. It’s not carried out by anything resembling democratic institutions at all. You may say, “Of course, Jeff. I had to come here to learn that?” But it’s rather alarming, actually, because it’s not only 2003. We’re in non-stop wars. Non-stop.
This is the first time I have heard a man of Professor Sachs’ public stature say out loud just how deeply the curses of denialism and unaccountability have dropped in our country—even to the point of enveloping society as we know it.
When our country can have two successive deranged presidents, one from each party, and American society refuses to even acknowledge the issue, it is an indictment not of Biden or Trump, but of America in its entirety. It means that as a society, as a culture and even at a faith level, we are totally and thoroughly corrupt.
Sachs is right. Corrupt, criminal and even crazy presidents are now normalized on both the Right and the Left, in both the Democrat and Republican parties, among the churched and the unchurched.
Corruption itself is now considered normal. And that’s the heart of our problem.
As a result, our religious leadership is corrupt; our economic leadership is corrupt; our political leadership is corrupt; our military leadership is corrupt; our educational leadership is corrupt; our corporate leadership is corrupt; our entertainment leadership is corrupt; our information leadership is corrupt; our intelligence leadership is corrupt; our medical leadership is corrupt.
Professor Sachs’ plea, “Get him out of there before he kills us all,” is not biased political theater; it is the heartfelt cry from a man who knows his country is drowning in corruption, and his educated instincts fear the worst.
I continue to maintain that the corruption of American society began with the corruption of the American pulpit. Pulpits on the left tolerated and justified Biden. Pulpits on the right tolerate and justify Trump. The result: The moral compass of America is gone.
It should not matter if one is an evangelical Protestant or a mainline Protestant or a Roman Catholic or Greek or Russian Orthodox or a person of no faith system; one should understand that no nation is long for this world when it ubiquitously loses the principles of basic human integrity, honesty and character.
If the American people do not “get him out of there” and he is allowed to “kill us all,” history will judge the death of America not as a homicide but as a suicide.
Article posted with permission from Chuck Baldwin
