Fintan O'Toole on Trump's madman strategy

The power may send us mad is a rule of politics and history that goes way, way back before Dr. Freud. When riding in triumph through Rome, Caesar's slaves stood behind him in the chariot, whispering into the emperazia, remember you are a man.

No one as far as we know is keeping Trump's pride in check as he parades through Washington in the back of the beast. He lives surrounded by sycophants who tell him he is indeed the omnipotent leader he imagines himself to be.

Cabinet members do it for the cameras. Trump glows. It's a horrible sight. Fintano Tool's diagnosis is that, while not mentally ill, Trump is in a broader sense

mad. The madness of King Donald is the subject he's pursued in the last couple of months first in the Irish Times, then the New York Review of Books, now on Late Night Live.

This man's writing reaps prizes, his books are celebrated, he's a regular contributor to both those publications, teaches Irish literature at Princeton. Fintan, welcome back to the show. It's a real pleasure to be with you, ladies.

Now Fintan, explain to us this difference. Not mentally ill, but mad. Yeah, so the mentally ill thing, none of us is Donald Trump psychiatrist, thanks be to God.

And it's impertinent for anybody to try and diagnose somebody from a distance. It's unethical, and you just don't do it. However, there's good reasons why we have this broader term,

MAD, which has been around for a very long time, and which we recognize as uncontrolled, irrational behavior, a delusional state of mind. I think maybe a good place to start with this

is the diagnosis made by Pope Leo, which obviously got under Donald Trump's skin to the extent that he started attacking the Pope and posting images of himself as Jesus Christ,

which is what you remember the phrase that Leo used, which was the delusion of omnipotence. And omnipotence is a delusion, right? Even the presidents of the United States,

Bob Dylan reminds us must sometimes have to stand naked. We are saying because we have some sense of the limits of our own will. It's increasingly obvious that Trump has no real sense of limitation. He's utterly disinhibited.

He's disinhibited politically because he's just surrounded himself by sycophants. He has a Republican Congress that will basically not stand up to him at all, no matter what he does. He's also disinhibited, I think personally.

You know, he's at an age when his ability to control his own behavior has become more and more limited. But I wonder about that posting of the picture of himself as Jesus Christ.

I mean, it's funny, it's bizarre, it's all of those things. But from his point of view, maybe he's just saying to the Pope, I don't give a damn.

I really do not give a damn what people think of me. You call yourself Pope, well, I'm gonna call myself Jesus. Yeah, oh yeah, he is, you know.

And then I mean, the question is, is that mad? I mean, so we have to stand back a little bit here and always remember that we're sort of used to dealing with binaries, you know, that there's, on the one hand,

there's somebody who is playing mad, you know, in Shakespeare's terms, and Hamlet has put on an antique disposition. And on the other hand, there's a reality of what is this guy really like. And you see that distinction between performance on the one side

and reality on the other side just doesn't work with Trump. His persona is shaped entirely around performance. The proposition I would put forward is that it's perfectly reasonable to think both that he is indeed Think mad as in you know, I know what I'm doing when I'm posting an image of myself as Jesus

And actually is mad in a sense that that there's a deep sense in which he does believe and more recent reporting, you know since I wrote my own pieces, but it's been Interesting reporting since and in the Atlantic and other places, you know with insiders in the Trump administration saying He does believe that he is the most powerful human being has ever existed on the planet

You know, he's not comparing himself anymore To George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He's comparing himself to Alexander the Great Julius Caesar and Napoleon And he kind of sees himself as kind of the best of them all this is What's playing out? Yes, you know

Now, Trump's defenders say, look, he's only playing mad. And he's playing mad in order to terrify his opponents into thinking he might do anything and therefore out of fear they cave into him. Now what do you think about that theory?

Well, you see, it's quite possible that in his own mind he is playing mad. You know, there's a very interesting passage in the art of the deal, that infamous book that was ghost written for him, but that kind of created his persona. And he describes in that when he's a young man, he's a student and his first big property development, actually funded by his

daddy of course, but he buys a block of apartments in Cincinnati and there's, you know, some people who won't pay their rent. And he describes his huge admiration for this guy called Irving, you know, who goes around and screams at people and screams at, and he describes Irving's screaming obscenities at a 10 year old girl. And he doesn't describe this in horror, he describes it as,

you know, kind of something that he says it made a big impression on me, you know, being so outrageous, so completely crazy that you just might kill a 10 year old girl, you know, makes everybody to collect the rent. You know, and it's mafia stuff, of course. And, you know, he's deeply shaped by all that mentality. So there's no question that in his mind, I think he

thinks he's playing the mafia enforcer, you know, however, that doesn't mean he's not crazy. So if you go back to the madman theory, which, you know, is the name that Richard Nixon gave to it. It goes back a long way, right? It's in statecraft, but it's very interesting if you look at Henry Kissinger, who of course became Nixon's sidekick, and was a very major theorist of

political power. Kissinger says, well, yeah, the problem with the madman theory is you can't