President Donald Trump holds pens as he speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., March 26, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The U.S. government has seemingly never been more incoherent and chaotic than it is now, and according to a new analysis from the New York Times, this is because President Donald Trump's own broken brain has rendered the rest of his administration "psychotic."
Writing for the Times on Friday morning, Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, laid out the extensive examples of how Trump's "disorganized mind and a disordered personality" have so thoroughly seeped into the rest of the government around him. While not claiming to diagnose Trump or any of his allies with a specific disorder, they explained that the White House now "lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently," as a direct result of the president's "grandiosity, his impulsivity, inconsistency and his outright breaks with reality" becoming "state policy."
"What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how the president’s pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration," Rauch and Wehner wrote. "They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is because it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state."
By way of example, the pair presented the ongoing debacle with the war in Iran, arguing that it "has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem," whereby "the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence."
"The Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t," the pair detailed. "The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it had been 'obliterated' last June."
They continued: "The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, and then said the waterway would somehow 'open itself.' He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon, and that the war would end “when I feel it … in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran 'can change by the sentence.'"
The complete incoherence of this approach is "not incidental in this administration," the analysis added, arguing that it is the entire "modus operandi" of the Trump government. As evidence, the piece further cited the mass chaos of the DOGE cuts, the president's flip-flop on support for foreign wars and his tendency to alter tariff rates on a whim.
Rauch and Wehner concluded that Trump's governmental madness cannot continue forever, as "reality always reasserts itself," but at that point, "severe damage" will have already been done that could take a "generation" to repair.
"As the Trump era winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten," the pair wrote. "Institutions need to be reformed, not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all."