Donald Trump and maga Republicans wrecking America's reputation in Europe anti-American sentiment rising

I just got back from Europe. Anti-American sentiment is on the rise
Opinion essay echo published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian.

It was midday just before Easter in Paris. 

My niece and I walked past the city’s famous opera house, where tourists were relaxing on the wide steps. French soldiers armed with assault rifles strolled around, a comforting sight given the warnings about Iran-backed sleeper cells and potential retaliatory attacks. 

A busker with a guitar and a microphone entertained the crowd with a Coldplay cover.

Between songs, he asked, “Anyone here speak English?” Unbelievably, not a single hand went up.

The busker shrugged, turned both thumbs down in the universal gesture of disapproval, and said, “America, eh?” I felt him.

A couple of days after I got home, I saw a social media post that reminded me of that moment. “Honestly,” wrote @_thatambitiousgirl, “I don’t know how anyone could even feel comfortable traveling as an American outside of the U.S. right now.”

Anti-American sentiment is on the rise, and it sucks being from a country whose presidents do things like threaten to end a “whole civilization,” invade Middle Eastern countries based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, or insert themselves into pointless conflicts in faraway lands. 

In college, I had friends who sewed Canadian flags onto their backpacks because they didn’t want to be associated with America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia.

Polls show that half of Europeans view Donald Trump, who has threatened to withdraw from NATO, as an enemy rather than an ally. He has managed the neat trick of telling our allies they are useless while castigating them for not rushing to help with his poorly planned and illegal war on Iran. “This is not our war,” the German defense minister said pointedly last month. “We have not started it.”


Quite simply, with the assent of the Republican Party, Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the world order as we’ve known it in our lifetimes, while also managing to make life harder for Americans at home.

“We’re worse off in every way, and officially a global pariah,” said the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Facebook this week. “Awesome. Love that.”

Anyway, I was glad to see that someone I know, the novelist Erin Zhurkin, responded thoughtfully to @_that ambitiousgirl’s Instagram post.

Donald Trump is a Republican wrecking ball

Been an American abroad for 20 years now,” wrote Zhurkin, whose Russian-born American husband is an executive with Renault. “Six countries so far. People are in general curious and grateful that I can see my country from all sides….I try to represent the heart of the US, which I believe is about being open to all people and finding commonalities rather than differences.”

This, truly, is the heart of the matter.

 In the fall of 1967, my family moved from Northridge to France, where my father had a year-long Fulbright teaching scholarship at the University of Pau. Before we got on the airplane, my mother sat the four of her rambunctious kids down.

“It’s very important that you not be ‘Ugly Americans,’ ” she told us. We were too young to have read the classic 1958 novel she was referring to, but we understood that we were to be curious and respectful and maybe not yell, as we unfortunately did, “Yuck, this is NOT a hot dog,” during our first meal in Paris.

One winter evening in Pau, my parents took us to an anti-war demonstration, as they had done many times in Los Angeles. The locals we marched with were chanting something we couldn’t quite make out. It sounded to our American ears like “Yohn-kee go ohm.” We figured it out pretty quickly, and frankly, it was unsettling.

Zhurkin had a similar experience in Moscow, in the early 1990s, at a kiosk near Red Square. “An older Russian lady looked at me, and in a thick Russian accent said, ‘Yankee, go home,’ ” Zhurkin told me by phone from Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she and her family had moved in September from Seoul. “It opened up this whole feeling inside of me that there is something about my country that may not be as wonderful as it seems. It was a huge, perspective-breaking moment for me.”

Years later, Zhurkin was living in Paris. Trump had just been elected to his first term.

“I could not get into a taxi without someone asking me why I would let this happen, as if it was all me,” Zhurkin said. “They’d say, ‘I can’t believe you Americans are so stupide.’ I was like, ‘Look, I didn’t vote for him.’” Still, she said, “I feel like I am apologizing all the time.”

By the time President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, Zhurkin said, her family had moved to Ireland, where the vibe was much more “Thank God you guys got your act together.”

Maybe in the not-too-distant future, we will again. And then we can start to put this long national hideous nightmare behind us.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian

Donald Trump needs psychiatric care and behavioral health counseling. He creates evil and Republicans must remove him from office!

Re: “Donald Trump talks like a genocidal maniac” — Sun Sentinel Editorial, April 8, 2026.

I hope Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine will find somebody to read this echo opinion letter to her, published in the Florida Sun Sentinel.

Thank you for your excellent editorial about Donald Trump’s un-fitness for office.

Trump revealed a murderous philosophy shared by other 20th century dictators: genocide. On social media he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz and end hostilities (a war Trump himself unilaterally and illegally launched against Iran).

Trump's hideous statement was condemned around the world, and it should have shaken every American to their core.

Such an evil threat cannot be dismissed just because he failed to carry out his apocalyptic blackmail threat. 

Just the fact that he made such a dangerous declaration, and is capable of such thinking, is proof about his sociopathic mind.

As the former Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on tyranny and genocide, put it, “Whatever happens tonight, or any other night in this war, is now legally defined by Donald Trump's dangerous statement.”

Snyder says Trump practices “sado-populism,” using threats and cruelty to subdue his perceived opponents while sabotaging democracy by “destroying institutional trust.” Trump has spoken. 

We must repudiate Donald Trump. Americans must reject his tyranny. #ImpeachTrumpNOW  #25thAmendment

From — June S. Neal, in Delray Beach, Florida

Donald Trump is crazy! Full Stop! He must be removed from office, impeached or by 25th Amendment- NOW!

Echo opinion letter published in CAPTimes, a Wisconsin newspaper:

Dear Editor: Donald Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran. It's been fragile, the details sketchy at best. But for now he has backed off from his draconian threats to Iran.

Those threats to destroy Iran's non-military infrastructure of bridges, power plants and water desalinization systems, if carried out, would be considered war crimes under the Geneva Convention.

Of course there are those who would say that Trump's draconian threats to end the civilization of Iran is just Trump being Trump. Just a negotiating technique.

But, I contend, and it's of utmost importance for everyone to remember, that Trump knows, the Iranians know, and we should all know, that in any real serious negotiation such as the one between the United States and Iran, there is no place or purpose for the completely idle threat. He really thinks he might blow Iran into "smithereens." When we consider that, along with Trump's escalating psychological instability, think malignant narcissism, we can only conclude the president is not well. Not well at all.

This incompetence makes Trump now totally unfit to carry out the duties of the presidency, and not only puts our United States system of government in crisis mode, but also puts the rest of the world on existential standby.

The time for invocation of the 25th Amendment should be at hand. There has never been a more pressing moment in our country's modern history when that has been more apparent and important.

From Bill Walters in Fitchburg Wisconsin

Republicans like Senator Susan Collins are enabling Donald Trump's war crimes. GOP must stop Donald Trump's insane tranny

Echo Editorial Opinion published by The New York Times:

Four Ways Trump’s War Is Weakening America

When Donald Trump attacked Iran on February 28, 2026, we called his decision reckless. 

Donald Trump is inept, corrupt a dunce in KKK attire

Trump went to war without seeking congressional approval or the support of most allies. He offered thin and contradictory justifications to the American people. He failed to explain why this naïve attempt at regime change would end better than earlier attempts by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In the six weeks since, the recklessness of his war has become clearer yet. He has disdained careful military planning and acted on gut instinct and strange wishfulness. 

After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel predicted to  Trump that the attacks would inspire a popular uprising in Iran, the director of the C.I.A. countered that the notion was “farcical,” The Times reported. But, Trump proceeded nonetheless. 

Without consideration for the consequences, Trump was so confident that he assembled no plan to respond to an obvious countermove available to Iran: causing a spike in oil prices by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Nor did he develop a feasible strategy for securing the enriched uranium that Iran can use to rebuild its nuclear program.

Last week, Trump careened from illegal and immoral threats about erasing Iranian civilization to a last-minute cease-fire that accomplishes few of his announced war aims. Iran continues to defy a central part of the deal and block most traffic from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s irresponsibility has left the United States on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat.

As we have emphasized, Iran’s regime deserves no sympathy. It has spent decades oppressing its people and sponsoring terrorism elsewhere. And the current war, combined with the June attacks by the United States and Israel and other Israeli operations since 2023, weakened Iran in important ways. Its navy, air force and air defenses have been degraded, and its nuclear program has been set back. Its murderous network of regional allies — including Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria’s fallen government — has been eroded.

Yet, these successes cannot mask the ways in which the war has weakened the United States. 

We count four main setbacks for America’s national interests that are the direct result of Trump’s carelessness. These setbacks likewise weaken global democracy when authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere were already feeling emboldened.

The most tangible blow to the United States and the world is the increased influence that Iran secured over the global economy by weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz. About 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows through the strait, which is next to Iran’s southern shore.

Before the war, Iran’s leaders feared that blocking traffic would invite new economic sanctions and a military attack. Once the attack happened anyway, Iran closed the strait to nearly all traffic except its own ships. The policy is inexpensive because it mostly involves a threat, namely that a drone, missile or small boat may blow up a tanker. Forcibly reopening the strait, by contrast, would require an enormous military operation potentially including ground troops and an extended occupation.

Trump’s lack of foresight about the strait reveals glaring incompetence. The two-week cease-fire does not bring back the status quo because Iran is still limiting traffic and has threatened to impose tolls as part of a final peace deal. The war has shown Iran’s leaders that controlling the waterway is a real possibility. Eventually, other countries are likely to develop alternatives, including pipelines, but those solutions will take time. For now, Iran appears to have won diplomatic leverage that it could have only dreamed of six weeks ago. The only apparent way to change the situation would be for a global coalition to demand the strait’s reopening — the sort of coalition that Trump is distinctly unsuited to lead.

The second setback is to America’s military standing around the world. This war, together with recent U.S. assistance to Ukraine, Israel and other allies, has burned through a substantial portion of the stockpile of some weapons, such as Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors (which can shoot down other missiles). Experts believe the Pentagon used more than one-quarter of its Tomahawk missiles just in the war against Iran. Returning the stockpile to its previous size will take years, and the United States will have to make tough choices about where to maintain its military strength in the meantime. Already, the Pentagon has pulled missile defenses from South Korea.

The war also revealed that the U.S. military is vulnerable to new ways of warfare. 

For example, America used billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech munitions to destroy Iran’s traditional air and naval forces, while Tehran used cheap, disposable drones to halt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and hit targets in the region. The world saw how a country that spends one-hundredth of what the United States does on its military can seek to outlast it in a conflict. It is a reminder of the urgent need to reform America’s military.

The war’s third big cost is to America’s alliances. Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and most of Western Europe refused to support the United States in this war — unsurprisingly, given Mr. Trump’s treatment of them. When he demanded their help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, most allies declined. These countries will remain allies in important ways, but they have made clear that they no longer consider the United States a reliable friend. They are working to build stronger relationships with one another so that they can better resist Washington in the future. “Perhaps the greatest long-term damage to the United States from the Iran war will be in its relationships with allies around the world,” Daniel Byman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote on Wednesday.

The situation in the Middle East is more nuanced. Iran’s decision to attack its Arab neighbors during the war may draw those countries closer to the United States. But that prospect is uncertain. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries have been damaged economically by the war and feel abandoned by Mr. Trump’s cease-fire. The past six weeks have given them reason to question his judgment and his understanding of their interests.

The fourth setback is to America’s moral authority. For all the flaws of this country, it remains a beacon to many around the world. When pollsters ask people where they would move if they could, the United States is consistently the runaway No. 1 answer. America’s appeal stems not only from its prosperity but also from its freedom and democratic values. Mr. Trump has undercut those values for his entire political career and perhaps never more than in the past week, when he made odious threats to erase Iranian civilization. Trump's (whiskey) secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, made a series of bloodthirsty remarks, including a threat to offer “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Those would be war crimes. Trump and Hegseth have embraced a brutal approach to armed conflict that the United States led the world in rejecting after World War II. By doing so, they have undermined the foundations of America’s global leadership, which claims to place human dignity at the center of an argument for a freer and more open world.

Our New York Times editorial board has long opposed Mr. Trump’s approach to politics and governing. Yet we take no pleasure in his failures over the past six weeks. For one thing, there have been deaths, injuries and destruction, in Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. At least 13 U.S. service members have died in the war.

It is also a mistake for any Americans, including Trump’s critics, to root for this country to fail. We all have a stake in the nation that he leads. So does the rest of the free world. There are no other democracies with the economic and military strength to counter China and Russia. When America is weaker and poorer, as this war has made us, authoritarianism benefits.

The best hope now may sound naïve, but it remains true. Trump(and Republicans like Senator Susan Collins) must at long last recognize the ineptitude of his impulsive, go-it-alone approach. 

Trump must involve Congress and seek help from America’s allies to minimize the damage from his failed Trump Iran World War.

Republicans must remove Donald Trump before he annihilates earth with his hate and vengeance

Echo opinion letter to the editor published in The Gazette, an Iowa newspaper.

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Congress, do your job and rein in Trump

How many of us have been in a restaurant or grocery store where a child is having a meltdown, screaming and crying, while their parents seem oblivious to the tantrum and let it continue❓ When I am confronted with this disruptive and annoying behavior, my response is not anger at the child, but anger at the parent who will not act to control the outburst.

This demonstrates how I feel about Congress as it continues to ignore the tantrum happening every day in the White House. 

Donald Trump clearly is unhinged❗ He's not well. Like a toddler, he is unable to regulate his emotions or his words. Like the parents of the child freaking out in the grocery store, Congress is responsible for reining in Trump's behavior, including his illegal war and his appalling threats to destroy "a whole civilization." 

Rep. Ashley Hinson and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, along with Senator Chuck Grassley, vowed to defend the U.S. Constitution, not the president. For the sake of humanity, please control your unruly child or we voters must elect someone who will.

From Sheri Albrecht in Solon, Iowa

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are putting U.S Navy in danger by deploying too many ships without a purpose

Editorial opinion published in the Virginian Pilot:

Donald Trump's war crimes demand Congressional investigation.

As church services marked Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, Donald Trump spent the morning threatening war crimes against Iran by claiming he would order the attacking of essential infrastructure if that nation’s leadership didn’t accede to his demands. Donald Trump's latest incendiary messaging continues his reckless pattern of violating international laws, putting servicemembers in greater danger and undermining American security.

Trump’s war of choice may be delivering successful blows on the battlefield, but it looms as a generational strategic disaster, driving oil prices higher and calcifying the control extremists have on the Iranian government. As the home to thousands of men and women fighting this conflict, Hampton Roads must press its congressional delegation to demand better from the president, and to assert legislative authority over war operations to bring our people home quickly.

Last week, another carrier strike group homeported in Norfolk departed for the Middle East, the latest deployment of servicemembers from our region to the ill-defined war of choice with Iran. The USS George H.W. Bush and its roughly 5,000 sailors are expected to arrive in the region soon, adding to the estimated 50,000 personnel the United States now has positioned in the Middle East, according to New York Times reporting.

As Congress debates the White House’s 💲200 billion request for continued operations there, our men and women in uniform should be foremost in lawmakers’ minds, just as their swift and safe return dominates our thoughts in Hampton Roads. Those who volunteer to serve this country deserve clearly stated goals, achievable objectives and defined rules of engagement to ensure both their success and to confirm their mission is just and legal — none of which has been forthcoming since operations began a month ago.

Our region (in Norfolk and Hampton Roads) has seen plenty of ships depart these shores over the years, both in periods of peace and in times of war, so the scenes that played out last week at Naval Station Norfolk were quite familiar as the USS Bush headed out to sea.

But, knowing where the strike group is headed is cause for queasiness. Trump has repeatedly used the social media platform he owns to threaten the destruction of numerous targets that, if struck, would be egregious violations of the Geneva Convention. These include Iranian power stations, roads and bridges, oil wells and the desalination plants that provide drinking water to the public.

Perhaps Americans have grown calloused to the president’s saber-rattling, just as they have come to accept his other orders that constitute war crimes, 💢❗including the extrajudicial killing of people aboard boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. But, we should be keenly aware of the danger ⚠️his behavior represents.

In one egregious example, Trump said the March 4, sinking of an Iranian frigate, a strike that killed more than 100 sailors, was done because it was “more fun” than capturing the vessel. It was a comment that chilled the blood of everyone in our Navy-centric region who knows that international law requires an effort to rescue survivors, which the USS Charlotte did not make.

While Iran, thankfully,  may not have the capability to respond in kind to American ships, our nation’s enemies have surely taken note of our conduct in this war and could use it to justify similarly calloused and reprehensible behavior in future conflicts.

Trump’s unhinged and vulgar social media post this Easter weekend follows his listless address last week in which he claimed the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed since the U.S. and Israel attacks, is a problem for Europe and Asia. Trump claimed during his nationally televised chaotic speech that the strait “will open up naturally.”  

(OMG- Will Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves suddenly show up with the magical command to "Open-Sesame"❓ Of course not❗)

None of this inspires confidence in the leadership or direction of these operations, or that they will result in a stronger, more secure nation. Congress has been on the sidelines for too long and members, led by those who represent our region, should assert their constitutional authority to bring focus, responsibility and a swift conclusion to this illegal Trump war.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are not telling Americans the truth about how Iranian children were victims of U.S. missile attacks

Unfortunately, we’ve seen this disturbing pattern before.

Echo opinion essay published in the Virginian Pilot and the Los Angeles Times. 

Photos of a number of Iranian children who were victims in the U.S. missile attacks.

A U.S. deadly missile strike. An initial statement emphasizing precision. Then, later, reports that civilians — including many children — were among the dead. In Afghanistan, through the early and mid-2000s, these reports came so often they formed a grim pattern. Each incident is explained as an anomaly, but over time, the pattern itself became the story.

Now, similar reports are emerging from Iran. A new investigation alleges that a Feb. 28, strike by the U.S. hit an elementary school and sports hall in the southern city of Lamerd, with children once again among the dead. U.S. Central Command has since denied carrying out any strike in or near Lamerd that day, calling the reports false.

Independent verification is difficult because Iran shut down its internet, but Americans should nevertheless be concerned, especially after at least 175 people including many children were reported killed in a U.S. strike on a different school in Minab 😢that same day. The cycle is familiar, with allegations of civilian harm followed by official denials, and no independent access to quickly verify the facts.

Sarah Yager says she was a civilian protection adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first Trump administration. "I worked inside the Pentagon with military professionals who took the issue of civilian harm seriously. They saw avoiding civilian casualties as a matter of military discipline and their own humanity. I know what it looks like when civilian protection works. But, obviously, this isn’t it."

Over more than two decades of armed conflict, U.S. efforts to reduce civilian harm have moved in fits and starts, with periods of progress followed by setbacks and recurring mass casualty events. Pressure often came from civil society, public outrage and negative headlines, but also from within the armed forces. Senior commanders came to see civilian casualties not just as “collateral damage,” but also as operationally counterproductive.

That recognition led to real changes including tighter rules, better intelligence practices and eventually the creation of systems within the Pentagon meant to track, investigate and learn lessons to reduce harm. By the time U.S. troops were withdrawing from Kabul in 2021, those lessons were just beginning to be institutionalized across the armed forces.

What is happening now is undoing that progress. Safeguards built over years are being torn down, and it is unclear whether senior military leaders are willing to push back.

There are warning signs that in this policy environment, the U.S. military will not be led to correct its course. 

Defense Secretary (Wiskey❗) Pete Hegseth publicly dismissed what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” and emphasized making the military “more lethal.” 💢🤢😔

At the same time, Hegseth has weakened or sidelined efforts designed to reduce civilian harm in war.

Before and since the start of the U.S. war on Iran, there has been little sustained public debate and no congressional hearings about the risks of American military action in Iran, including the inevitable civilian casualties that result from using powerful explosive weapons in populated areas. During the war in Afghanistan, each deadly strike on a wedding party or family compound did more than take civilian lives. It fueled anger at the U.S. and magnified skepticism that our military was trying to minimize civilian harm in any way.

Americans are entitled to clear answers about who and what is being targeted, what its military is doing to protect Iranian civilians and how possible violations of the laws of war are being investigated. This is basic public oversight that should accompany the use of military force. When incidents are openly disputed, as in the Lamerd strike, the need for impartial and transparent investigations becomes more, not less, important. If the U.S. military was acting lawfully, it should show it. But, if it wasn’t, the public deserves to know that too.

The United States has long claimed to fight according to international law and to benefit from doing so. 

But, that means little if the rules are mocked and actions don’t match reality. Waiting to recognize these patterns of civilian harm, and to correct them, will once again cost lives.

Sarah Yager is the Washington director of Human Rights Watch and previously served in the Department of Defense. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans failed. They communicate with disorderly incoherence

It has been clear for a long time that Donald Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. 

In the conflict with Iran, the most potent antagonist has been the Trump administration’s own incoherence.

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner

What the past few months, especially the past few weeks, have brought into focus is how Trump's pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his corrupt administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Donald Trump’s second term: a tragically psychotic state.

This probably does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.

In that respect, Donald Trump’s second term is different from his first. In 2020, he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But, he could not translate his fantasies into reality — at least not usually. In the second chaotic term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since his Day 1.

It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.

Unbelievably, the dangerous 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 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 was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, 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, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, Donald Trump's erratic position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”

Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before starting a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.

Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.

This is far from normal.

Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, (Central Intelligence Agency) aka, C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.

A policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But, nevertheless, it is vital❗ Hard questions are asked to assess the competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify (or not) and prepares for contingencies.

In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.

Policy judgments should be made by the president, not by subordinate agencies and experts. But irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.

When an agency goes haywire, the administration might rush to stabilize it — for example, at the Department of Homeland Security, where chaos and brutality led to the killing of two American citizens right on the street in Minneapolis. But until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.

Understandably, scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to fit Trump 2.0 into any number of at least somewhat rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, the madman theory, spheres of influence, imperialism and more. Some of those frameworks can help illuminate the president and the people around him. As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.
Which leaves everyone wondering: ❓What are ❓the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions and not reliably in touch with reality❓ It’s impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.

This puts our nation and allies in the precarious, but not hopeless, position of over relying on the rational guardrails that we need and remain. Some of these guardrails are within the executive branch: in the federal bureaucracies and the military services, where nodes of ordinary practice and process carry on as best they can. Still more important are guardrails in the other branches of government. The courts have remained independent and tethered to reality. Congress has quietly nixed some of Mr. Trump’s wildest nominees and overruled some of the administration’s destructive impulses, such as its attack on the science budget. State governments, especially in blue states, have been using the courts and their own policies to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda and demand accountable behavior from Washington.

Perhaps most important, the public supports effective and responsive government, not the wild swings of a fugue state — and it is making its feelings known.

Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.

As the Trump cult era (hopefully) winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, but 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.