New York
Much of world history is a police blotter of madmen’s crimes. Seldom is it recorded, let alone acknowledged, that victims play a supportive rôle in villainy.
That is, we victims consign wrongs and wickedness suffered to disposable memory—simply writing off our wounds to the general depravity of psychopaths, a strata of society we wish to remain distant from our better selves. Thus, tormentors are simply “insane,” a damning label that frees us from considering the complexity of human cruelty.
“Voluntary ignorance” is what the British novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) called this conundrum. As he wrote in a 1956 essay for Esquire magazine, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons history has to teach.”
Beyond the long sweep of history, lessons are either learned or ignored in the teachable moments and warning signs of modern-day life. Take, for instance, the biographical digest of an octogenarian given some prominence:
He’s been getting away with murder, so to speak, ever since he was a lad in the 1960s tasked to hauling out large bags of coins from laundry machines in his old man’s racially segregated cluster of apartment houses—seven high-rise buildings containing the near four thousand homes. The haul would be transported, via the lad’s usual chauffeur-driven limousine, to whichever Brooklyn bank asked least about the purity of cash deposits.
Such purity was a mark of banking integrity in the decades prior to a modern-day deceit. Namely, “cryptocurrency” from the Greek kryptos, meaning “hidden” or “secret,” and “currency” as a medium of exchange for goods and services.
A pair of fun facts:
- Legend has it that Brooklyn-born Italian-American mobster Al Capone (1899-1947) conceived of “money laundering,” whereby he mixed illicit cash revenues from his bootlegging and prostitution operations with lawful cash generated from his string of neighborhood laundromats. Thus, dirty money came clean in the wash.
- The aforementioned limousine lad who once hauled bags of laundry machine coins to Brooklyn banks, who you might guess is named Donald John Trump, is today America’s first multiply accused rapist and convicted felon (thirty-four counts of fraudulent business records arising from pay-offs to a pornographic movie star) to become president. In 2025, the first year of his second White House term, the convict Donald Trump bested Al Capone by raking in $1.4 billion (€1.26) billion) of income from cryptocurrency ventures, as required by U.S. financial disclosure law. In a single year, such accumulation of sketchy wealth was acquired by one American as hundreds of millions of the rest of us knew economic distress.
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It is doubtful that Mr. Trump’s demise will fully echo that of his fellow criminal and South Florida gourmand, the late Signore Capone—who won early release from Alcatraz prison in California due to dementia caused by untreated syphilis. Despite the foul odor of his riches—grifting and grafting seems the purpose of his presidency—Mr. Trump will likely be spared the indignity of a lock-up as his final resting place, à la Al Capone. Instead, he will probably die not so many years from now at his gaudy Mar-a-Lago resort whilst munching on a bucket of wings and thighs from Kentucky Fried Chicken and surrounded by a decidedly small group of loved ones.
—Either a deathbed at Mar-a-Lago or in exiled custody at a rococo-style compound outside Moscow provided by his authoritarian idol, Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, we must endure a final two years of the Trump regime, which apart from enriching his family and himself has revealed an aging man’s spiral into dementia. Not a day goes by in which someone of respectable presence calls Donald Trump flat-out insane. So, too, a trinity of his top ministers: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kashyap Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
None of these men, Mr. Trump included, are unfamiliar players on the American stage. Of the president himself, a bit of dialogue from Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy “Hamlet” comes to mind: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”
As applied to the tragedy that is the story of Trump, an apt paraphrase might be, “Alas, we knew ye, Donnie…only too well.”
Which is to say that the 80-year-old president has been a headliner on the business, social, and media scenes for a long time—displaying himself variously as a brash real estate developer, a bankrupt casino operator, a Manhattan swain with an eye for very young females, and a television host presiding over a weekly pageant of noxious corporate culture as a launchpad for his political career.
Not a day goes by in which someone suggests that Mr. Trump be stripped of his badly-tailored suits and fitted out for a straitjacket, that French invention of apparel used for physical restraint of the insane.
But is Donald Trump insane all by himself? What is the mentality of those tens of millions of American voters who knowingly elected a madman to the highest office in the land? They are not so much victims as they are accomplices.
CRAZY CLOTHES. Ambroise Tardieu engraving of a mental patient in camisole de force (straitjacket)
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Lest anyone believe diagnoses of lunacy given to Donald Trump and his high-ranking underlings are unwarranted, consider a brief sampling of their unsettling notions—words and deeds given over to the silo of voluntary ignorance, per Aldous Huxley’s estimation:
Pete Hegseth. As top commander of the world’s most powerful military establishment, he stands unafraid of microscopic enemies. During a 2019 appearance on Fox Television, Mr. Hegseth confessed to not having washed his hands in ten years, reasoning: “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A long-time anti-vaccination kook and roadkill epicure, he is an embarrassment to American political royalty as peopled by relatives of the late President John F. Kennedy, his brother assassinated in 1963. As chief of government medical policy, RFK Jr.’s odd theories might well relate to a self-described disorder. In a 2012 divorce court deposition, he testified that an Xray had detected an abnormality in his skull caused by a “worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” (Presumably, the worm corpse remains lodged in some uneaten section of his encephalon.)
Kashrap “Kash” Patel. A true believer in Donald Trump’s bitter fantasy of being robbed of reëlection in a “rigged” 2020 contest (a claim by Trump loyalists in some sixty lawsuits all debunked in state and federal courts), the F.B.I.’s top man broke out his pen-and-brush coloring kit to document a conspiracy against the boss by way of a children’s comic book titled “The Plot Against the King.” In Mr. Patel’s telling, the plot was orchestrated by “Hillary Queenton” (aka Hillary Clinton) against “King Donald,” and featured himself as the “wizard of Kash” who exposes the wicked corruption that stalled Mr. Trump’s second four-year term until its commencing in 2024.
As for Mr. Trump, he remains a gushing fountain of crazy talk from the moment in late morning when he awakes in his White House bedchamber, minus the presence of First Lady Melania, until the black of night when he posts social media insults to good people he envies and racist sentiments about the dark-complexioned segments of American society, whom he despises.
Regarding the latter, Mr. Trump had this to say about Haitian immigrants welcomed via special work visas to a small post-industrial city in the state of Ohio as eager workers in a revival of the local economy: “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in are eating the cats. They’re eating…they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”
This insanity was voiced by Donald Trump in a televised debate with Kamala Harris, his opponent in the presidential election campaign of 2024—resulting in a resounding defeat of Ms. Harris when voters with mental shortcomings of their own brought on the shameful state of our union.
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As I write, we are days away from the most consequential election of my lifetime, in which the promise of hope contends with the sledgehammer of irony.
Hope for my beloved country, in that we may see past the often amusing spectacle of insanity from on high to recognize the irony of how our own disfunction has served as a permission structure for fools.
Donald Trump is not on the ballot this time, but his slavish sycophants in the United States Congress are. They must be trounced—soundly—as a first step toward restoring democratic norms to what has become cruel and unusual governance imposed by a gangster administration that has robbed us of international respect.
Hope that we shall not soon forget the moral stain of these past ten Years of Trump.
Hope that we will heed the words of Michele Goldberg, a columnist for the New York Times: “If there’s one lesson of the last decade, it’s never believe it can’t happen here.”
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THOMAS ADCOCK
U.S. correspondent
His essays with us: click here.
