Alan Zendell, May 27, 2026

Every day, at least one person asks me, “How can Donald Trump ______?” You fill in the blank. I always answer the same way. We can’t possibly know what motivates Donld Trump deep down, because we can’t see everything through the filter of a sociopathic, megalomaniacal narcissist. I know that’s a lot of syllables, but claiming to know how his mental illness influences everything he says and does is like me talling my wife I know what it feels like to give birth. I can’t possibly.

In the sixteen months of his second term, Trump has become even more unhinged. The Republican majorities in Congress and Trump’s hand picked Supreme Court have virtually unfettered him from inconveniences like the Constitution. With the exception of Trump’s illegal tariffs, there has been virtually no oversight of the Executive Branch by either the Legislative or Judiciary Branches. With neither checks nor balances, surrounded by yes-people and sycophants, Trump acts as if he really believes he is not only the King of America but the most powerful and respected leader in the world.

Since Inauguration Day, it’s been extremely painful for Americans who love to see Trump parade around like the naked emperor of Hans Christian Anderson’s 1837 fable. He is a laughing stock among world leaders, which is hardly a laughing matter. In Beijing, Trump fawned over Xi Jinping, calling them the G2 and receiving nothing but diplomatic courtesy in return, only to have Vladimir Putin visit Beijing for a mutual love fest with Xi as soon as Trump left.

No one outside his core MAGA base respects Trump. Surely, foreign leaders do not. They see him throw our military around like toy soldiers, putting them at risk and wasting their brilliance on missions whose only real purpose is to salve Trump’s ego. Thus, the leader of America’s staunchest ally, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney politely disengaged from Trump, re-orienting Canada’s trade and even its auto industry away from the United States toward Europe and China. The leader of our next-staunchest ally, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer risked his own leadership when he told Trump where he could stick his Iran War. German Chancellor Freidrich Merz made it clear that Europe and NATO no longer consider America a reliable ally.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s Iran War and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a right wing extremist herself broke with Trump over support of NATO and Trump’s criticism of the Pope. Both Denmark and Greenland rejected Trump’s attempt to annex Greenland and other traditional American allies, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, broke with Trump over Iran.

Our allies respect America’s military prowess and they realize that Trump is extremely unpopular with the American people. The whole world saw Trump’s favorability rating at home drop from around 50 percent to 30 in sixteen months. Every foreign leader understands that when Democrats take over the House in November, Trump will be a lame duck, albeit a very dangerous and annoying one. They know Trump fears the exposure of the Epstein Files and that Iran is playing him, stalling for time and betting that Americans will insist on an end to the war before Iran’s economy crashes completely.

Trump isn’t capable of understanding that he has lost. Every since he declared a cease-fire, only to see Benjamin Netanyahu increase his attacks on Hezbollah, many of us have wondered what he would do when it became clear, with the midterms nearing, that Iran is not intimidated by him. He’s certainly capable of inventing his own delusional reality in which he declares victory and walks away. The Obama nuclear deal that Trump tore up was complex enough that most people won’t be able to tell who comes out ahead in the current negotiations, compared to where we would have been in the JCPOA had remained in effect. It seemed like the last thing Trump wanted was to resume full scale war. When Congress returns in six days, it will likely pass a new war powers resolution that asserts their sole authority to declare and pursue war.

Trump seemed to have trapped himself badly, but when a cornered rat finds itself with no good options it attacks wildly, survival being its only motivator. When Trump said at his cringeowrthy Cabinet meeting today that Iran would never wait him out, he didn’t care about the midterms, and that Oman, a major U. S. ally in the region would either behave or we would “blow them up,” everyone but the sycophants in the Cabinet Room knew we might have crossed a point of no return.

Trump is now in full gangster mode, hurling irrational threats at anyone who displeases him, isolating America from the rest of the world. He is so driven to prove his own delusions there is no way to predict what he’ll do next, but there is now a significant chance that he will escalate attacks on Iran into a region-wide bloodbath, not caring if he bankrupts our strategic weapons supplies and detroys our economy. Mental illness can do that to you.

The most important question on the table is what it will take for his captive Republicans to say, “Enough!” and shut him down.