Jeffery Sachs: “This is a stupid man. This is not a man making detailed, sophisticated calculations.
From everything I know—and I don’t know him personally, but I know a lot of people who do know him personally, and I know many who interact with him—this is an old man: impetuous, impulsive, not knowledgeable, easily swayed, unable to pay attention to briefings, and unable to study a problem.
So in weighing things, I don’t believe we are actually seeing a rational actor making difficult, complex calculations. I think we are seeing an impulsive old man who is way out of his depth, surrounded by the least competent group that I have ever seen in American politics.
The President of the United States makes a statement that is completely false and demonstrably so within moments. What does one make of that?
It’s not sophisticated lying. It’s not deception. It’s not Machiavellian politics. It is making a statement that is disproved almost immediately.
To my mind, that by itself is a pathology that should be analyzed directly.
What does it mean?
Well, the easiest interpretation is that he’s an inveterate liar—and nobody doubts that. But there’s another interpretation: that he is delusional, that at this stage he is confabulating.
When I listen to sophisticated psychiatrists and psychologists talk about Trump’s mental state, they say that he is mentally unstable, suffers from what is called the “dark triad” personality—psychopathy, extreme narcissism, chronic and impulsive lying—and no small amount of paranoia.
Some of them also say—and I find this quite credible—that there is evidence this man is experiencing dementia on top of these lifelong traits.
He’s an old man, and he often cannot finish sentences coherently. Sometimes he cannot even finish words coherently. According to psychologists, that is a sign of frontotemporal dementia.
I think this is not unimportant from a geopolitical perspective, because we tend to normalize everything. We assume he is making calculations. We ask what his next move is.
I don’t think that’s the right approach.
More importantly, we may be witnessing a breakdown of any kind of rational process in the most powerful country in the world. That is the far more dangerous and likely reality right now—that this does not make sense, that this is not savvy calculation, that this is not a stable situation.
This is an extremely dangerous situation: a small group flailing around, completely out of its depth.
And when I add Mr. Netanyahu—whom I regard as the world’s greatest war criminal at large today—who has instigated wars across his region, again in my view driven by malignant and delusional ideas, then I think the situation becomes even more fraught.
In other words, maybe I’m wrong—and often I am—but I think there is a strong personal element to this crisis right now, which would suggest a different kind of approach.
What I am suggesting every day is that the Prime Minister of India, the President of Russia, and the President of China speak directly to Mr. Trump and explain: this is not right, this is not working, this has to stop.
Rather than seeing this as a great chessboard or battlefield of great powers, this may be a delusional environment in which the central figure, Mr. Trump, needs to be helped to stop the disaster that the United States has caused.”
