“You know what November 5 was?  It was the election of a president that loves you.”

– Donald Trump to applause and cheers from soldiers at Fort Bragg, June, 2025

President Richard Nixon told chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.  Nixon believed that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought an end to the Korean War, and Nixon  suggested using nuclear weapons to bail out the French in Vietnam in 1954.  Nixon defended the principle of threatening maximum force.  He called it the “mad man theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe..I might do anything to stop the war.”

Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to stop the Vietnam War, introduced the theory in his lectures in 1959 to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar  on the political use of irrational military threats.  Ellsberg, a Cold Warrior in the 1950s, called the theory the “political uses of madness,” arguing that any extreme threat could be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived as being not fully rational.  He believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool.

Speaking of mad men, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell gloated on June 11, 2025 that “There are now more U.S. troops  deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq.”

A day earlier, Donald Trump told a military audience at Fort Bragg that Marines were needed in Los Angeles to deal with the “radical left lunatic” politicians and “flag-burning” protesters, once again falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged.”  He told his Fort Bragg audience that the National Guard and Marine forces were “heroes.  They’re fighting for us.  They’re stopping an invasion, just like you’d stop an invasion.”

Trump has broken domestic law in his misuse of the National Guard and the Marines in Los Angeles.  He has defied the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by using the military to suppress legitimate protests, and has castigated the political leaders of California.  In politicizing the military, it’s fair to ask if a path is being created to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which he has previously threatened.  And it isn’t far-fetched to anticipate the possibility that he might invoke martial law.

(Judge Charles Breyer, a federal judge in San Francisco, ruled last week that Trump had unlawfully federalized the National Guard and sent them onto the streets of Los Angeles. The Trump administration immediately appealed his decision. Then, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals promptly entered an administrative stay, which means that control of the Guard, which Judge Breyer had restored to California Governor Newsom, is back in Trump’s hands, while a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals considers the case.)

There is considerable evidence that Trump is psychologically unfit, and that his cognitive decline puts us all at risk.  His so-called address at Fort Bliss was marked by incomplete sentences, pathetically unsophisticated vocabulary, and simplistic thought.  Trump cannot seem to finish a sentence or a thought without derailing into some kind of irrelevancy.  His claim to be a “stable genius” would be laughable, if current times weren’t so perilous.  While the mainstream media was focusing on the health of Joe Biden last year, Trump’s cognitive abilities were in serious decline, but essentially ignored.

Trump’s malignant narcissism was marked by a recent interview in the Atlantic magazine when he trumpeted his claim to rule the United States and even the world.  He requires fealty from everyone around him, and his empathy has been saved only for himself.  Trump’s paranoia was worsened by the assassination attempts in 2024, and his demonization of immigrants, journalists, jurists, and virtually everyone who disagrees with him leads to greater hostile language.  Trump’s cruelty and heartlessness were manifested in his Oval Office sessions with the Ukrainian, El Salvadoran, and South African heads of state in the past several months.

Trump’s ideas get zanier with the passing of time, such as turning Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East or the displacement of two million Palestinians from their homes.  And as his ideas become more incoherent or aberrant, we are reminded that there is no one around him who will challenge him.  As former Senator Bob Corker once said “There are simply no adults in the White House day care center.”  What can be said for Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and on and on, the malevolent sycophants who surround him?

There is madness—even nuclear madness—everywhere.  Russian President Putin’s saber-rattling against Ukraine; Prime Minister Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians as well as the current so-called strategic campaign against Iran’s nuclear capabilities; and Trump’s first term threats against North Korea that included references to U.S. nuclear capabilities as well as the “red button” threats.  Trump had ample support in his first term from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who endorsed the use of force and regime change.  And now Trump wants a “Golden Dome” to save the United States from nuclear forces.

Nuclear weapons have no real utilitarian value, unless one is willing to risk an apocalyptic ending to a crisis.  Nuclear saber-rattling increases the risk of miscalculation in decision making.  This was true in Cuba in 1962, the October War in 1973, and South Asia in 1999 and 2025, when India and Pakistan were involved in armed conflict.  There has never been a greater need for a substantive discussion of the dangers of nuclear threats and the need for a return to arms control.  And there has never been a time when there appears to be no one to step forward and take a statesman-like position in the direction of disarmament.

As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said, “It’s time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a mad man.”

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