A Mad Defense of Madness
Donald Trump’s latest messages are the kind of tweets I write after 10 beers on a relaxed day. Around the world, a single response echoes: “He’s crazy.” We’ve known Trump for decades. We saw him tweet in all caps during his first term, and we’ve also witnessed his verbal incontinence when speaking to the media at any hour, in any place — something unprecedented in a president, and something journalists don’t even acknowledge. We’ve seen him laugh in the faces of prime ministers from around the world, joke at state dinners, and raise his fist in victory immediately after being shot. And yet, in April 2026, people are still discovering that Donald Trump is crazy. Of course he is. So what?
Newton was completely mad. Van Gogh was mad, too. Beethoven had extreme mood swings compatible with almost any psychiatric disorder. Cioran went mad from chronic insomnia. Dostoevsky wasn’t the sanest of his generation. Hunter S. Thompson did everything to go mad — and succeeded. And Hölderlin, one of my favorite poets, ended his days profoundly detached from reality, only seeming to regain his sanity when he sat down to write.
Aristotle once said that “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” Don Quixote himself was a magnificent madman with a good heart. And Chesterton liked to remind us that “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason; the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
People forget that the only dangerous madman is the one who doesn’t seem mad.
History is full of brilliant madmen. It’s almost impossible to tell where genius ends and madness begins. Extreme lucidity allows some people to see far more than the rest of us: they find incredible rhetorical figures, brilliant words to describe everyday events, philosophically outstanding arguments; they can create unmatched advertising campaigns or devise flawless war plans that no one had ever conceived before. (RELATED: Trump Delivers Europe’s Much-Needed Wake-Up Call)
People forget that the only dangerous madman is the one who doesn’t seem mad. The typical guy who appears on the evening news after murdering his entire family, while neighbors testify: “He was normal, polite, a good person; he always said hello when you passed him.” On the other hand, a madman who doesn’t hide his madness isn’t dangerous at all. And Donald Trump makes no effort whatsoever to conceal his remarkable degree of madness. In fact, he exploits it with brilliant quips because he knows it makes others laugh, and he also uses it as a negotiation tool with terrorists and tyrants. (RELATED: Trump: A Real Commander-in-Chief)
On Tuesday afternoon, he said he would wipe out an entire civilization — and if someone else said that, or if you took it out of context, it might sound terrible. The truth is, if you read the full message, it’s actually quite funny. I’m not saying his threat was a joke, but he adopts that movie-thug pose, like: “I don’t feel like killing you right now, so you’d better get out of here and make it easy for me.”
I’m writing this just hours before the famous ultimatum deadline. Many of the ayatollahs are also mad, but not in the amusing way Trump is; their madness stems from pure hatred of the West. Trump, by contrast, doesn’t seem to hate the Iranian leaders in the slightest — probably because he simply finds them ridiculous.
[F]or your enemy to think your leader is crazy is an extraordinary diplomatic maneuver to intimidate him.
I don’t know how this verbal showdown will end, but for your enemy to think your leader is crazy is an extraordinary diplomatic maneuver to intimidate him. They know Trump isn’t pretending to be crazy; he is. So his threats, however amusing they may seem, shouldn’t be taken lightly. At least, if my head were on the line, I wouldn’t. The last person to openly laugh at Trump’s threats, publicly dancing and giggling, was Nicolás Maduro. And you know how that ended. A crazy and brilliant operation finished him off.
I suspect that everyone saying Trump is being rude or politically incorrect in his way of addressing the ayatollahs has no idea what kind of scum they’re dealing with. You don’t speak to a hyena with the courtesy and respect you give your mother.
Now that so many conservatives seem terrified to realize that Trump is, in fact, quite crazy, my bet — and that of another famous madman, Javier Milei — is that this madness is the best thing to happen to the West in decades. Madmen in power lead the world. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they fail. But they try. Boring sane people only manage to lull everyone to sleep while what’s wrong with the world becomes chronic.
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