You're Not Crazy. America Has Gone Mad

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. 

This is an oft-quoted passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. And it’s one that has proven especially popular in the years since the rise of Trump and explosion of global authoritarianism.  

I open with it here because I want to offer an extended reflection on what it feels like to be trapped inside the sort of madhouse she describes. Because I think sheer insanity now rules America. We have gone mad, and the consequence is that sanity now feels itself like a disorder.  

We aren’t the first society to come unglued. We  almost certainly will not be the last. But right now, each day in America for those of us who do not favor the president or hold to the MAGA worldview feels like we have been sent to some dilapidated asylum by mistake, like the protagonist of a pulp thriller. 

Nothing is working as it should. No one is speaking in sentences that add up to anything sensible. 

We are throwing the most advanced health science research system into the sea and have turned over our public health infrastructure to quacks and crooks. We are destroying our prosperity to sate the president’s desire to play at 19th century political economy. We are blithely ignoring the potential for war with former allies as Trump crows about annexing Canada and Greenland. 

In a rational world, we would already have seen markets balk at Trump’s trade policies, investigations into the mismanagement of our health services, and impeachment proceedings against a man who continues to menace treaty allies for nothing but personal ego. 

But it isn’t a rational world, at least not this American corner of it. And so I want to explore madness as the ordering principle of American life by looking at some of the key sites of breakdown. There is nothing curative in this essay, but diagnosis is a first step. And our symptoms are many. 

Fascism’s bad medicine 

How did a man who admitted he has brain damage from a worm and who has spent decades spreading deadly disinformation about the efficacy of modern medicine become the head of our nation’s health services? 

RFK Jr. has done what we all knew he would do. On Tuesday, mass layoffs gutted HHS, threatening everything from the CDC to the FDA to programs like Meals on Wheels. 

These are moves that will make Americans less safe and healthy. Our food will be more dangerous. Diseases we might have cured in the not-so-distant future will go under-researched for years. Loved ones will get sick and die. And medicine that should have been available will be stuck in an understaffed and underfunded regulatory pipeline.  

Before this, he had already driven out some of HHS’s top scientists, who have warned about the damage his views on healthcare and medical research will do. Under his watch, measles has killed two Americans, and numerous children have been diagnosed with Vitamin A toxicity after their parents followed Kennedy’s recommendation that it be used as a treatment.  

Kennedy’s beliefs on medicine and health are bizarre, conspiratorial, and, in some cases, simply hateful. It’s worth rehashing some of them here to stress just how unscientific the mind of the man who runs HHS really is. 

He has argued that SSRIs, taken for depression and other mood disorders, are addictive and has suggested they’re responsible for mass shooting events in the U.S. He offers dangerous dietary advice and has expressed doubts over whether HIV leads to AIDS. Perhaps most bizarrely, he believes Wi-Fi is a source of toxicity, telling Joe Rogan: “Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier and so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.”

And it’s here I want to turn to Nazi science. This is not as abrupt a transition as it might seem. Part of the madness of the Nazi regime was the imposition of their deranged and deadly scientific approaches on the whole population. America is not now a totalitarian society. But it is in the grips of madness driven by authoritarian figures, and Kennedy’s destructive reign at HHS is warping American life to his eccentric and cruel scientific worldview. And the absurdity of it all is relevant. Too many people have a view of the Nazis as rigorously empirical and scientific thinkers whose crime was that they applied this in service of their devout racism. But Nazism was also a mess of inconsistencies, irrationality, and bad science. 

As Edith Sheffer observes in her book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, despite the whole of the state being turned toward an enterprise of categorizing and eliminating “inferior” peoples, “In reality, expelling undesirables was a process of trial and error. Definitions were elastic and policies inconsistent, shifting with time, place, and actors…Officials were also unclear on how many biologically inferior individuals there were. Estimates ranged from 1 million up to 13 million”

It’s a ridiculous set of facts that highlights the deeply evil farce of race science and national hygiene as a project. 

But what made this insanity so menacing was, of course, the reality of execution. As Shaffer notes, Nazi medical and mental health were similar in many ways to practices ongoing in other countries at the time, save for this clear distinction: “While medicine and psychiatry elsewhere in the world shared characteristics, the Reich’s diagnosis regime operated under the shadow of death. And it included death as a treatment option.”

I find Sheffer’s study of Hans Asperger’s work in Nazi Vienna a particularly useful touchstone here given the role of fear-mongering about autism in the vaccine denialism peddled by RFK Jr and others. The ur-text of this conspiracy theory is Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent 1998 Lancet article, in which he claimed a link between autism and MMR vaccines.

But conspiracy entrepreneurs like RFK, Jr. ran with this. As recently as 2023, Kennedy stated plainly, “I do believe that autism does comes from vaccines.” 

Yet what’s critical to me here is not simply the dangerous lies being told to people about safe and effective vaccines, but the obvious terror and disgust with which these people regard those with autism. To quote Kennedy again, “These are kids who will never throw a baseball, they’ll never go out and date. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never pay taxes.”

Kennedy doesn’t only erase the great variety of experiences of those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, he seems to think their lives aren’t worth living. And he sets them fully outside normal society. 

It isn’t the mark of a healthy society to pathologize neurodivergence as a mark of inferiority or to regard those who have a particular condition as if they are infected. Autism Spectrum Disorder can indeed greatly affect the lives of those who have it, but it isn’t contagious and does not render anyone as somehow less human. I do not believe RFK and other MAHA activists agree with that assessment. Their language is both deeply unscientific and nakedly cruel. 

There is a kind of dark projection here, an obsession with wellness and hygiene by those with a fundamentally disordered view of what is and isn’t good health. Kennedy and MAHA pathologize American life in much the way MAGA does, seeing poison and enfeeblement everywhere they look. But it is the treatment they’re offering that is dangerous and, in fact, deadly. 

It is inaccurate to say that Kennedy’s project at HHS is one of public well-being. It is the nationalization of death as policy. What is the end result of stripping the FDA of its ability to insect food safety? Or disrupting crucial work on cures for Alzheimer’s and pancreatic cancer? Or a government that puts forward vaccine hesitancy and denialism as a formal position? These are policies that will kill. And they are being promoted by people for whom the widespread death of American citizens does not appear to be incompatible with their idea of public health. 

The breakdown of capitalism

Markets are supposed to be rational. This is not an uncontested statement. After all, capitalism is an economics with a long history of panics, bubbles, and crashes. But, setting aside the most ideological critiques of the system, markets are meant to aggregate information. When they work well, prices and commerce reflect agreed upon facts, undergirded by mutual trust. Trade itself is a communicative process that allows parties—individuals, companies, nations—to enjoy mutually beneficial gains. 

None of this is how things appear to be working at the moment. Let’s begin with Trump’s tariffs. 

Trump’s tariff chart, displayed on “liberation day,” not only included figures completely detached from economic reality but included places where no tariff can even be applied. For example, Trump has placed 10% tariffs on Heard and McDonald islands, uninhabited external territories of Australia that are located near Antarctica. Key U.S. partners have been hit with obscenely high tariffs: 25% on South Korea, 24% on Japan, and 20% on the EU. 

For MAGA diehards, the denial of basic economic facts continues. FOX’s Harris Faulker urged,

Look, when this nation used to go to war, people in this country would support the war effort with their materials at home and making things for weaponry. We have to do 100% buy in over this bumpy period

We are now in the stage of Trumpism where economic decline and the loss of personal financial security are worthy sacrifices in the name of Donald’s grand, incoherent, vision. 

The markets, however, have finally reacted with some genuine alarm to Trump’s sweeping protectionist agenda. The DOW dropped over 1,600 points in the twenty-four hours after Trump’s announcement. The NASDAQ has seen its biggest loss since the pandemic. CEOs and business analysis are pulling their hair out. Equity strategist Barry Bannister told CNBC he views the tariffs as a “stagflationary shock.” A tech CEO said his sector will face “economic armageddon.” 

But I can’t help but point out that these threats were always part of Trump’s messaging. He has never wavered from his belief that tariffs are some sort of magic bullet, and he didn’t waste time engaging in skirmishes with Canada and Mexico prior to Wednesday’s trade war blitzkrieg. So why did it take so long for reality to set in? Why have markets until now failed to apprehend the slaughterhouse into which Trump is leading our economy?

And still others are maintaining that this is not a panic moment at all. Trump allies are saying this is “necessary” and “non-negotiable.” David Zervos, of investment bank Jeffries, went on CNBC’s Fast Money to tell everyone to calm down, asserting that “We’re still early days in the deregulatory policies and the tax cut policies—or the fiscal policies—and the benefits from having just a significant reduction in the government footprint in the U.S. economy. So this is not, to me, the be all end all. This never was.”

This is lunacy. The United States is self-immolating on the world stage, and it is doing so by destroying both its private and public sectors. Even as Trump pulls the roaring Biden recovery to a screeching halt with his tariffs, his administration is eviscerating the capacity of the federal government to carry out its work. We are bleeding out from Washington, D.C. to rural Iowa. 

Over 275,000 were cut in the U.S. in March. Almost 80% of those were cuts to government, driven by DOGE.  On Tuesday, Whirlpool announced plans to lay off 650 workers from its plant in Amana, Iowa. On Thursday, 900 workers across five different Midwest auto plants were temporarily laid off as Stellantis paused production at Canadian and Mexican plants supplied by the U.S. facilities. 

Just as paranoia and irrationality now dominate America’s health science decisions, our economy is running not on rational self-interest but a kind of psychosis. The people who are now panicked are right to be, but many of them were only weeks ago welcoming Trump’s victory as a boon to the American economy. Those who aren’t are forcing their analysis through such a tiny ideological pinhole that, to look upon it, it is unrecognizable from delirium. 

And the wider economy has started to reflect this irrational, ideologically motivated, and dysfunctional mode of operation. 

Consider the saga of Newsmax’s IPO. In the first two days of trading, the stock price rocketed from an opening value of $10 per share to a peak of $265. The company reached a market capitalization of $32 billion, eclipsing over half the companies on the S&P 500. This is a cable news channel whose top show in the first quarter of this year pulled in just a little over 500,000 viewers. 

Yes, there has been a correction, but the entire affair was preposterous. It briefly made Newsmax’s Christopher Ruddy wealthier than countless other CEOs, all for running a small-fish cable news company most famous for having to settle out of court with SmartMatic after running a stream of lies about the 2020 election. There’s no rational world in which this should be a valuable company, much less an astronomically valuable one. 

Then there is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. His immense wealth is built on the back of the very government he is now ransacking, with his companies combining for $38 billion in government funding in the form of contracts and loans. He took $6.3 billion in 2024 alone. Simply put, Musk’s companies would not be what they are without being subsidized by the public sector. 

Musk’s Tesla is suffering by many of the traditional metrics. Its sales are down, and its brand reputation is now deeply politicized. The stock has indeed fallen substantially, down 36 percent in the first quarter of 2025. But perhaps this doesn’t matter when the money chasing Tesla is driven by the cronyism and eccentricities of meme culture. This could be the new normal in a world where the president has ordered the creation of a “strategic bitcoin reserve” that appears to be little more than a self-enrichment scheme. 

Capitalism is imperfect. And it has given us crises before due to the greed of investors or systematic errors in judgement by policymakers. But we seem to be in an entirely new world in American capitalism where the ideological valence of a company, or at least its pliability to the demands of the Trump regime, are as good an indicator of its worth as anything else. 

Companies know the only way to avoid the worst effects of Trump’s reforms is to pay fealty, verbally and financially, to the big man. And the investor class now includes opportunistic grifters and MAGA true believers willing to prop up the value of companies to score political points and, they hope, enrich themselves. This is a fundamental breakdown, the meme-ification of whole companies while the rest of the economy tries to conform to the whims of a tyrant in the White House. 

Covering Trump’s expansionist ambitions 

In the same way we have become used to a booming economy, perhaps we have also become over-accustomed to peace. This might seem strange to say when America only recently concluded its decades long foreign engagements in the Global War on Terror or when Russia is currently waging war on Ukraine or when Israel’s war on Gaza has dominated headlines for a year. 

But how else to explain the lack of alarm among the American press as Trump continues to suggest he will seize Greenland and wants to annex Canada? 

Worse, some networks have used framing that takes Trump‘s assertion at face value that there is an open contest for the island. Of course, Trump-friendly media has cheered him on. But mainstream outlets have also failed to meet the moment, such as when ABC News’s Terry Moran reported that Vance’s visit was “a dramatic moment in the struggle for Greenland.”

There is a wonderful book by Deborah Cohen titled Last Call at the Hotel Imperial. It is about the American reporters who covered Europe in the years that fascism came to power and Hitler and Mussolini plunged the world into conflict. They wrote, with increasingly clear eyes and mounting dread, of the rising storm on the horizon. 

If chronicling the coverage from these first few months of Trump, where he has repeatedly insisted he will have both Greenland and Canada, I would suggest the title “Last Call from the Hotel Impossible.” Our news media largely does not seem capable of imagining or articulating the cataclysmic implications of Trump’s rhetoric—rhetoric which has increasingly been followed with actions, including Vice President Vance’s bizarre trip to Greenland. 

To wax a little 1938, there does not appear to be a widespread capacity for understanding that Trump is pushing us toward conflict with two NATO allies. Trump-friendly outlets either welcome such a scenario or do not care about the dangerous game they are playing. And mainstream news has hewed far too closely to stenography in covering Trump’s talk of annexations. 

I’m sympathetic, of course. Much of this inability to see that Trump is serious is the sheer audacity of his assertions—the sheer insanity, as well. We do not need to acquire Greenland nor does Greenland want to be acquired. Canada is a sovereign nation with no interest in becoming “the 51st state.” What is the basis for even carrying forward such a conversation? But some have begun to see that he is serious, and their warnings are grave. 

As Michael A. Cohen wrote Wednesday for MSNBC, “How many times can Trump say he’s considering using the U.S. military to seize Greenland before we start taking him seriously?…Trump wants Greenland to become part of the United States. Period. He doesn’t care about Greenland’s security. He wants it for America.”

It’s spot-on analysis. But it’s ridiculous that this isn’t the dominant theme of all coverage of this issue. Trump has been clear. Vance has been clear. They want Greenland, and all options are on the table. 

When our media covers Trump’s language as audacious but not necessarily bellicose, they are writing a fantasy. The only way to take Trump’s expansionist talk seriously is to lay out explicitly that it is not achievable without direct conflict with other states. Anything short of that, anything that entertains it as either edgy policy or tough talk is farcical. 

Madness is as much a denial of reality as it is an embrace of the unreal. Here, our press has continued to deny what is so clearly front of them: the rapacious ambitions of a narcissistic strongman. 

On being well in an unwell society 

The effects of all this are to make those who are not in lockstep with MAGA feel they are losing their grip on reality. What is happening is that our reality is being remade before us in the image of an irrational, chaotic, despotic, and unscientific worldview. 

“This is insane” is the common refrain, but each time we say it some part of our mind slips and shifts, the structural integrity of our own sense of the world weakening a little. MAGA is a project of delusion, both personal and political, and it has absolutely unmoored American society. 

To quote Sheffer again, “Beyond racial and physical ideals, Nazism was also about how one thought and felt. It imposed mental and emotional norms toward a model kind of personality.” So, too, are we living under a regime that seeks to rewire how we think and feel. But what is the MAGA personality?

I would argue that this personality is a deeply disordered one, a kind of madness fashioned into the false image of a disciplined citizen. In a similar vein, Peter Wehner recently argued in The Atlantic that “Trump's vindictiveness—relentless, crude, and capricious—has reshaped the emotional wiring of many otherwise good and decent people.”

I want to be careful here not to be mistaken as suggesting that every Trump voter or enabler is literally in the grip of mental illness, particularly because this would wave away the question of agency and complicity. But when I look around at our country, its leadership, its economic and media ecosystems, and its citizenry, I see many signs of paranoia, delusion, and obstinate denial of reality. 

And it’s not just that this reshaping of the citizen is underway. Those who don’t conform or are unable to meet this standard are themselves being cast as abnormal and a threat to the future of the nation. In fact, MAGA has set up those people and ideas it deems dangerous as not merely objectionable but explicitly pathological. 

In The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art, Charlie English chronicles Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill and the relationship between Nazi psychiatry, art, and the Holocaust. Part of what is so compelling about reading the book now is that it is an account of people suffering from mental illness surrounded by a society given over to the derangements of fascism. Under the principle of Entartung (“degeneracy”), the Nazis viewed these individuals as, to quote English, “degrading [to] the Germans culturally and biologically.”

This is striking to me, because we are now seeing sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities portrayed as degenerate by MAGA. So, too, is anyone who speaks up for the rights of such people or opposes Trump’s agenda. 

Representative Keith Self made headlines recently for intentionally misgendering Democratic Representative Sarah McBride, the House’s first openly trans member. Defending himself on Fox News, Self said, “I don’t have to participate in his fantasy.” This is Self not only demeaning McBride, but pathologizing her. It’s become a common theme on the right when it comes to LGBTQ+ people. 

In a March rant in which he boasted about protecting America from “predators” and “rapists,” Stephen Miller responded to criticism from MSNBC legal analyst  Andrew Weissman by declaring, “He is a moron, and he is a fool, and he’s a degenerate.”

So it’s not only the minority groups they hold in contempt who are disordered. It’s anyone who dares to question the mad, inhumane reality they seek to impose. This is how you get a Minnesota legislator introducing a bill to define “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness. And because projection is a running theme of this essay, that legislator, Justin Eichorn, was arrested in mid-March for soliciting a minor. 

That last detail should be shocking, but lately such news is all too common. We aren’t only witnessing an unspooling of our institutions and public decision making. We seem beset by a kind of generalized moral insanity—only its locus is the GOP. 

So who are we to be in such a society? How are we to find sense, stability, and sanity when so much feels like it is coming undone? 

My answer is two-fold. First, we should recall that there is a difference between people and people. Individuals can be good or bad, but I am inclined to think most of them retain a substantial capacity for decency. Of course, I’ve highlighted some particularly bad individuals here, but the problem mainly rests in groups. In the aggregate, humanity can get ugly quickly. Luckily, away from our screens, human interaction mostly happens at the intimate scale. And that means a chance for mutual recognition of the good that’s there in each of us. 

Second, we must be unafraid to be viewed as crazy, hyperbolic, over-the-top, and otherwise out there. Too many assessments of this moment still underestimate the danger. And far too many commentators spent the preceding years tut-tutting those of us who dared to call Trump’s movement fascism, or who suggested he would run and win again, or who say now that he really is considering forcibly annexing another country. We have to constantly rewrite our sense of the possible in the face of the facts. 

Will Trump attempt to have a third term in office as he has repeatedly stated he wants to do? “No,” people will say, “he can’t do that. That’s insane.”

“Ok,” should come our reply, “but what if he does?” 

We must be as frank as possible about the challenges before us and willing to call things as we see them, no matter what our opponents or even our own allies might say. We have to stare at the abyss and dare it to stare back. We can be realistic about how dark things have gotten and retain the hope necessary to fight what could well be a long, even generational struggle to reclaim American democracy. 

For my own sanity. I have to believe that we will win. 

Featured image is Two Old Ones Eating Soup, by Francisco Goya