He Has Never Been Playing Chess
A Crisis Dispatch
This Crisis Dispatch series has been a somewhat exhausting effort. Not because of the volume of writing — I have written more in worse conditions. But because of the pervasive, grinding sense that society at large simply does not accept the obvious thing staring it in the face.
Here I am, late on a Sunday, typing up a storm. Not so much in reaction to the fact that the President of the United States has taken to Truth Social to make the Pope the target of his ire — though that is what happened, and I will get to it. But in reaction to the society-level failure to understand the nature of what is going on in this man’s brain.
Which is actually straightforward. It requires no guesswork. You do not need intelligence services or insider access or political analysis to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s mind at any given moment. He is thinking zero steps ahead. As the philosopher Vlad Vexler has observed, Trump is floating through dispositional states inside very malignant pathologies. There is no strategy to decode. There is no chess game to map. There is a man moving from one psychological state to the next, driven by the same neurological machinery as any other organism in the grip of a compulsive disorder — seeking the next hit, escalating when the last one wore off, displaying dominance when the hierarchy feels threatened.
That is all that is happening.
That is all that has ever been happening.
And yet, tonight, after one of the most consequential Sundays in recent memory — the Islamabad talks collapsed, the blockade order went out from Mar-a-Lago, Hungary voted Orbán into oblivion — the response to Trump attacking the Pope is: this is a distraction strategy. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Classic Trump.
I cannot adequately express, in language suitable for publication, my exasperation at this response.
And I know — even as I write this, I know — that some portion of the people reading it are processing it as provocation. As wry humor. As rhetorical exaggeration deployed for effect. As Mike doing his thing.
No.
I am completely serious about every word I am saying. This is not irony. This is not performance. This is not a stylistic choice to make a point more sharply. It is the plain truth, stated plainly, by someone who has been watching this pattern for years and has run out of patience for the collective failure to name it.
The fact that our society cannot process this simple truth — that the most powerful man on earth is operating without executive function, floating through malignant pathological states, thinking zero steps ahead — is itself a civilizational crisis. Not a metaphorical one.
Donald Trump has insulted the Pope.
Not the abstract institution of the papacy. The specific man — an American, the first American Pope in history, a man who called Trump’s threat to annihilate Iranian civilization “truly unacceptable,” who said the Iran war was “unjust,” who spent Palm Sunday reminding the world that Jesus “rejects war” and “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” Trump went to Joint Base Andrews and said “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo.” He went to Truth Social late on a Sunday night and called the head of the Catholic Church “WEAK on Crime” and told him to “stop catering to the Radical Left.”
And across social media, cable news, and the commentariat, the immediate response was: this is a distraction strategy. He’s changing the subject from Islamabad. He knows exactly what he’s doing. This is classic Trump — create a new controversy to bury the last one.
I need you to hear me when I say this: no. That is not what is happening. That has never been what is happening.
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Let me tell you what actually happened on Sunday.
The Islamabad talks collapsed after twenty-one hours. Iran said no further negotiations. Trump posted a blockade order from Mar-a-Lago. Hungary voted Orbán out in a historic landslide — the illiberal international’s flagship fell, on the same day that Vance’s diplomatic portfolio collapsed in Islamabad, completing a week of cascading failure across three cities. Every major supply source degraded simultaneously.
I described this sequence in The Supply Crisis earlier this week. The clinical literature on pathological narcissism is precise about what happens when supply sources fail simultaneously: escalation. Not strategic escalation. Compulsive escalation. The same brain pathways as drug addiction. The last dose didn’t produce the hit. The next dose has to be larger.
The blockade order was the next dose after the Islamabad collapse. It didn’t produce sufficient supply — the markets will punish it Monday, the allies rejected it, the military is managing mines in a strait that the ceasefire was supposed to have opened. So the dose escalated again.
Insulting the Pope — the head of a 1.4 billion-person church, the most morally authoritative American alive, the man who has spent months calling Trump’s war unjust — is not a distraction strategy. It is the next largest available dose. It is what compulsion looks like when the previous doses are wearing off.
The commentariat keeps attributing chess to someone playing slot machines.
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I want to give credit to George Conway, and to the other clinicians and public intellectuals who have spent years trying to bring the public’s attention to this fact. Conway has been consistent and precise and largely ignored by the very establishment press that prefers the “distraction strategy” frame because that frame preserves the comforting fiction that someone competent is in control. The Duty to Warn coalition. The sixty thousand signatories. The people who were called alarmist and hysterical and politically motivated for saying, in clinical terms, what is plainly visible to anyone willing to look.
Donald Trump is certifiably insane. Not as a rhetorical gesture. Not as a political attack. As a clinical description of a man whose behavior across eight years of public life is precisely and consistently explained by the framework of malignant narcissism and the supply dynamics I described this week — and is not explained by any model that attributes strategic executive function to him.
He cannot subordinate his immediate need for supply to a longer-term strategic objective. This is not a personality quirk. It is a clinical feature of the disorder. The capacity for strategic thinking requires the ability to defer gratification, to accept short-term costs for long-term gains, to model the future and act from that model rather than from immediate impulse. The clinical literature is unambiguous that this capacity is severely impaired in pathological narcissism under supply deprivation.
When the commentariat says “he’s distracting from Islamabad,” they are attributing to him precisely the capacity the disorder eliminates.
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The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is an ape-like dominance performance. I mean that precisely. Not as an insult — as a behavioral description. The largest object in the room asserts its size. The assertion is not instrumental. It is not in service of a goal beyond the assertion itself. It is dominance display for its own sake, driven by the same neurological machinery that drives any social primate to establish hierarchy — and in a man whose entire psychological architecture is organized around being the largest object in every room, the display becomes compulsive when the hierarchy is challenged.
Hungary challenged it. Islamabad challenged it. The Pope challenged it repeatedly and publicly over months. The supply sources are failing. The dominance display escalates.
This is the limit of his cognitive capacity. Not a tactic. The limit.
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The Vance-Catholic connection deserves its own note, because the irony is structural rather than incidental.
Vance is a Catholic convert. His conversion book — Communion — drops in June. The entire Catholic infrastructure was a central element of the power accretion I documented this week: the faith narrative, the character arc, the vehicle for appealing to the religious electorate that the Republican coalition requires. Elbridge Colby — a Catholic, a close Vance ally — summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington in January and invoked the Avignon Papacy as a reminder that secular powers can dominate the Church when they choose to.
The plan, apparently, was to bring the American Pope into alignment with the American administration. To add the moral authority of the papacy to the political project.
Instead, Pope Leo called the war unjust from Palm Sunday through the ceasefire announcement, called Trump’s civilization threat “truly unacceptable,” and is spending July 4th — the 250th anniversary of American independence, the date the administration wanted the Pope present in Washington — on Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island where African refugees arrive.
The protégé’s conversion book is two months away. The head of the Church he converted to just got called weak on crime by the man the protégé serves.
The supply crisis consuming Trump is also consuming the carefully constructed Catholic narrative that was supposed to be Vance’s 2028 vehicle. One more supply source, degrading.
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Sanewashing — the practice of translating compulsive behavior into strategic rationality — is not a neutral act. It has consequences.
When the commentariat says “he’s distracting from Islamabad,” they accomplish two things. First, they let the actual situation — a man with a severe personality disorder holding nuclear launch authority, making escalating dominance displays as his supply sources fail — recede behind the comfortable fiction of a strategist in control. Second, they train the public to watch for the strategy rather than the symptom, which means the symptom will always be misread.
The people who warned about this — Conway, the Duty to Warn signatories, the clinicians who challenged the Goldwater Rule because the situation was too dangerous for professional etiquette — were right. They were right in 2017 and they are right now and the evidence has not become more ambiguous with time. It has become overwhelming.
He is not playing chess. He never was. He is a man in the grip of a disorder that is producing compulsive escalation as its supply sources fail, holding the most powerful office on earth, insulting the Pope on a Sunday night because the last dose wore off.
That is what is happening.
That is all that is happening.
One consistent, informed expert source we shouldn't neglect to mention is Mary Trump.
Your words validate that I am not insane, that what I see as true is reality, that my heartache is real.