By Joseph Mazur

Dealing with enemies from within

Some say that Donald Trump was sent from heaven but, if that’s true, is he a blessing or simply a punishment for our sins?

Despite a long list of what many people perceive as flawed domestic initiatives, foreign policy missteps, and damage to U.S. institutions, Donald Trump continues to have a surprisingly high approval rating — the lowest of the last twelve presidents after Harry Truman. In part 3 of his analysis of the Trump phenomenon, Joseph Mazur examines the factors that have brought the 47^th U.S. President this far.

The most powerful leader of the free world waves to his public, preaching lies, deceptions, accusations, and insults. We know who he is; do we comprehend his pathology, maladjustment, or illusory belief in his instincts for success? Being democratically elected twice, he feels his power yet fears his impending disgrace.

– H.W. Brands, Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas-Austin

Who is this man who breaks down America, bullies the world, and controls his rank-and-file sycophants as if they are side-by-side uncontrolled aggressors on his own battlefield as he leads the charge? I do not know him, but lengthy articles, biographies, and opinions that I pick from the cubbyholes of journal information tidbits, after intensive fact-checking, tell me all I need to know. To actually “know him” is a daunting endeavor that would take years of psychoanalysis or at least a true biography of his ontogeny, attempting to understand who he is. So many psychiatrists have shied away from diagnosing him with no direct contact because, in Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run for the U.S. presidency, a large survey of psychiatrists claimed Goldwater was considered psychologically unfit to serve. The American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), established the Goldwater Rule, which declared opinions without personal examinations to be unethical.

We are left with too many unknowns. The man is a confusion genius who studied amusement park mirrors early in his life, a danger to his country, a danger to everyone. Using Stalinist tactics, he manipulates instruments of law to be used against anyone he does not like – especially people who do not like him. All I can say is that this enigmatic man came from a reality warp, perhaps an aberration wormhole. For just one example of his inscrutability: Trump tells us that his gifted Qatari plane is cost-free to the U.S. when, in truth, it has so far cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. With that plane’s upgraded luxury, it will be his when he leaves office. Should we list the improper moves of self-dealing far beyond his Qatari gift? No, that would add at least a thousand words to this article, words that would not tell us anything more than what we think we know about him, but don’t. ^[1] Complicated, huh…?

A blessing from heaven?

Where did he come from before descending a gold-plated escalator portal to announce his intention – not to run for president, but rather to become president? Not that the election would be rigged, but rather that it would be spoiled by extraordinary misinformation coming mostly from media moguls who flipped the bill. It was, I unfortunately must say, democracy in action. So, who is he? Some evangelists claim he was sent by God to save the country by protecting religious freedom. That rhetoric favors a Christian agenda, though it stems from invoking Cyrus the Great, a Persian king who conquered Babylon and liberated those Israelites who wished to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple that was destroyed by the Babylonians.

From Cyrus the Great we get Donald Trump through a ludicrous biblical literalism doctrine. In an interview about a campaign video, “God Made Trump” – not kidding here – the host, George Louis Martinez on National Public Radio, begins saying, “A video making the rounds online depicts Donald Trump as a messiah-like figure.” Following up, an unidentified person says, “God looked down on his planned Paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So, God gave us Trump.” ^[2] 

Okay, so now we should wonder if Trump is really a delivering messianic. Delivering what, you may ask, and for whom? He delivered $2.2 billion to himself. According to Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller, and David Yaffe-Bellany, three reporters at The New York Times, “The release of a mandatory financial disclosure for 2025 shows that the Trump family’s holdings, particularly the president’s crypto businesses, were stunningly lucrative.” ^[3] With advanced knowledge oozing out of the White House about back-and-forth changes regarding the war in Iran, Trump’s sons shift their heavy investments in defense technology toward whatever makes a profit. ^[4] But who, besides conservative judges that boast having canceled Roe vs Wade and Republicans who brag about tax breaks for the rich, sees his accomplishments? He’s proud of those two destructive accomplishments, though the tax breaks are the converse of Robin Hood robbery.

We know that he has delivered more than a few destructive orders. What about things he extinguished? For the moment, skip the war in Iran that killed more than three thousand Iranians and, so far, 18 U.S. service members. For simple examples, I bring in half a dozen among many that hit humanity with no sympathy:

• Dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), officially shut down on July 1, 2025, and “has already caused the deaths of six-hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” ^[5] USAID annual funding accounted for less than 0.00063 percent of the U.S. budget. What messiah-like person would do such a thing?
• Elimination of the 1980 Refugee Act that helped refugees, some fleeing conflict or persecution, who had already passed an intensive vetting process that generally takes 36 months, and instead subjected them to detention. Often, this involves separating families, a cruelty for no reason.
• Rolling back gun regulations to permit some people with mental illness to buy guns, and loosening oversight of private weapon transactions that surely leave people less safe.
• Destructing Iran’s public infrastructure, schools, residential neighborhoods, and hospitals in an attempt, as Trump himself said, to “annihilate its civilization.”
• Ending Temporary Protection Status (TPS), a humanitarian immigration amnesty program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
• Ending subsidies for Medicare drug premiums so that millions of older Americans will either pay far more for prescription drug coverage or risk the consequences of life under poor health.

I could go on with the hand-in-glove list of dismantling and extinguishing. These are just a few of the disconnected, destructive orders that directly and indirectly kill innocent people. I avoid bringing up the disastrous hardships on American consumers caused by enduring inflation, listless economic growth, and the shredding of the safety net to fund his wishes. If you ask him about his achievements, he will tell you inflation is down, “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” the economy is booming, the war with Iran is won, immigration enforcement has been handled with ethical and moral standards, and of course, taxes have been largely cut by doing away with those unnecessary safety nets that just cost too much money. In the real world, the U.S. Federal Reserve found that the number of men and women employed in manufacturing in Trump’s second term in office dropped by 75,000 jobs, and in 2026 the U.S. gross domestic product has so far been paltry. 

None so blind?

It is difficult to understand why his followers continue to cheer him on, even when his actions run counter to their needs. “Oh, reason not the need!” He drafts a cult of a party that stubbornly sticks with him. With his impulsive behavior fueled by the noise in his head and the inspiration that drives his fantasy instincts, he invites a generational civil war while ignoring the advice in his daily intelligence briefs, thereby inviting disaster.

And disaster it has been, says Matthew Dallek, political historian at George Washington University: “Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century. At home and abroad, in many cabinet and sub-cabinet agencies, the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.” ^[6] With that, it would seem that no one would vote for him, and yet the polls for July average at just under 38 percent in favor. So, why the high of 38 percent? For those voters who do not understand him, they do not see his major faults: his chaotic instincts, vindictive style of governing, or his confusing compulsions that miss the targets of success. I agree with Dallek; it’s not the way a normal leader should lead. Every leader has governing problems to solve, but when the solution is based on faulty assumptions or – especially in Trump’s case – conspiracy theories, the problems magnify with abandoned solutions.

Though I do not know him, I think I do, from what he has been doing in his second term in office. He can swindle taxpayers, mess up government agencies, accept bribes, walk away with the gift of a $400 million plane, and a whopping $636 million Trump bitcoins while his investors collectively lose $3.81 billion, or any of his other scam activities. ^[7] It’s the cruelty that gets me to the horrors of an administration that accepts what he wants: bribes, retributions, a ballroom that 99.9 percent of U.S. citizens will never be invited to.

Americans know he is a consummate liar, and so does the world. Even the official White House website, at www.whitehouse.gov, tries to make us feel that what it says is true, but we know the lies coming from our daily experiences. Take these two sentences from its current posting: “In 2025, inflation moderated, job creation accelerated, and consumer confidence rebounded as businesses expanded, and wages rose. His America-First economic strategy is restoring prosperity, lowering costs, and positioning the United States for long-term growth.” You see its sneakiness, starting with “In 2025,” ignoring 2026. Actual government databases show the inflation rate, ending in May, was 4.2%, up from 3.8% in the 2025 fiscal year, according to U.S. Labor Department data. ^[8]

Does a legitimate messianic person lie? Maybe.

Let the people who believe in his messianic presence have their faith. That’s okay with me. We can take, and even ignore, the lies and swindles. By January 2029, he will have scammed tens of billions from the American people and the U.S. Treasury, but that’s okay with me if he and his cruel retinue and family will have been voted out, never to return to politics.

Okay, so maybe not a messiah or even a prophet. Does he have magical powers? Timothy L. O’Brien, a biographer of Trump, tells us that “he will walk on the stage with a giant presidential wand and end decades of Middle East warfare or prehistoric algae that defies modern chemicals.” ^[9] He certainly has media powers; the media continues to print and post whatever he says and does, as if he is the messiah. He feels the world is not yet his, though it will be soon. So, his ambitions are to conquer it by making one-sided deals in his favor. With no shame, as a crypto industry operator and president, he counts his cryptocurrency token windfalls; his office says that he “only acts in the best interests of the American public.” ^[10] You ask, Which part of the American public? Hmm. He believes that he alone can change the world for the better. However, better for him is far from what the world has waited for – a generous messiah who cares for the world public, not a pretender.

Speaking falsely, he hammers the noise in his brain

America is at the crossroads of autocracy, with a public that has welcomed refugees for centuries. Its crossing is clear, with a stop sign warning to carefully look right and left. The man in the seat behind the Resolute Desk feels he can control the world, though he cannot. He is aware of his leadership failures and being hated by some and loved by others, and so, fearful of his declining, disturbed ego, he spends his sleepless nights composing half-sentences on his safe-space Truth Social platform that he believes followers will take as policy success stories, counter to the truths of his failure. As it is with all wannabe autocrats who need safe spaces, he believes that everything he says must be accepted as true and that nobody should ever question him, even though observational evidence declares what he says as false. It is part of the standard authoritarian scheme to slash trust in everything. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, put it in an interview with Ann Applebaum in The Atlantic, “It’s destroying trust, which is really trust in each other, too, because what is an election? It’s everybody casting their vote, their preference, and then based on that collective will, you can change a leadership.”

The last three elections were not rigged, though he claims that the middle one was. All, including his, were plain and simple examples of democracy. He was elected in a true spirit of democracy, a political system that he is attempting to disrupt. Add that to his list of breakages.

The grifter-in-chief

The words “grifter” or “swindler” or “scammer” are not the same as “cheater” or “crook.” In the case of Trump, his sons, and cronies, it seems they first convince people a profit could be made by following and believing lies; the victims do not sense they have been played. Autocrats are not necessarily grifters. They are generally crooks who dip into government funds and taxes, but they do not directly dip into people’s pockets, though indirectly they do. Scanning Trump’s businesses and dipping, it must be obvious to all that the grifter is scamming the public. A grifter is someone who uses other people for personal gain, whereas a crook is someone who may or may not steal from a private person, but rather from an organization or business. Trump’s endless corruption is evident, yet those that he cons continue to support him. Why? Is it stupidity or ignorance? No, there are a few followers left who, though they see the gain on his side, admire his ugly policies such as racism, misogyny, and presentation of toughness, and don’t forget the worst of them all – his brutal immigration policies.

I know that many Americans are saddened that their country has been taken, even many who thought they knew the candidate and believed that they were voting for some of the policies flagged on the campaign trail. They are reckoning with America’s ruptures and seeing that the person in the Oval Office has priorities with no interest in public welfare. We might compare what is happening in America with what has happened in Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Nicaragua. It’s not a fair comparison, but rather a warning.

The path to autocracy

– M. Gessen, Russian-American journalist, on Trump’s fascination with Putin in 2018

Here are Gessen’s rules for combating suspected autocracies:

Rule #1 – “Believe the autocrat.” He means what he says.

Rule # 2 – “Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.” It is a façade of control and manipulation.

Rule # 3 – “Institutions are useless to you.” Watch for the judiciary to repress or collapse your rights.

Rule # 4 – “Be outraged.” It shows you will not accept unconstitutional behavior and diminishing rights.

Rule # 5 – “Don’t make compromises.” Autocrats don’t negotiate the immoral powers they have. Diplomacy is a useless mirage.

And there is also rule number 6, one last one that brings some hope, at least for America. Before listing that rule, I must say that Trump is not fully disobeying laws but is spending billions of taxpayer dollars on legal fees and, in some cases, backing away, as he has with his $1.7 billion taxpayer slush fund for allies investigated under President Biden, a case he would have lost. According to the Trump Administration Litigation Tracker, of the more than 700 lawsuits brought against the Trump administration’s policies, more than 316 active cases challenge Trump’s actions, and 400 cases are active in litigation by appeal. ^[11] More than 150 have ended through temporary restraining orders or injunctions. ^[12] And of the 165 cases that ended with a final decision, 94 were dismissed, 62 were won in favor of the plaintiffs, two had mixed outcomes, and the Trump administration won seven. Of the 30 cases taken to the Supreme Court, six are pending action. Past American presidents have had many lawsuits against their administrations. Trump has had far more than most. Putin and Xi have none. America still has laws in place to hold lawbreakers accountable. There’s the hope.

Rule # 6 – “Remember the future.” Gessen tells us, “Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either.” Resist and dream of awakening from the nightmare by helping those who follow the rules.

– Former U.S. President Barack Obama

How did the US get so close to autocratizing its democracy?

Americans are bravely rising to the challenge. In my previous article “Autocratizing Democracies: A War Just For Power (Part 2),” I wrote that in the written history of the world, in the Common Era, there has never been a constitutional democracy that lasted more than 50 years and later became an autocracy for more than 25 years. America has been somewhat of a democracy for 250 years. Nothing lasts forever (think of Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s electoral autocracy that lasted 16 years), but democracy, in all its weaknesses, is tough to kill if we resist and dream.

David French, in his New York Times opinion column, put it this way: “In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects. They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.” ^[13]

America has been through auditions of toe-holders in every century since its birth. Attempts, experiments, and tests have never broken its democratic model. We are now suffering with ignorant wannabes who will not succeed with this regime. We will go through this repeatedly in the centuries that follow. Will it work for them in the end? We cannot say. That is why we will always have to guard against the endless wannabes.  

This wannabe is focused on his war with Iran, and immigration, while dogging opportunities to solve America’s domestic problems – avoiding the job of presidents – housing, poverty, political unification, and inflation.

When Trump saw his poll numbers rapidly diminishing, he felt he needed a war. That can serve as a political escape route for incumbent leaders who have no better way of pleasing constituents. And so, I am ready to say that the obsessed man’s thinking is to start a war with Iran, partly to show that he can, and partly to have the thrill of feeling the immense power of his reincarnation of Cyrus the Great, who in 550 BC conquered the Iranian plateau in Persia. When Trump’s war ends, if it ever does, the noise in his brain will inspire thoughts of invading Greenland. In doing so, he will be destroying the allied balance of power to get a few hotels built in a part of the world that will someday be the best region for civilization to survive the climate change that he claims is a hoax.

The new messiah-like figure

Some people believe in reincarnation – not me – though I would welcome a reborn American President who, as former U.S. President Barack Obama said, “has to reflect a basic regard for human dignity and decency, not just within our open borders but beyond. … If we don’t have those things, the world can break in very bad ways.” ^[14]

Now, the world is once again leaning toward those bad ways of forgotten history. Those old forgotten wannabe inclinations have consequences. David French, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, illustrates that, when a church evangelizes that he – “arguably the most vulgar, most corrupt president in American history” – was sent by God to save the country, good people begin to leave the church. ^[15] “This is a finding that should trigger soul-searching among American evangelicals.” He wrote, “If Jesus instructed his followers to ‘go and make disciples of all nations,’ then it’s worth pondering whether the decision to so loyally support a man like Trump is worth actively repelling millions upon millions of Americans from church.”

A reincarnated Cyrus the Great now threatens substantial parts of Persia that were once ruled by his previous self. It is another attempt to threaten for personal profit. America has duly and democratically elected this pretender avatar and might again in a future cycle of rebirths to universal powers, but America – the only country in the Common Era that has been at least a representative democracy for 250 years – has its democracy reinforced. Perhaps in some future leadership, a bolt cutter will break it; not in this one.

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

Notes

^[1] His biggest grift attempt was to personally sue the U.S. Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion that would have been paid by American taxpayers. Will that overt grift stop him? Yes, he was stopped by a judge, but will he try again, and again? Sure, what his team of sycophants had laid out in scandalous lawsuit documents, demanding immunity from tax inquiries and compensating his allies with billions.

^[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227070827/a-video-making-the-rounds-online-depicts-trump-as-a-messiah-like-figure

^[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/us/politics/trump-financial-disclosure-crypto-windfall.html?emc=edit_na_20260630&nl=breaking-news&segment_id=222350

^[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/07/13/trumps-sons-invest-heavily-defense-fathers-administration-pours-money/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=acq&utm_campaign=RH-ACQ&utm_content=dtpannual_20260713_RH&campaign_id=18949134

^[5] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

^[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/trump-inept-second-term.html

^[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/us/politics/trump-coin-crypto-investors-loss.html

^[8] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/

^[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/us/politics/trump-washington-dc-construction.html

^[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/us/politics/trump-financial-disclosure-crypto-windfall.html?emc=edit_na_20260630&nl=breaking-news&segment_id=222350

^[11] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-series/trials-of-the-trump-administration/tracking-trump-administration-litigation

^[12] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/us/trump-administration-lawsuits.html

^[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/opinion/communism-fascism-authoritarianism-democracy.html?emc=edit_ty_20260601&nl=opinion-today&segment_id=220776

^[14] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/11/barack-obama-in-the-age-of-trump

^[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/opinion/gen-z-religion-evangelicals-trump.html?emc=edit_ty_20260730&nl=opinion-today&segment_id=223921