Trump, just another ‘mad’ leader in the vast hall of political infamy?

With just over a fortnight of Donald Trump's term of office remaining, it is hardly surprising that the world is reflecting on the outgoing president’s place in history. But the historical debate so far has not been flattering – even before the shocking events in Washington on Wednesday. The trouble is, people keep reaching for the C-word. You’ve probably heard it: Caligula, third emperor of Rome, whose disastrous four-year reign (37-41 CE) made him synonymous ever after with depravity, cruelty and mental instability in the highest office. 

What could a mad emperor – who declared war on the sea, threatened to make his horse a consul, slaughtered people for fun, committed incest with his sister and demanded that his subjects worship him as a god – possibly have in common with the elected president of the world’s leading democratic superpower? Quite a lot, unfortunately.

Trump may not have murdered anyone, or made Trump-worship the official US religion, or done anything more incestuous than think out loud in public about his daughter’s sexual attractions, but he ticks an alarming number of other boxes. 

Like Caligula, he was born into privilege. Like him, he has delighted in scandalising the traditional governing elite. Like him, he has served a four-year term – although “served” is hardly the right word in either case. In office, each man showed considerably more interest in self-glorification than in public service; each squandered a fortune on bling, lavishing luxuries upon himself; each was sexually predatory. And each left the once-idealistic superpower he ruled rocked with unrest.

Caligula, according to the first-century historian Suetonius, was notable for his “astonishing mixture of imbecility and presumption, of moral turpitude and frantic extravagance”. He was also, according to the US historian, Stephen Dando-Collins, “sometimes cowardly and unable to own up to a mistake”; was “driven by self-gratification and paranoia”; and “ruled on impulse”.

Once you start noting the similarities, it’s hard to stop; and Caligula’s example has been invoked endlessly since Trump came to power. The British historian Tom Holland first made the comparison back in 2016. Since then, the New York Times alone has published at least half-a-dozen columns on that theme, while Dando-Collins devoted a whole chapter of his 2019  book, Caligula, the Mad Emperor of Rome, to the question “Is Donald Trump the modern Caligula?”

But the question has been asked more feverishly since November’s election, for obvious reasons. Thwarted madmen have a tendency to lash out recklessly, and Trump’s behaviour in recent weeks has often suggested that he has lost all touch with reality. When the Beijing-backed Global Times reported the Chinese government’s concerns that the defeated president was preparing a “final act of madness”, it was partly a propaganda dig but also a reasonable thing to worry about. Similarly, there was genuine anxiety in the background when the usually sober Modern Diplomacy, specifically invoking Caligula as a comparable example of “the lethal consequences of barbarous governance”, asked: “Should this visibly impaired president still be allowed to decide when and where to launch American nuclear weapons?” And that was before Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol…

But when even the New York Post – reportedly Trump’s favourite paper – made a front page plea to the president to “Stop the insanity”, it became harder to shrug off the potentially horrific consequences of what Republican grandee Mitt Romney has called “things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head”.

Is Trump going to end his presidency with the kind of all-out power-abusing meltdown we associate with Rome’s most notorious tyrant? We will know soon enough; but it is hardly unreasonable, in the meantime, to note the historical echoes. Yet there’s a risk that, in accepting too eagerly the popular “Combover Caligula” meme, we fail to learn more important lessons from the former Apprentice host’s presidency. For there have, it has to be said, been plenty of other men and women in positions of great power whose grip on reason has been a lot more tenuous than Donald Trump’s.

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“FOOLS, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind,” wrote Sigmund Freud on the eve of the Second World War, “and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.”

He was right about the first point. Rome alone produced a good half-a-dozen emperors who might reasonably have been described as “visibly impaired”, notably Nero (r.54-68CE), a narcissist and sadist plagued by psychotic delusions; Commodus (r.176-192), a paranoid megalomaniac with a gladiator fixation who believed himself to be Hercules; Caracalla (r.198-217), who couldn’t stop killing people; and Elagabalus (r.218-222), who in the words of Edward Gibbon “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury” and, as a result, achieved “inexpressible infamy” that “surpasses that of any other age or country”.

How much this mattered to the governed is open to debate. It was generally the ruling elite, rather than the common people, who intervened when an emperor ran amok, and their motives and judgements may not have been disinterested. Elagabalus’s worst offence may simply have been to be non-binary – although he was also, according to the British historian Adrian Goldsworthy, “probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had”. It seems uncontroversial, however, to assert that several emperors of Rome – the greatest superpower the world had seen – were not in full command of their faculties.

Beyond Rome, history offers such a glut of examples of mentally impaired rulers that it might be quicker to list the sane and well-adjusted ones. But the examples of madness, alleged or real, are generally more interesting; and the first thing you learn, when you ask yourself who were the maddest rulers in history, is that insanity is a fluid concept.

At one extreme, history offers a small number of examples of mental disorders in high places that actually prevented the ruler from ruling at all. Otto of Bavaria, for example, whose problems included schizophrenia, syphilis and, possibly, post-traumatic stress disorder, spent much of his notional reign (1886-1913) confined in palace rooms with padded walls. Similarly, the British King George III (r.1760-1820), who suffered periodically from delusions, convulsions, confusion and “incessant loquacity”, spent much of his reign in confinement.

The thing about this kind of mental illness is that it isn’t necessarily a major public inconvenience. Otto was said to bark like a dog, bang his head against the wall and scream in a high-pitched voice about imagined boils on his feet. His subjects barely noticed. Bavaria had already lost its independence, absorbed by Otto von Bismarck into a united Germany while Otto’s predecessor, “Mad King Ludwig”, was squandering every last pfennig of the royal wealth on pointlessly extravagant “fairy-tale” castles. Mad King Otto could do what he liked.

Even the madness of King George caused only minor havoc. Like Otto, he was a constitutional monarch with limited powers, and ceding those powers to a regent (and, in practice, to parliament) limited them further. George III’s most embarrassing activities as a monarch – losing the American colonies, opposing the abolition of slavery – took place during his sane interludes; the rest of the time, he was marginal.

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More alarming is the madness of the absolute ruler who continues to rule – such as Charles VI, who was king of France, after a fashion, from 1380 to 1422. Sometimes said to be the real-life inspiration for Aerys II Targaryen (“the Mad King”) in Game of Thrones, Charles not only barked like a dog, forgot his own name, claimed to be Saint George, failed to recognise his own wife and, for a while, thought he was made of glass, but actually attacked and killed his own men in (or rather before) battle. 

In the early years of his long reign (1380-1422), he was known as Charles the Beloved. By the end he was very firmly Charles the Mad, and while his only act of mass incineration, at a masked ball in 1393, appears to have been accidental, the absence of confidence-inspiring royal leadership (even when his wife was acting as his regent) had disastrous consequences for France, which suffered invasion, defeat, ethnic cleansing and, from 1407, a messy civil war (between rival royal factions) while Charles wore the crown.

In the grand historical scheme of things, however, such episodes of eccentric misrule feel like little more than unfortunate under-achievement. Consider, by contrast, such world-changing leaders as Attila the Hun (434-453CE), the “scourge of humanity” who sacked 100 cities and precipitated the collapse of Roman civilisation; or Genghis Khan, who left millions dead as he carved out the Mongol empire between 1206 and 1227; or Hulagu Khan, who led the Mongols from 1256 to 1265 and oversaw the utter obliteration of Baghdad – the heart of Islamic civilisation – in a 10-day blow-out of cruelty and destruction in 1258; or the Turco-Mongol warlord Timur (aka Tamberlaine, aka “the scourge of God”), who has been blamed for the violent deaths of up to 17 million people (five per cent of the world’s population) during a 35-year orgy of conquest (1370-1405CE) that subjugated, among other places, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Georgia, Azerbaijan and India.

None of these leaders suffered from incapacitating delusions, as far as I am aware, but it is hard to think of any of them as entirely sane or stable. Each employed intense cruelty as a deliberate military tactic, rather as Isis do today. Timur, for example, buried thousands of people alive, used his victims’ severed heads as missiles, built towers from left-over skulls, and used one defeated sultan (still alive) as a footstool. You probably wouldn’t want such a man too close to a nuclear arsenal. Yet there’s no denying that, by certain measures, the tactic of ultra-violence worked well for each of these self-appointed scourges; and, as a result, history has treated them leniently when judging their sanity. Timur is known as Timur the Great, not Timur the Mad, and Uzbekistan has adopted him as a symbol of national identity. Genghis Khan, similarly, is revered in Mongolia as a founding father of national identity and culture.

It’s far from self-evident that slaughtering millions of people is saner behaviour than a bit of harmless barking or spreading random untruths on Twitter, but that’s how history works. Donald Trump won’t like hearing this, but madness is, traditionally, a diagnosis doled out to losers. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re mentally ill.

Joanna of Castile, who reigned over parts of Spain from 1504 to 1555, is generally known as “the Mad” (Juana la Loca). Often she has been portrayed as comically insane: a woman prone to paroxysms of rage and grief who, following her husband’s death in 1506, insisted on being accompanied by his corpse wherever she went, so that he wouldn’t betray her with other women. A more sceptical reading of the same biographical facts suggests a brave woman who was cruelly abused – by her father, by her faithless husband, and by the imperial schemers who took her children from her, locked her up and spread the rumour that she was too insane to govern. 

Joanna’s real offence – arguably – was to be fiercely independent. She went on hunger strike to get her daughter back, seemed sceptical about Roman Catholicism and may even have adopted the ploy of carting her husband’s coffin around with her in order to discourage unwanted suitors. It’s hard to deny that her behaviour was often strange – she dressed as a monk and claimed that her mother had been eaten by a cat – but this, too, may have been a ploy. And if she also comes across as a bit paranoid, well, a lot of people really were out to get her; and one of the ways in which they did so was by labelling her as “mad”.

Compare this to the reputation of Joanna’s brother-in-law, Henry VIII of England. He got through wives like takeaways, was prone to fits of murderous jealousy and rage, suffered from paranoia, hypochondria, depression, anxiety and perhaps even dementia; started wars on a whim; and overthrew an entire religious establishment for no other reason than to gratify his sexual urges. It’s hard to imagine a less sane and balanced ruler, yet no one identifies him as “Henry the Mad”. 

Perhaps that’s because that label wouldn’t distinguish him sufficiently from other English Henrys, such as Henry V (whose Stannis Baratheon-like single-mindedness was surely psychopathic) or Henry VI (a religious simpleton whose mental breakdown in 1453 – possibly catatonic schizophrenia – made him totally unresponsive for 18 months). More probably it’s because Henry VIII, unlike Joanna, got what he wanted. History, including the history of mental health in high places, tends to be written by the winners.

It also tends to be written by men and (for those of us who read it) in our own language. So our judgements tend to be skewed by biases of gender and nationality. Henry VIII’s craziness has been underplayed because he was at least “our” monster. The Reformation he unleashed became, in due course, a key part of British national identity – and, hey, what are a few wives between fellow Anglican males?

A foreign, female sovereign could expect far harsher treatment by English-speaking posterity. Ranavalona I, for example, is often referred to as “the Mad Queen of Madagascar”, or, to quote the title of one modern biography, “the female Caligula”. Yet although her reign (from 1828 to 1861) was cruel and bloody, it was also relatively successful, in terms of her self-declared goals. Like Henry VIII (and others since), she sought to take back control for her nation. 

Europeans – missionaries, merchants, would-be colonists – had been encroaching on Madagascar for years, and Ranavalona was determined to turn back the tide. “Never say: ‘She is only a feeble and ignorant woman…’,” she proclaimed at her coronation. “I will… worship no gods but those of my ancestors. The ocean shall be the boundary of my realm, and I will not cede the thickness of one hair of my realm.”

Nor did she. Foreigners were driven out, Christianity was banned. Anyone who opposed the Queen was killed without hesitation. So were many who didn’t. Missionaries were tortured and killed in a variety of inventive ways. Many thousands of others, including the Queen’s lovers, were subjected to a bizarre and hazardous form of trial by ordeal, involving the emetic (and toxic) tangena nut, while tens of thousands more were conscripted as forced labourers-cum-soldiers – an occupation that proved fatal for many of them. Demography suggests that Ranavalona overdid it. By one estimate, the island’s population halved, from 5 million to 2.5 million, in the course of her reign; which is, when you think about it, pretty insane.

On the plus side, however, she did manage to keep out most of the Europeans – and it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this may have coloured her subsequent reputation among European commentators. OK, she was probably a psychopath, and her subjects paid a high price for her mood swings and whims. She once initiated a vast, four-month buffalo hunt that cost thousands of her (involuntary) followers’ lives but failed to catch a single buffalo. Yet you could also argue that she was an effective monarch – especially in contrast to her successors, who allowed a resurgence of French influence that culminated, after years of bloody struggle, in Madagascar becoming a French colony.

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THIS IS one of the paradoxes of derangement in high places. Mentally unbalanced rulers make us nervous, and tend to end up knee-deep in blood. Often, however, they get the job done. From Robespierre to Lenin, Napoleon to Mao Zedong, history keeps throwing up examples of statesmen who changed history because they weren’t squeamish about mass killing. They’re rarely described as lunatics. Is it reasonable, however, to think of them as sane?

Our answers to such questions are shaped by our philosophical assumptions about evil, madness and moral responsibility. They are also influenced by our political and patriotic prejudices. Most French people admire Napoleon, whose vainglorious war-mongering caused untold suffering across Europe and cost between 3 and 6 million lives. They tend, however, to condemn Henry V, another insatiable warmonger, whose cold-blooded slaughter of civilians and prisoners (justified by the claim that he, too, was “the scourge of God”) mark him out as a very English psychopath. The English tend to invert these judgements. 

Most Mongolians admire Genghis Khan, who slaughtered the populations of whole cities with barely a second thought; in the lands he devastated, his name is still used as shorthand for merciless terror. In China, public places are decorated with vast images of Mao – who ended his 27-year stint as Great Helmsman with a cumulative death toll conservatively estimated (if you include man-made famine) at 70 million of his own citizens. And Mao, like Joseph Stalin (whose paranoia sent at least 15 million of his countrymen to their deaths), is also viewed favourably by many beyond his homeland, who believe, from a socialist perspective, that great revolutionaries can be forgiven a few million broken eggs in the making of their utopian omelettes.

The Russians, predictably, are particularly likely to look favourably on Stalin, who regularly tops “Greatest Russian” polls. What’s almost more shocking is the admiration that some of them also feel for Ivan IV (r.1547-84), the distinctly non-socialist founding father of Russian autocracy, whose paranoid rages and gratuitous cruelties (removing enemies’ ribs with red hot irons, boiling or skinning people alive, massacring the entire population of Novgorod, beating his own son to death) earned him worldwide notoriety as Ivan the Terrible. So what? say his admirers: at least he gave us strong, centralised government. There have even been a couple of Ivan the Terrible statues erected in Russia in recent years.

It is striking, however, that, even if you disregard patriotic biases, a record of large-scale atrocities is not, in itself, enough to guarantee a cruel ruler a historical verdict of madness. Think of the various respectable British monarchs and prime ministers who enabled the slave trade; or, more simply, think of the posthumous reputation of Belgium’s loathsome king, Leopold II (1865-1909), whose crimes against humanity in the Congo resulted in perhaps 10 million deaths and left social and economic scars that persist to this day. 

Leopold used the resulting wealth to play the part of a model European monarch: a suave, dignified, philanthropic benefactor of the Belgian nation. It’s hard to find words to do justice to his chilling lack of conscience or common humanity, yet you are unlikely to hear him described as insane. Indeed, until very recently there were statues in his honour all over Belgium; just as, in Britain, “Good Queen Bess” (Elizabeth I) and “the Merry Monarch” (Charles II) are generally remembered as two of our more accomplished sovereigns. Sanity, it seems, is judged by the face you present to the public, not by what goes on behind the scenes.

Perhaps that’s why Jean-Bédel Bokassa – president of the Central African Republic from 1966-1976 and, from 1976-1979, “emperor” of the briefly rebranded Central African Empire – is rarely described as anything but deranged. He was open about his enthusiastic cruelty. He is said to have personally murdered one rival, André Banza, in the middle of a cabinet meeting, using a knife with which he had just been stirring his coffee. Other opponents were fed to crocodiles or even, some claimed, eaten by Bokassa himself. As for corruption, he despoiled his nation’s wealth for his own aggrandisement, just as Leopold had despoiled the wealth of the Belgian Congo, just across the border. Unlike Leopold, however, Bokassa didn’t try to conceal it. His coronation as emperor in 1977 was reported to have cost $20m – one third of the erstwhile republic’s annual budget.

Eventually, Bokassa’s reign of terror became intolerable – the final straw was a massacre of protesting schoolchildren in 1979 – and a French invasion restored the previous president, David Dacko, to power. Seven years later, Bokassa, who had returned from exile, was tried for a smorgasbord of crimes including treason, murder, embezzlement, cannibalism and assault. After a stormy trial – “I’m not a saint,” raged Bokassa – he was found guilty of all the charges apart from the cannibalism. (There was reasonable doubt as to why, precisely, the butchered bodies seen in his cold store had been hanging there.) His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; he was released after six years; and he died at home, of natural causes, in 1996.

Ironically, of all the gory details, it’s the cannibalism charge that sticks most persistently to Bokassa’s reputation – and that helps make the “mad” label stick. No doubt there’s an element of racism in this, just as there is when the same allegation is made against Idi Amin. Yet it’s hard to see the “Butcher of Uganda” as anything but a crazed tyrant. His eight-year presidency (1971-1979) was marked by cruelty, repression and vicious persecution of a range of ethnic minorities, offset by an often comical self-regard that encouraged the western media to portray him primarily as a vain buffoon. 

Amin showered himself with honours and titles: president for life, field marshal, doctor, VC, DSO, MC, CBE; king of Scotland (uncrowned); and, eventually: “Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas”. There was of course nothing funny about his reign of terror for those who endured it (including 50,000 citizens of Asian descent who were simply expelled from their own country). But following his humiliating overthrow in 1979, Amin has rarely been discussed without some reference to the more colourful symptoms of his mental instability. We’re more likely to mention the love letters he wrote to the British Queen than to reflect in depth on his presidency’s death-toll of up to 300,000 people.

The moral is obvious, if dispiriting: serious analysis is reserved for successful rulers, not for losers. In fact, the best way to avoid the “mad” label may not be to do your best to govern in a sane, rational and humane way. It may simply be to avoid failure – whatever the human cost. Freud’s much-quoted remark in the 1930s about “fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions” was directed not at Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini but at the late US president, Woodrow Wilson, whose failure to impose a lasting peaceful settlement on Europe after the First World War marked him out, in Freud’s view, as a man “dangerously alienated from the world of reality: a man for whom mere facts held no significance”.

History’s verdict on Wilson has, on the whole, been kinder than Freud’s – which might more appropriately be applied to a later occupant of the White House. Wilson was a president of limited effectiveness, and his views on race were offensive even by the standards of the day, but in terms of mental stability he was one of the early 20th century’s saner leaders. Yet the mere existence of an alternative view reminds us that reputations for sanity can go down as well as up. One moment, you’re the competent, well-meaning master of all you survey, with a war freshly won and half the planet looking to you for guidance. The next thing you know, people are questioning your grip on reality.

The questioners often turn out to be right, not just because success is transient but also because it breeds its own delusions. Even clear-headed democratic politicians succumb easily to hubris after a few general election triumphs. Think of third-term Margaret Thatcher or third-term Tony Blair, and then imagine how much headier success might feel for a hands-on military leader with a taste for dominance and a decade of conquest behind them.

Ivan the Terrible is an obvious example of how things can go wrong. In his first decade or so as ruler he went from success to success, defeating Russia’s enemies, expanded its frontiers, taming the feuding boyars (nobles), rebuilding Moscow, and creating a strong, centralised machinery of state. Only later on, from around 1560, did his paranoid side become dominant – after which it made up for lost time.

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Shaka kaSenzangakhona, also known as Shaka Zulu, followed a similar career trajectory. The Zulus’ most famous king combined incisive intelligence with relentless terror to militarise his nation between 1816 and 1828. Men who showed insufficient enthusiasm for ferocious combat were simply beaten to death; so, by some accounts, were any who objected to running barefoot across rocky mountains on the way to battle. The results were spectacular. The Zulus became an almost irresistible military force and a significant regional power – whose conquests arguably set off the disastrous cycle of displacement and tribal violence known as the Mfecane, in which a million Africans or more perished in the first half of the 19th century.

From the Zulu point of view, Shaka was still “the Great” after his first decade in power. Then he slipped over the thin line between ruthless effectiveness and sadistic paranoia. In 1827, following the death of his mother, Shaka had at least 7,000 people killed for not showing enough grief, banned crop-planting for a year and made pregnancy a capital offence. His popularity suffered as his victims multiplied, and in 1828 he was assassinated.

From a reputational point of view, perhaps he should have been grateful, like a poet or musician who dies young. Time has softened the impact of his indiscriminate killings, and Shaka is today more likely to be admired for his military genius – and his success as a nation-builder – than scorned as a psychopath. There’s a large statue of him, still un-toppled as 2020 draws to a close, in Camden Lock, London, while a new statue of him is expected to be installed soon at King Shaka International Airport in Durban. The previous version, removed soon after the airport’s opening in 2010, was deemed insufficiently respectful.

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SHAKA might have survived longer if he had been a bit more suspicious of those around him. Crazed tyrants rarely make that mistake. Caracalla did, in 217CE – and was assassinated by a bodyguard whose brother he had killed. So did Astyages of Medea (r.585–550 BCE), who was caught off-guard by the treachery of general he had appointed, whose son he had previously killed, cooked and served up to his father at a banquet. But these were rare exceptions. Most of the maddest, baddest tyrants have been guided by Dominic Cummings’s adopted mantra, that “only the paranoid survive”.

“I know that there are scores of people plotting to kill me,” boasted Saddam Hussein, the “Butcher of Baghdad” (and president of Iraq) from 1979 to 2003. “However, I am far more clever than they are. I know they are conspiring to kill me long before they actually start planning to do it…” There is a compelling logic to this approach. The more you slaughter and torture those whose loyalty you doubt, the more reason you have to distrust your remaining subjects. But is it paranoia to recognise this? Or just common sense?

In their classic 1997 study, Political Paranoia, the US political psychologists Robert S Robins and Jerrold M Post identified seven traits that typically characterise a “paranoid” leader: extreme suspiciousness (seeing threats everywhere); centrality (thinking “everything is about me”); grandiosity; hostility (anger at perceived enemies all around); fear of loss of autonomy and control; delusional beliefs (even in the face of strong contradictory evidence); and projection of the leader’s own flaws, weaknesses and errors on to the outside world (which must be to blame, given that the leader cannot be). Remind you of anyone? Of course. But Robins and Post were focusing on the 20th century, not the 21st.

They found that, taken together, these traits are associated with a pattern of political behaviour that typically involves the tireless pursuit of power, constant scheming, the elimination of rivals, and the promotion – with scant regard for truth – of a distorted vision of the world in which the leader has almost messianic powers and requires absolute obedience in order to thwart a supposed conspiracy by some already-resented minority (eg, Jews, kulaks, intellectuals, Communists, foreigners, witches, etc). This often leads to rapid political successes but rarely ends well in the long run.

Leaders who exhibit such behaviours are assumed to suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder of the kind sometimes known as “malignant” (also associated with serial killers), which is exacerbated, paradoxically, by a strong sense of inferiority, rooted in childhood rejections or humiliations. Such leaders tend to develop a grandiose, idealised self-image, to compensate for those underlying feelings of unworthiness; and from this grows a thin-skinned horror of criticism and, as a result, a powerful instinct to blame every setback or frustration on the malign machinations of hostile groups.

It’s a toxic formula, but the complicating factor, as Robins and Post concede, is that there is no objective way of determining which leaders exhibit these traits because they are genuinely unbalanced and which do so for tactical reasons. Caligula, for example, leaves few boxes unticked in terms of politically paranoid behaviour, yet some modern historians attribute his excesses, at least in part, to ruthless calculation. (“What he did,” according to Tom Holland, “was to trample the dignity of the senatorial elite into the dirt. And what he discovered in doing that was that the mass of the Roman people really enjoyed it.”) 

You could certainly argue that, if much of Trump’s behaviour in politics has seemed to conform to that seven-point “paranoia” blueprint, it has also brought him significant political advantages. Like Caligula’s, his confident flouting of the norms of political decency has simultaneously delighted his non-elite supporters and cemented his dominance over the scandalised political Establishment. Even since his electoral defeat, his untiring stream of preposterous public falsehoods may well have tightened his grip on his party. In effect, he has been daring Republican grandees to call him out, and each one that has failed to rise to the challenge is doomed to be Trump’s creature for ever.

Any gangland boss or playground bully would recognise that tactic – reinforcing dominance through humiliation – just as they would recognise the underlying method in Trump’s ostensibly mad slanging-matches with foreign leaders. 

What Trump instinctively recognises – along with populists, gang-leaders and political paranoids everywhere – is that, when it comes to power, few things make more difference than prestige. Is the world on the point of accepting North Korea as a serious nuclear-armed state on a par with the UK or France? Or will we continue to think of the ruling Kim dynasty as largely comic dictators, pudgy, vain and obsessed with Western luxuries? The global jury is still out, but it was hardly irrational for Trump to seek to influence its jurors by name-calling. In the absence of better options, undermining Kim Jong-un’s prestige with “Little Rocket Man” gibes may have been as sensible a way as any of hurting the rogue regime, and the “dotard” counter-gibes suggest that it had an effect.

The danger with such willy-waving is that it sometimes works too well. Being sniggered at is, after all, the political paranoid’s worst nightmare. Who wants to end up like Saparmurat Niyazov, whose otherwise lacklustre rule of Turkmenistan from 1990 to 2006 was remarkable only for repression, declining life expectancy and Niyazov’s bizarre personality cult? 

The Great Head of the Turkmen (as he dubbed himself) renamed towns, schools and even months after himself, his family and his writings; made his autobiography compulsory reading in schools; erected a $12m golden statue of himself that rotated so that it always faced the sun; commissioned an ice palace and a penguin house in the sun-baked desert; abolished the Turkmen word for bread; and insisted that a youthful image of his face appear on, among other things, watches and vodka bottles.

In the absence of actual achievements, however, his self-aggrandisement merely made him look ridiculous – and he is remembered, if at all, as a warning for other narcissistic tyrants of what happens if you fail to persuade the world to take you seriously. The moral that many of them will draw is that, if you want respect, it is better to arm yourselves to the teeth, like the Kims; or perhaps even to think like King Lear, Shakespeare’s maddest king, who, tormented by his humiliations, warned: “I will do such things—/ What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be /The terrors of the earth!” When an embattled paranoid leader starts scaling up the atrocities, it often means that the end is approaching. It also means, almost invariably, that he’s afraid of losing face.

We should hope that, in his crazier moments, Trump is just playing a part, because true political paranoids who achieve great power tend, eventually, to do terrible things with it. It’s the only way to convince the world of their worth. Robins and Post offer detailed and compelling evidence to show how closely many of history’s most monstrous tyrants have conformed to their psychological profile of paranoia. Even at the height of their power, for example, Hitler and Stalin were almost comically averse to criticism, however mild, even in private. So was Saddam. So was Idi Amin. So, for that matter, was Caligula. And, yes, so is Donald Trump.

We should resist the temptation to equate Donald Trump’s undignified debasement of his office with the genocidal atrocities of Hitler or Stalin. Yet that basic psychological dynamic – an inferiority complex offset by delusions of grandeur, with the resulting tensions kept at bay by a refusal to face facts – can also be observed in a host of lesser charlatans. Robins and Post mention Joseph McCarthy, David Duke, Lyndon Larouche, Jim Jones and David Koresh, among others. It doesn’t seem unfair to discuss the bombastic, thin-skinned, compulsively dishonest Trump in this kind of low company.

With Trump, however, any psychological impairments are only half the problem. The other, crucial half is his job title, because great power makes things worse. “A dog’s obeyed in office,” observed Lear, correctly; which is bad news if the dog in question is a mad dog – or even a mentally erratic dog – and the office in question is the presidency of a nuclear-armed superpower.

The pioneering political scientist Betty Glad, in her 2002 paper, “Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power”, argued that many of the most powerful tyrants have an inherent tendency to self-destruct, because the psychological factors that impel them to pursue power so ruthlessly in the first place ultimately drive them to abuse it to the point of catastrophe; and the more power they have, the stronger that pressure becomes.

To start with, their political paranoia works well for them, as they soothe their inner tensions by accumulating control and uncritical adulation. But there comes a point where the returns diminish, and neurosis and narcissism spill over into something more dangerous. The tyrant’s “reality-testing capacities” diminish too, and, according to Glad, “fantasies held in check when his power is limited are apt to become his guides to action”. This leads to more erratic behaviour, which results in more disappointments, which the insecure, narcissistic tyrant simply cannot deal with. As a result, “paranoid defences become more exaggerated”.

In other words: necessary cruelties are compounded by gratuitous ones. Allies are eliminated along with enemies. Resources are diverted, absurdly, into protecting the tyrant’s frail ego. In effect, the possibility of criticism is banned. Setbacks multiply, and are blamed ever more fiercely on mostly imagined conspiracies and betrayals; and, as a result, are never learnt from or even properly addressed. And so the whole cycle continues, constantly reinforcing itself, until we end up with the familiar trope of the all-powerful dictator hiding in his heavily-guarded bunker, with no one with whom to share the rewards of absolute power apart from an entourage of abject sycophants, trusted because they are obviously useless, half of whom are thinking treasonous thoughts anyway.

I hope it isn’t tempting fate to say that Trump’s first presidency seems likely to end much less dramatically than that. But the problem remains that, as Robins and Post put it: “When a paranoid leader becomes chief of state, his paranoia infects the nation.” They had in mind that particular kind of collective paranoia that sees millions turn savagely on demonised minorities. But dangerous infections can take many forms, and it hardly needs pointing out in the coronavirus age that a contagion can be relatively non-lethal but still be dangerous, debilitating and desperately hard to eradicate.

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ULTIMATELY, the psychological source of Trump’s erratic behaviour doesn’t particularly matter, any more than it matters, right now, precisely where coronavirus came from.  We know that the president has a narcissist’s horror of losing face. We hope that US democracy is robust enough to deny him the absolute power that paranoid tyrants usually require in order to Go Too Far. Barring a final-fortnight meltdown, or a second, crazier term in office at some later date, the 45th president will go down in history not as a madman but as a super-spreader: the man who, in four years as leader of the free world, made more than 25,000 demonstrably untrue public statements – according to the Washington Post’s itemised count – and thus ensured that the virus of fake news became endemic.

In this respect, Trump calls to mind another of history’s most notorious rulers:  Vlad III Dracula, the on-and-off Voivode of Wallachia (now mostly in Romania) from 1448-1477. Vlad wasn’t, as far as I know, a spreader of falsehoods, although his behaviour left a lot to be desired in other ways. (He disembowelled his own mistress, nailed turbans to the heads of Ottoman envoys, amassed a collection of 24,000 severed noses, and impaled his defeated enemies on stakes in such numbers that on several occasions he created vast “forests of the impaled”.) 

But the significance of Vlad the Impaler today has less to do with his actual record as a firm leader who took cruelty to the next level than it has to do with the fictional character that Bram Stoker loosely based on him. Stoker’s Count Dracula, as we all know, was a vampire. He lived, indefinitely, be feeding on human blood, which his living victims were strangely unable to prevent him from sucking from them. To make things worse, these victims then became vampires themselves, seeking out new victims of their own. And because they were already undead, they were almost impossible to get rid of.

It’s not an exact simile, but there’s something about Trump’s modus operandi that makes me think of Dracula. He feeds not on blood but on trust, which he drains insatiably, in different ways, from friends and foes alike. (This is where the image breaks down, because the bitten foes – Hillary Clinton, the mainstream media, half-hearted allies, rival candidates for the Republican nomination – seem to be left as metaphorical zombies, drained of credibility; it’s only Trump’s supporters who become metaphorical vampires, undead, but actively passing on his post-truth curse.) Barely anyone, except perhaps the Russians, has worked out an effective way of fending off the post-truth president’s attacks, and there are now so many of his undead victims out there that it is impossible to keep track.

Like any narcissist, Trump loves to be the centre of attention, yet he has also perfected the vampire’s necessary trick of shunning mirrors and direct sunlight. No matter what he is accused of, he always sticks religiously to the rules laid down by his political guru, Roger Stone (the consultant who also advised Richard Nixon): “Attack, attack, attack – never defend… Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.” While his enemies struggle to recover from his attacks on their integrity, Trump’s own perceived credibility remains almost supernaturally intact.

Perhaps I exaggerate. It is true that, for the time being, the Dracula figure in this simile seems (thanks largely to coronavirus) to have been manoeuvred back into his coffin. But if you think the menace of the Trust Vampire has gone away for ever, you are more optimistic than I am. Those baseless allegations of electoral fraud are scary partly because it’s the President of the United States who has been making them. What’s scarier still is the thought that there are so many people out there who believe them – and who, even as you read this, are energetically passing them on.

Comparing the US president to the Emperor Caligula – or to any of the other “mad” leaders in history’s vast Hall of Political Infamy – is a seductively easy exercise, but it’s liable to lull us into the assumption that, come 20 January, the Trump nightmare will be over. Comparing him to the Voivode Vlad III alerts us to a less comfortable, but possibly more accurate thought: if we don’t find a way of metaphorically putting a stake through his heart – or at least of exposing him and his followers to lots of direct sunlight – he’ll be back next time it gets dark.