A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose

Especially when you’re running a country

A note to subscribers: I’ve taken my weekend primer on Social Security out from behind the paywall, partly in response to popular demand but also because it’s relevant to today’s post.

This will, I hope, be a fairly short post. That’s partly because my schedule is really tight at the moment and I don’t have time for detailed analysis. But it’s also because I don’t want too much analysis to clutter up a very simple point: The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.

I don’t say this because I disagree with their ideologies or believe that they have very bad policy ideas. That’s been true for quite a few politicians over the years. But while I’ve always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity.

And yes, I’m well aware of the dangers involved in questioning people’s mental stability from afar, especially in a political context. I personally have been the target of that sort of thing, back when people accused me of being unhinged for suggesting that the Bush administration was taking us to war on false pretenses.

But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality.

News reports still tend to sanewash what our leaders have been saying, and even selected quotations often make them sound more rational than they are. Fortunately, both are addicted to posting on social media, and you really have to read some of their posts to get a full sense of the madness.

So here’s Trump, ranting against Canada:

Leave aside the nonsensical claims that Canada is a high-tariff nation subsidized by the United States. When Trump first began talking about turning Canada into the 51^st state, many people treated it as a joke. But Trump doesn’t appear to be in on the joke. He just keeps doubling down, even as the people of Canada grow ever more outraged. No sane leader would imagine that it’s a good idea to threaten a heretofore friendly but proudly patriotic neighbor and ally with annexation. But a sane leader is exactly what we don’t have.

Then there’s Elon Musk. Surely almost everyone except Trump realizes that DOGE has been a bust; despite unprecedented and often illegal access to government agencies, it has yet to come up with any credible major examples of waste or fraud. Even Musk, I suspect, knows at some level that he’s failing. But like Trump on Canada, he just keeps doubling down.

Consider Musk’s quickly and easily refuted claim that tens of millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This was a deeply embarrassing error, one that would have killed most people’s political careers. Still, Musk might have been able to ride it out by admitting that his minions had failed to understand the Social Security Administration’s databases.

But no. Musk has reiterated his claim that we’re making huge payments to dead people, and is now insisting that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, showing that he hasn’t made any effort to understand how the bedrock of American retirement works. Musk’s obsession with supposed fraud in Social Security is looking a lot like Trump’s obsession with annexing Canada; apparently he simply can’t admit error, even to himself, and change course.

And then there’s this:

Of course, illegal immigrants don’t receive Social Security benefits, because they don’t have valid Social Security numbers. But that’s almost trivial compared with Musk’s open endorsement of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, according to which liberals are deliberately luring nonwhite immigrants to America to tilt the electorate in their favor. This is the conspiracy theory that inspired torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville to chant “Jews will not replace us.”

And look beyond what Trump and Musk have said to the actions of the people they’ve chosen to oversee key public agencies. Robert F. Kennedy, the secretary of health and human services, refuses to respond to a measles outbreak with a clear call for vaccinations, instead suggesting that people take cod liver oil. The secretary of agriculture has suggested that Americans respond to high egg prices by raising their own chickens.

How did the highest levels of U.S. government become infected by madness? Well, this is what you get when you give flawed people — people prone to grandiosity, vindictiveness and paranoia — so much power that nobody dares tell them when they’re going too far. Cowed Republicans and timid Democrats have effectively given Trump and Musk the freedom to become the worst versions of themselves.

And the whole world will pay the price.

MUSICAL CODA