Trumps Calculated Derangement Syndrome

Autocracy by insult.

Trump does not simply insult people; he curates a small private bestiary and then stuffs you into it. On Air Force One, high above the earth in the whitish hum of Trump’s imperial power, the president of the United States turned to a woman whose job is to ask him questions on behalf of 330 million people and called her “Piggy.” Another insult in the vacuous sludge of Trumpian politics, but the White House hurried to assure everyone that this, too, was democracy in action.

“Frankness,” explained press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the Trump administration’s latest spokesperson turned Trumpian ghoul. This is, she claimed, the honesty that won him a second term; the people wanted authenticity, and what is more authentic than the head of state barking farmyard epithets at a woman for asking about the government’s handling of the files of a dead sex trafficker with friends in very high places. The choreography is simple. Karoline Leavitt steps up to the podium, a high priestess in the new religion of ressentiment, and assures the room that this was not misogyny, not bullying, but “frankness,” the sacrament by which the leader reveals his authenticity to the faithful. Trump, she insists, is “very candid and truthful”, and this is why the American people reelected him: he insults you to your face instead of lying behind your back, and somehow this alchemy turns verbal sadism into virtue.​

Trump faces criticism for the Epstein files, and so he lashes out at the people whose job it is to ask about the Epstein files. Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg asked a question, and the president of the United States, who controls the nuclear weapons and the slowly leaking contents of history’s most embarrassing dead man, snarls: “Quiet, Piggy.” The insult is schoolyard, not Shakespearean; a bored, lazy cruelty from a man who knows that for him, the insult has no consequences, only vibes. The whole episode was so childish that you could almost miss the fact that it happened on Air Force One while the president is fielding questions about a dead man whose black book glows like nuclear waste at the heart of the American elite.

Bloomberg, dutifully, reminded the world that their reporters “perform a vital public service, asking questions without fear or favour,” which is true. Still, it also sounds like a press freedom NGO trying to negotiate with a drunk dictator. Lucey herself does not comment. One imagines her somewhere on that plane, watching American political reality becoming aggressively absurd in real time. But perhaps the most shocking thing was the reaction of the other scribes and custodians of the Fourth Estate. No protest, no weak chorus of solidarity. The guardians of American democracy accept their new place, on all fours, keen to nose at the trough. Trump’s second term is littered with such moments: the president’s sadomasochistic intercourse with the press, each episode less shocking, each humiliation met with subdued acquiescence, as if they are being gradually housebroken by the force of pure, toxic repetition. Is it the jab of his finger, that imperial digit tracing commandments in the air? Is it the blunt command, the assumption that reality itself kneels before his voice? Perhaps, but more so, it’s the name-calling, the transformation of public discourse into a private presidential menagerie where every opponent can be rendered something less than human or livestock with a word. And perhaps, worst of all, it’s the studied unconcern from the others, the great, rolling inertia of a journalistic profession learning to become silent, to stop barking, to stop asking.

The spiral continues. A few days later, under the chandeliers of the newly decorated vulgar White House, Trump appeared with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and CIA-certified architect of Jamal Khashoggi’s dismemberment. Mary Bruce of ABC News asks the obvious questions: why anyone should trust a man who ordered a journalist to be butchered by a death squad with a bone saw, and why Trump has not released the Epstein files while claiming to support legislation that would. For this, Bruce is rewarded with the full Trumpian diatribe: denounced as a “terrible person and a terrible reporter,” her network accused of being “fake news,” the president trying, again, to yoke the machinery of the state to avenge his bruised ego. He even instructs his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, a bureaucrat now repurposed as a kind of palace inquisitor, to revoke ABC’s broadcasting licenses. The point is to let every journalist in the room feel, even for a second, that their job depends on the capricious mood of the man in the Oval Office. The point was to show Mohammed bin Salman, another brutal Middle East dictator, that journalists can be made to squirm for asking the wrong questions in Trump's America.

A fifteen-man squad flew into Turkey to murder Khashoggi at the behest of Mohammed bin Salman. Not assassins, not exactly, that’s too clean a word, too romantic. This was a technical team, a delegation of butchers. A disassembly crew. They didn’t just kill Jamal Khashoggi; they performed an act of state-sponsored barbarism, reversing the order of flesh and bone until all that was left was a problem of logistics. And of course, they recorded it. In the 21st century, even an act of medieval barbarism requires documentation. The killers didn’t just make a snuff movie. As a trophy for Mohammed bin Salman, the butchers brought back the journalist’s fingers, the very instruments he had used to type his critiques of the regime. When Trump calls Khashoggi “extremely controversial” and shrugs, “things happen,” standing beside the man who ordered Khashoggi’s dismemberment, he is not just excusing an ally; he is performing a theory of the press. In this theory, journalists are not citizens with rights and duties; they are, at best, inconvenient objects, whose continued existence depends on their willingness to be supine rather than interrogatory.

In the first Trump term, this stuff could be written off as theatre: the insults as brand management, the “enemy of the people” language as trolling with nuclear codes. In the second term, it has metastasised into something darker and more dangerous: petty authoritarianism laundered through the machinery of state. This is the real function of all that talk about “frankness.” It is not honesty, but permission. It tells journalists that the government is just an especially large comments section, that power is the right to say the quiet parts out loud and then make someone lose their job. When Trump calls a reporter “Piggy,” he is not simply being rude; he is inviting anyone watching to imagine a world in which people who ask awkward questions are shoved back into the sty.

And always, just offstage is Jeffrey Epstein: the human nexus of money, sex, and power that now haunts Trump’s second term like a ghost that knows everyone’s browser history. Somewhere in those pages are the names of men who would prefer to be respected as statesmen, philanthropists, thought leaders, princes, not sex criminals. The president, asked why those files remain sealed, calls the journalist a pig and changes the story. This is not a distraction; it is the Trump system working as designed. Noise, bile, cruelty, all to drown out the sound of a dead man’s secrets rattling in their box.

The White House propagandists call it “frankness,” Trump’s low-IQ base calls it “owning the media,” and the rest of the world is invited to accept that American political discourse will now be conducted in the style of a man shouting at the television. Meanwhile, a dead journalist is still dead, and a dead sex trafficker’s secrets are still locked away, and the United States of America slips further into autocracy. The United States used to point at the jackboots stomping in some faraway place, tut-tutting at the crude spectacle of tyranny from the safe, plush distance of its own exceptionalism. The same slow, suffocating authoritarianism they once so piously condemned on foreign shores has now taken root in the shopping malls and town squares of America, not as a dramatic coup d’état, but as a kind of banal, background noise.

People talk about authoritarianism as if it arrives with uniforms and salutes, as if there will be some clear line of demarcation where civil society ends and tyranny begins. But the American version looks more like this: a leader who lives to insult, an imperial bureaucracy that threatens the media, a dead journalist reduced to “things happen.” The suffocating walls of authoritarianism close in, not with a bang, but with a hissed “Quiet, Piggy,” and so long as you understand that the problem is not the bone saw, not the sealed files, but the woman who dared to ask about them.