Trump: On a Tight-Rope between Madness and Murder One

Trump, like Richard Nixon and even President Eisenhower, pretends to be mad to be a more effective criminal

By

David Gottfried

Being mentally ill is not the same thing as being a criminal. Of course, criminals might attempt to feign madness to avoid penal sanctions, but a keen student of psychology, or better yet someone with plain old common sense, will be able to distinguish the fakers from the truly disturbed. I fear that in the case of Donald Trump, we have been snookered like a bunch of social worker softies who are too hung up on the idea that he has been aggrieved by his terribly coarse Father and that Donald is one really sick puppy who deserves our pity.

Robert Reich recently wrote, in Substack, that Trump is really a son of a bitch who is feigning madness (“Trump only simulates Madness: The Rest of Us Pay the Price,” April 9, 2025).

Reich convincingly argued that Trump’s zig zagging policy on tariffs (On several occasions since he assumed office, Trump has imposed draconian tariffs and then paused the implementation of tariffs), suggests emotional instability, but may instead constitute a criminal scheme to make a mint on the options market.

For example, Trump might tell his agents, relatives and other members of his crime family that within 24 hours he will impose enormous tariffs. His criminal accomplices correctly expect stock prices to collapse and therefore they buy “shorts” in the options market, i.e., they bet on the market collapsing. Then, Trump imposes Tariffs, market prices tumble and Trump’s allies make a mint. Subsequently, he tells his accomplices that he will pause the tariffs in a few hours, and his accomplices will buy call options, or bets that the market will rise, and will make a fortune when stock prices soar after he pauses the tariffs.

Trump hopes we all believe that he paused the implementation of tariffs because he was stunned and “all shook up” at the intense reaction against his imposition of tariffs. However, this notion is contradicted by both Trump’s image of himself and the objective reality of his life and psyche. Trump has said, and the historical record reveals, that Trump is familiar with very hard bargaining, has the commercial sentiments and tendencies of a sewer rat and is never shook up by the rodent-like machinations of men of commerce. Indeed, Trump is very mobbed up (connected to the mob), ran a real estate business that cut labor costs by hiring undocumented workers, and has been implicated in the sale of faulty asbestos that was used in the construction of the world trade center.

Given Trump’s criminal propensities and gravelly, gross and grotesque love affair with the infliction of agony, I can’t believe that he suddenly paused tariffs because he was “all shook up” when mild-mannered Jamie Dimon of Chase Manhattan said that tariffs would hurt the economy. It is so much more likely that Trump’s constant, mercurial about-faces with respect to tariffs are a means to making a mint on the options market.

Of course, it is illegal to trade stocks while in possession of inside information, but most American millionaires are loaded because they traded on inside information. One study showed that United States Senators, on average, have the most golden stock portfolios; obviously they are in possession of droves of inside information. (Indeed, in the 1950’s, at a birthday party held for Joseph Kennedy, Sr., Ethel Kennedy, the wife of valiant Robert Kennedy, made it a theme party which laughed about Joseph Kennedy’s clever manipulation of the market by buying shorts, or bets that a stock would collapse in value. When the market crashed in 1929, Kennedy made fresh millions.)

As I said, Robert Reich contends that Trump’s apparent insanity is a ruse to conceal his thieving schemes. However, as I thought of this, and as I remembered that Joseph Kennedy, the father of two of the finest liberal statesmen of American history, was a swindling son of a bitch whose life work was in large measure crooked and corrupt,¹ I had an epiphany:

In some ways, the Trump Presidency is not a matter of crossing the Rubicon. In some ways, he is not that much more grotesque than previous reactionary politicians. In some ways, Trump’s criminality is part and parcel of the criminality that has always had a prominent place in American history.

I recall that in 1954, when France was defeated by Vietnamese Communists at Diem Bien Phu, the Eisenhower administration, through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, offered the French two atom bombs to nuke the two largest cities in North Vietnam, Hanoi and Haiphong.

This seems to be a perfect example of what Robert Reich has said about Donald Trump: He Feigns Madness to conceal criminality. Obviously, the United States must have seemed to have been run by lunatics when it suggested that the French drop two atom bombs on North Vietnam. At that time, the Vietnamese air force was virtually nonexistent and a Vietnamese tank (the United States effortlessly produced tens of thousands of tanks) was a rarity. At that time, the population of the United States was more than ten times the population of North Vietnam. And the United States, in its infinite and infantile egocentricity and imperialistic, venomous wrath, was poised to nuke Vietnam.

Similarly, in the early 50’s, when the new Iranian regime led by Mosaddegh wanted to nationalize the oil industry, the Eisenhower administration threatened the use of nuclear weapons. Ultimately, that was not necessary. Instead, we simply led a coup which put the Shah on the Iranian throne.²

Also, I have read several articles which related that the Nixon administration made an effort to appear insane to terrify the communists and force them to make more concessions. Of course, if one succeeds at such a strategy, it is all well and good. But of course, when one keeps throwing fuel on the fire, there is always a risk that that fire might incinerate oneself as well.

Although Trump is exceptionally cruel, stupid and vulgar, I do not think he is the first American President to have decided to project madness to conceal his evil intent.

And I don’t think Trump’s evil is as breathtakingly different than the evil meted out by prior malicious American administrations.

Yes, Trump has been heartless and hateful in deporting undocumented people. But during the administration of General Eisenhower, constantly portrayed as bland but fundamentally benign, we instituted “Operation Wetback” in which tens of thousands of Mexican Americans were thrown out of this country in, I believe, a scant 72 hours.

In this country, workers were shot and murdered by the police on numerous occasions during the industrial tempests of the late 19^th century and early 20th century.

In this country, one half of the Jewish citizens of Georgia were forced to flee the state, in 1916, because one Jewish man, it was alleged, had raped and killed one Aryan girl.

In this country, fully one half of the nation’s economy centered around slavery.

Shortly after the Holocaust, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted on the false charge that they had given the Russians the secret of the atomic bomb. The trial was a model of depravity and illegality. Roy Cohen, the prosecutor, routinely had ex parte communications (Communications between the Court and one side to a dispute in which the other side is absent) with the Judge notwithstanding that ex parte communications are absolutely forbidden in every jurisdiction in the United States.

Trump is not some foreign virus that has taken over America by accident. He is as American as the KKK; as American as Charles Lindbergh, who was an admirer of Adolf Hitler; and as American as the Pennsylvania legislators who, in a spasm of Hitlerite hate, passed a statute restricting the right of Eastern Europeans to travel in Pennsylvania (That Statute, thank G-d, was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in Hines v. Davidowitz (1940).

1. Joseph Kennedy, Sr. was not only commercially rapacious; he was also quite racist. In “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam notes that after John F Kennedy decided not to make William Fulbright Secretary of State (Blacks did not like him because he was a member of the segregationist Southern caucus; Jews did not like him because of his hostility to Zionism), Joseph Kennedy sent him two cases of scotch along with a note saying that he, Joe Kennedy, will always like a man who is disliked by both blacks and Jews. On a more serious note, Joe Kennedy was also an apologist for Hitler and said Jews were responsible for the discrimination they endured in Germany.

2. The Shah, incidentally, was an ally of Hitler as Hitler told the Shah that Iranians were Aryan and hence part of the master race. Although Aryans are normally thought of as blond and blue-eyed and non-Jewish, Hitler’s crazy racial ideology held that Iranians were a species of Aryan. Indeed, the very term “Iran” is related to the Farsi (the language spoken by Iranians) term for Aryan. Before the Shah decided to cast his lot with Hitler, and had decided that his countryman were also Aryans, the term Iran was not used. That nation, for more than two thousand years, was known as Persia.