Leaving aside the amen choir in hard-core MAGA circles, is there anyone out there who doesn’t think Donald Trump is bat-shit crazy? How much more evidence is needed before he is gold-chained to the wall of a padded cell?

The midnight tweets of himself as a cartoon action figure are sufficient proof of cognitive disorientation, but at the state level, we have the course of the war in Iran, which, if laid out on a medical chart, would indicate that American foreign policy is being dictated by someone capable of hiding their own Easter eggs.

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The war in Iran did not begin after a new Iranian threat or after a congressional resolution; it began as everything does in Trumptopia—with either a billionaire whispering bizarre sweet nothings into Trump’s ear (between DJ sets at Mar-a-Lago) or as a result of a ninety-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was Netanyahu who dog-whispered Trump into an air campaign over the Persian Gulf, and subsequently, Trump’s reasons for the Iranian war have bounced from regime change and dealing with terrorists to destroying Iran’s nuclear capability to opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite waging such a war, you can be sure—given Trump’s addled brain—that he remains clueless about the geography of the Middle East, the alignment of the various coalitions, or the strategic dilemmas now facing the United States as it tries to put the oil genie back in the $2 gallon of gasoline.

As happens with persons suffering from dementia (and there are many forms, as all of us know from our families), Trump’s earlier impulses have become more exaggerated, the further his mind drifts down the rabbit hole. (I bet that on some bad days, he does not remember that there’s even a war going on.)

Trump was always impulsive (sexually and mentally), but now his impulses come with aircraft carriers and cruise missiles.

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In the negotiations to end the war in Iran, the only frame of reference in Trump’s mind is some long-ago Manhattan real estate deal where, if you shout loud enough and long enough, you might just end up with the corner lot at a discount price.

At the same time, we know from Trump’s legacy of bankruptcies that, more often than not, his style of negotiation has led him to failure. And that was when he was in his fifties; now in his eighties, with his mind in free fall, for the most part Trump is negotiating with himself.

When Trump first sent family retainers JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff to Islamabad to negotiate with the Iranians, he telephoned Vance some 12 times during the talks (in the middle of the night, Washington D.C. time), which I am sure is one reason why those negotiations and those that have followed have never gone anywhere.

Imagine on one hand, having to negotiate with the Iranians, and on the other, get instructions from Trump. In the latest go-round, Trump has sent the draft peace plan to all “concerned parties,” including Israel, an easy way to ensure it fails.

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It does not help the American cause (justice and liberty, not what we have now, which is rape and pillage) that the addled Trump cannot keep straight our friends and our enemies.

He somehow thinks that Israel is helping the United States in the Middle East (not simply wagging its own dog), just as he’s in a muddle about Oman (a traditional ally) and the long game of the Saudis (which is to turn Trump into an off-balance sheet asset of its sovereign wealth fund).

In many ways, the president is another Donny (from The Big Lebowski—itself a film about American ineptitude in the Middle East), to whom Walter Sobchak says: “So you have no frame of reference here, Donny. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know…”

All Trump really can keep in focus is who has promised to pay him money, and my guess is that the short list includes Qatar, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The rest of the world might just as well be plumbers in Atlantic City who can easily get stiffed on payday.

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Without either memory, a frame of reference, core values, or access to history, the demented Trump clings to his “notions” as if they were toys on his nursery floor—something to throw around for a while at the other kids until he gets bored or Daddy’s chauffeur comes to collect him.

Take these examples of how often the president has indulged in changing whims:

—In 2024 Trump ran for the presidency as a Woodrow Wilson Democrat (“He kept us out of war…”) but then once in office behaved like a cross between William McKinley and William Randolph Hearst (“You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war…”);

—In the broader Middle East—because Trump senses a chance for a few golf resorts in Gaza—he has aligned American policies with Israel’s genocide and then, for good measure, made American customers hostage to the fortunes of the OPEC cartel (which, lest we forget, has Trump and his sons in its deep pockets).

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None of these positions adds up to a calculated policy, for the simple reason that Trump himself is incapable of coherent thought. Call it frontotemporal dementia, malignant narcissism, or old style psychosis, but whatever Trump has, his mind no longer functions.

He can send out tweets at midnight of himself as Jesus or a Jedi knight; he can march around a parade ground with Putin, Xi, or King Charles; and he can answer a few questions with airplane engines running in the background, but, despite gambling with the future of American civilization by threatening nuclear war in Iran, he cannot discuss Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the Treaty of Sèvres and Sykes-Picot.

Trump can neither read nor write (other than his name with a Sharpie), and I suspect that the day after he has met a world leader (take the dance extravaganza in Beijing) he recalls no details of the meeting, and a week later will say to some aide: “Why don’t we ever have a summit with the Chinese?”

Even more amazing is that Washington D.C. is full of people earning fat salaries to govern the nation, and yet a majority in Congress or on the Supreme Court refuses to act, even when the president spends most of his days and nights barking/tweeting at the moon.