By Jeffrey D. Sachs
When insane leaders use divine disasters as a political tool, it’s not just their enemies who are affected. If they aren’t stopped, we will all fall victim to these two psychopaths.
Here is Donald Trump’s Easter message to the world:
On Tuesday, Iran will celebrate “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day” simultaneously. This has never happened before!!! Open the damn strait, you crazy bastards, or you will live in hell – YOU WILL SEE! Praise be to Allah . President Donald J. Trump
Donald Trump and his accomplice in war crimes, Benjamin Netanyahu, are jointly waging a murderous war of aggression against Iran, a nation of 90 million people. They are gripped by three mutually reinforcing pathologies. The first concerns their personalities: both are malignant narcissists. The second is the arrogance of power: men who possess the power to order nuclear annihilation and, consequently, have no qualms about doing so. The third and most dangerous of all is religious delusion: two men who believe—and are indoctrinated with this belief daily by those around them—that they are messiahs carrying out God’s work. Each of these pathologies exacerbates the others, so that together they plunge the world into unprecedented danger.
The result is a glorification of violence unseen since the Nazi leadership. The question is whether the few “adults” in this world—responsible heads of state and government who remain committed to international law and are willing to say so—can keep it in check. It won’t be easy, but they must try.
Let’s begin with the underlying psychological disorder. Malignant narcissism is a clinical term, not an insult. Social psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term in 1964 to describe Adolf Hitler as a fusion of pathological grandiosity, psychopathy, paranoia, and antisocial personality into a single character structure. The malignant narcissist is not merely vain. They are structurally incapable of genuine empathy, inherently immune to guilt, and driven by the paranoid conviction that enemies surround them and must be destroyed. As early as 2017, psychologist John Garnter and many other experts warned of Trump’s malignant narcissism.
When power knows no bounds, conscience is the only remaining inner control. And the psychopath has no conscience.
Several respected psychologists and psychiatrists have assessed Trump for psychopathy using the standardized Hare scale and found scores significantly above the diagnostic threshold. See, for example, here. Psychopathy is best characterized as a lack of conscience or empathy for other people.
Both Trump and Netanyahu fit this profile perfectly. Trump’s psychopathy was on full display when US forces destroyed a civilian bridge in Tehran that had no military significance, killing at least eight civilians and injuring 95 or more. Trump didn’t mourn. He gloated and promised further destruction. Netanyahu’s Passover address also contained not a single word for the dead. Not a pause. Not a shadow of a doubt. Just the triumphant enumeration of the enemies he has annihilated.
Paranoia fuels the threat fabricated by Trump and Netanyahu. Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, stated in writing that the Iranian nuclear program had been “erased” and that intelligence agencies “continue to conclude that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” The IAEA stated outright that there was no evidence of a bomb. Trump’s own counterterrorism chief resigned in protest, writing: “We started this war because of pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” The paranoid individual doesn’t need a real threat. They will invent one if necessary to satisfy their feelings of exaggerated fear.
Machiavellianism operates without shame. Trump told the world that diplomacy had always been his “first choice,” while in the same breath boasting about withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal: “It was a great honor to do it. I was so proud of it.” He destroyed the diplomatic framework with his own hands and then blamed Iran for the chaos. He then casually admitted that the war had no justification in self-defense: “We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have. But we’re there to help our allies.” According to the UN Charter, self-defense is the only legal basis for the use of force. Trump has admitted that no such basis exists.
There is a particular distortion that power imposes on certain personalities, and it is especially pronounced when the power in question is limitless or appears to be.
With control over nuclear arsenals, Trump and Netanyahu experience the world differently than others. For these malignant narcissists, the availability of nuclear weapons is not a burden of responsibility, but an extension of their grandiose egos: I can do anything. I can raze everything to the ground. Watch me. There will be no self-restraint on the part of Netanyahu and Trump regarding this delusional grandiosity.
Trump and Netanyahu do not experience the world the way others do.
Trump has fully internalized this sense of impunity. On April 1, he stood before the cameras and promised to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong.” The phrase “where they belong” is the judgment of a man who feels divinely authorized to judge the worth of 90 million people and dehumanizes them without hesitation. He has repeatedly threatened to destroy Iran’s civilian power infrastructure—a war crime under international humanitarian law—openly declared as a negotiating position before a global audience that largely changed the channel.
Netanyahu commands a state with an estimated 200 nuclear warheads, has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is not subject to any international inspection regime. He has watched as Trump uses American military power with unbridled aggression and is certain that there will be no consequences. The second madness feeds the third: when power knows no bounds, conscience is the only remaining internal check. And the psychopath has no conscience.
The absence of a conscience is the most dangerous of the three pathologies, because it eliminates the last possible internal brake. The strategist waging an unjust war might eventually calculate that the costs outweigh the benefits and stop. The malignant narcissist waging war for ego-driven reasons might eventually exhaust the demands of their ego and cease. The psychopath escalates because there are no limits.
And, if you can believe it, it gets even worse. Both Trump and Netanyahu are would-be messiahs. They are self-proclaimed representatives of God. For them, stopping the war against Iran would mean that God was wrong. And the self-proclaimed messiah can’t be wrong either, because in their grandiose psyches, the messiah and God have practically become one.
Both Trump and Netanyahu have explicitly claimed this messianic identity for themselves. Trump has referred to himself as “the Chosen One.” Referring to the 2024 assassination attempt on him, he stated, “I felt then, and believe even more now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” Netanyahu, in his Passover eve address, did not merely invoke God. He usurped God’s role in the Exodus narrative by listing ten “achievements” of what he calls the “war of salvation,” labeling each one a plague. He called the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei the “plague of the firstborn.” Then he warned the world:
I would like to remind you that even after the ten plagues of Egypt, the Pharaoh still tried to harm the people of Israel, and we all know how that ended.
In the Book of Exodus, this story ends with the destruction of Pharaoh’s entire army. Netanyahu threatened the annihilation of Iran on television – in the language of the Holy Scriptures.
Each of these men is surrounded by a retinue of flatterers and fanatics whose task it is to maintain the delusion and prevent reality from penetrating their consciousness.
Trump’s entourage: Hegseth, Huckabee, and the Christian nationalists
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, has turned the Pentagon into a holy war theater. He has a Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest and the words “Deus Vult,” “God wills it,” the battle cry of the medieval Crusades, tattooed on his arm. He holds monthly Christian services in the Pentagon’s auditorium. He has called on the American people to pray “every day on their knees” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.” At one of these services, he prayed aloud that U.S. troops:
Overwhelming violence against those who do not deserve mercy… We ask for this in the name of Jesus Christ, who is mighty and strong.
At a press conference on the Iran war, Hegseth said the United States was “negotiating with bombs.” He called Iranian leaders “religious fanatics” who were seeking nuclear weapons for “some kind of religious Armageddon,” while leading monthly devotions at the Pentagon and declaring that “the providence of our Almighty God is there to protect these troops.” He seems utterly oblivious to the mirror he is holding up. A defense secretary who prays for “overwhelming force” in the name of Jesus and calls his enemies religious fanatics has redefined the term “projection.”
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, provides the theological basis. A Baptist preacher and ardent Christian Zionist, Huckabee believes the conflict between Israel and Iran is the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy—a necessary step toward the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ. He sent Trump a message—which Trump subsequently posted on social media—comparing the moment to Truman’s actions in 1945 and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, and urging Trump to listen to “his voice,” by which he meant God.
In an interview, Huckabee was asked about the biblical territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates – encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq – and whether Israel had a divine right to all of it. His answer was direct: “It would be fine if they took everything.”
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Smotrich, for his part, posted on social media: “I ♥ Huckabee.” Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee, whose organization “Christians United for Israel” was a driving force behind evangelical support for the US wars against Israel, looked at the war against Iran and simply said: “Prophetically speaking, we are right on schedule.” Franklin Graham, at an Easter service in the White House, stoked Trump’s messianic delusions: “Today the Iranians, the evil regime of this administration, want to kill every Jew and annihilate them with nuclear fire. But you raised President Trump. You raised him for a time like this. And Father, we pray that you will grant him victory.”
Netanyahu’s court: Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the Messianic settlers
On the Israeli side, the inner circle consists of two figures whose radicalism is so extreme that they were considered political pariahs until Netanyahu used their votes to cling to power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, is an admirer of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was designated a terrorist organization. Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister, derives his ideology from Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who taught that Israel’s 1967 military victory was divinely ordained and that the settlement of Palestinian territory is God’s will. Together, they hold 20 seats in Netanyahu’s 67-member coalition. They not only advise the Prime Minister but also share his messianic beliefs and vision.
Ben-Gvir has used his control over the Israeli police to support paramilitary settler groups that attack Palestinians in the West Bank. He has consistently blocked ceasefire negotiations and openly boasted about delaying them. He has pushed for Jewish ritual rights on the Temple Mount, disregarding a decades-long status quo—a move Israeli security officials warned would lead directly to bloodshed. In August 2023, he declared, “My right and the right of my wife and children to move freely on the streets of Judea and Samaria is more important than the right of movement of Arabs.” The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and Spain have all sanctioned him for inciting violence, but the United States, under Marco Rubio, defended Ben-Gvir and criticized these sanctions.
Smotrich is the more methodical of the two: less theatrical and more dangerous. He has systematically transferred the civilian administration of the West Bank from the Israeli military to his own ministry, channeling hundreds of millions of shekels into settler infrastructure while deliberately cutting the Palestinian Authority’s budget. He has instructed his ministry to develop “an operational plan for exercising sovereignty” over the West Bank. During the Iran-Iraq War, he called for Israel to annex southern Lebanon as far as the Litani River, declaring that the war “must end with a completely different reality.” Smotrich’s ideology is based on Kook’s doctrine that the settlement enterprise is not political but sacred—a divine obligation to be fulfilled regardless of international law, Palestinian rights, or world opinion. In this theology, the 1967 borders are not a temporary military reality. They are God’s unfinished work.
The adults of this world must try to stop this madness.
Neither Ben-Gvir nor Smotrich were more than fringe figures among the extremists before Netanyahu legitimized them by bringing them into the government and his inner circle. He gave them power over Israeli society, and they gave him the religious-nationalist clout to portray his wars as a divine mission.
In this landscape of holy war, a voice has spoken with world-saving grace and clarity. Pope Leo XIV consistently called for an end to the violence. During a Holy Thursday Mass in Rome, he addressed the arrogance of power:
We tend to see ourselves as powerful when we dominate others, as victorious when we destroy our equals, and as great when we are feared. God has given us an example—not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.
On Palm Sunday, the Pope once again spoke out unequivocally, declaring that Jesus “does not hear the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Hegseth subsequently held another service at the Pentagon, where he again prayed in Christ’s name for “overwhelming force.”
Professor John Mearsheimer has pointed out precisely that the crimes currently being committed by Trump and Netanyahu are the same crimes for which the Nazi leadership was hanged at Nuremberg: wars of aggression, annexation of foreign territory, deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure, and collective punishment. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. These are legal categories. The Nuremberg Tribunal described the crime of aggression as the “greatest international crime”—the one that “unites all evil”—because it is the crime that makes all other crimes possible. These men confessed to this publicly in speeches broadcast by international television networks.
The institutional mechanisms designed to prevent precisely this type of catastrophe – including the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court, the non-proliferation regime, and international humanitarian law – are being actively undermined by the United States.
And yet, those in positions of responsibility in this world must try to stop this madness. The multilateral efforts in Islamabad, involving the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and accompanying the Sino-Pakistani Five-Point Peace Initiative, are an important first step. They should be supported by the full weight of the BRICS nations, the UN General Assembly, and every state that wishes to live in a world governed by rules and not by the delusions of two malignant narcissists.
When deranged leaders use divine disasters as a political tool, it’s not just their enemies who are consumed. We will all fall victim to Netanyahu’s plagues and Trump’s bombing of Iran back to the Stone Age, unless other leaders put a stop to these two lunatics.
