{"id":315449,"date":"2026-04-27T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=315449"},"modified":"2026-04-26T14:27:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T13:27:23","slug":"trump-sanity-and-obedience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/04\/trump-sanity-and-obedience\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump, Sanity, and Obedience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cShameless self-willed infatuation<\/em>
\nEmboldens men to dare damnation,<\/em>
\nAnd starts the wheels of doom which roll<\/em>
\nRelentless to their piteous goal\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy: Agamemnon<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

18 Apr 2026 – <\/em>Many people are saying that Donald Trump is insane. He may be. So too Benjamin Netanyahu. But if so, it is a form of insanity that includes the calm sanity of Adolf Eichmann and Harry Truman as they went about their business of mass extermination.<\/p>\n

Crazy, to use the vernacular, is an elusive word nearly impossible to define, especially when an entire society can be crazy, as Erich Fromm, the German-American social-psychologist, has argued. Obedience is a much touted virtue, not only in overt police regimes but in so-called democracies \u2013 but obedience to whom? To mass murderers?<\/p>\n

Obedience can be imbibed through osmosis. I remember Regis, my Jesuit high school\u2019s motto \u2013 Deo et Patriae<\/em>, for God and country \u2013 and how it linked obedience to God with obedience to the United States. I am certain that such a linkage would be denied by school authorities, but of course the Jesuits are known for their guile. So it didn\u2019t surprise me when I was applying for a discharge from the Marines during the Vietnam War and was being questioned by a group of Marine Officers and one starting screaming at me: \u201cWhat the hell kind of God are you talking about? I\u2019m a Catholic, too, and my God supports the Marines and the war in Vietnam.\u201d It was hard not to laugh sardonically, especially as he gesticulated with his large cigar for emphasis. I was then sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation who told me, to my great surprise, that he agreed with me and that the country\u2019s leaders were insane.<\/p>\n

Adolf Eichmann was declared \u201cperfectly sane\u201d by a psychiatrist who examined him when he went on trial for his routine daily tasks of carrying out Hitler\u2019s orders to exterminate Jews. It was just another day at the office for Eichmann.<\/p>\n

Harry Truman was not examined after he ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he was assumed to be sane in committing these satanic crimes of mass murder. Just another state executive doing his duty by carrying out the orders of his puppet masters.<\/p>\n

Those were the good old days when everyone knew who was sane and who was nuts. Now we seem very confused. Perhaps Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. have discombobulated many minds about who is sane or not, who is a mass murderer, who evil and who good, depending on which functionary is in the White House. Perhaps not.<\/p>\n

If Trump is insane, how did he twice become the president of the United States? Do \u201csane\u201d people \u2013 the well-adjusted ones? \u2013 not realize that Trump is the nominal head of an immense system <\/em>whose history is one of mass murder from Wounded Knee to the recent U.S. slaughter of hundreds, mostly young girls, at the elementary school in Minab, Iran.<\/p>\n

Trump gave the orders, but he did not launch those missiles. Nor did Netanyahu massacre Palestinians with his own hands. These fat boy killers prefer to keep their dainty hands clean of blood \u2013 to have their functionaries do the killing. I think of other functionaries and the names they gave to the atomic bombs they dropped on Japan: \u201cFat Man\u201d and \u201cLittle Boy.\u201d And we talk about sanity.<\/p>\n

The \u201csane\u201d obedient ones do the killing; the soldiers who carry out orders. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote<\/a> in his profound book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable<\/em><\/a>, in 1966:<\/p>\n

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones<\/u>, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons<\/u>, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake<\/u>. We can no longer assume that because a man is \u201csane\u201d he is therefore in his \u201cright mind.\u201d The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our problem, as the historian Howard Zinn once said, is civil obedience,<\/strong> surely not civil disobedience, that people everywhere are so submissive to authority that they will dutifully obey the orders of people like Trump and Netanyahu. Such obedience, all false rhetoric to the contrary, is drilled into us from birth through overt and covert methods of fear inculcation.<\/p>\n

My dear departed mother\u2019s father was a New York City cop. When she was young, he made her and her mother, trembling with fear, sit at the kitchen table, upon which he put his revolver, and warned them to obey him or else. Such tyrannical behavior was slightly mitigated decades later when he and my grandmother lived with us. When he heard that any of us eight kids were misbehaving, he, old, feeble, and long retired, would don his police uniform and stomp down the stairs waving his long baton to frighten us. I never got to ask my mother why she tolerated this. Such is the long life of fear.<\/p>\n

There are reports that by April\u2019s end the U.S. will have 60,000 troops in Iran\u2019s vicinity. If Trump gives the orders to invade Iran, how many will refuse? How many will refuse to send missiles into more Iranian schools and homes? If Trump gives orders for a nuclear strike, can we expect military individuals with consciences to disobey? Will any heed Pope Leo\u2019s voice about this war? That it is immoral.<\/p>\n

It takes a system <\/strong>to wage war, and civil and military obedience to support it. That system \u2013 what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has adroitly named MICIMATT: The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank system \u2013 is so deeply woven into American society and therefore the hearts and minds of its citizens and military personnel that one can only hope against hope that Trump\u2019s orders will be disobeyed by many. It is a desperate hope, I realize.<\/p>\n

War Is A Racket<\/em><\/a>, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler once put it. It is waged for the tyrannical oligarchs and always kills mostly civilians. Over ninety percent now, probably more. Innocent people, little girls at school, babies in their mothers arms \u2013 it is organized state terror. War is immoral. It is not complex. It is simple. Like the gospel message the Pope is conveying.<\/p>\n

Like all tyrants, Trump is surrounded by sycophants, fearful little people like Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Peter Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, Jr., et al. The whole crew groveling at his feet are implicated in his war crimes. To hear Kennedy defend<\/a> Trump\u2019s war on Iran, his Ukraine and other policies, by claiming his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, and his uncle, President Kennedy, would agree with Trump is to pass through the looking glass. Kennedy, also a staunch defender of Israel and its savage policies, makes me shake my head in wonder. Was his political conversion, like St. Paul\u2019s, from a light from heaven that sent him to the ground where Trump\u2019s divine voice asked him to hop on the MAGA train? \u00a0Or was the voice more insidious and subtle, a quiet call from someone else late in the night? However it happened, it is complete, and he is now fully marching to the drums of war along with Trump\u2019s ass-kissing entourage. I, once Bobby Kennedy, Jr.\u2019s ardent supporter when he announced his run for the presidency, feel like a fool.<\/p>\n

Let me recommend an important film \u2013 Terence Malik\u2019s A Hidden Life<\/a><\/em> \u2013 about a different type of man, Franz J\u00e4gerst\u00e4tter, an Austrian peasant farmer from an isolated small mountainous village who refuses to take an oath to Hitler and fight in the German army. He knew that his refusal would not stop Hitler; but he also knew his conscience came from God and not the state. So he said no. NO! I will not follow orders, despite everyone telling him to do so. For his refusal, he suffered terribly and was beheaded. In my review<\/a> of this film which I wrote six years ago as Joseph Biden was three weeks into his presidency, I said:<\/p>\n

While Franz is eventually put on trial by the German government, it is we as viewers who must judge ourselves and ask how guilty or innocent are we for supporting or resisting the immoral killing machine of our own country now. Hitler and his Nazis were then, but we are faced with what Martin Luther King called \u2018the fierce urgency of now.\u2019<\/p>\n

Many Americans surely ask with Franz, \u2018What has happened to the country that we love?\u2019 But how many look in the mirror and ask, \u201cAm I a guilty bystander or an active supporter of the United States\u2019 immoral and illegal wars all around the world that have been going on for so many years under presidents of both parties and have no end? Do I support the new cold war with its push for nuclear war with its first strike policy? Do I support, by my silence, a nuclear holocaust?\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The questions still linger. Let first Thomas Merton and then the twenty-two years-old Bob Dylan have the last words:<\/p>\n

For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest and most ridiculous of all the false gods. We can call ourselves innocent only if we refuse to forget this, and if we also do everything we can to make others realize it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n