Although the New York Times presents itself as radically anti-Trump, its language and framing, when viewed from a psypolitical perspective, ultimately reflect the same anti-political, technocratic logic as the Trump administration
by Federico Soldani – January 25th 2026
On the International Edition of the New York Times Saturday-Sunday, January 24-25, 2026 there is a front-page White House Memo / news analysis – a type of reported journalism – by Shawn McCreesh (“One Year In, Searching for a Strategy Behind Trump’s Unpredictability.” The New York Times, 20 Jan.) as well as a lead op-ed column by David Brooks (“The Coming Trump Crackup.” The New York Times, Opinion, 23 Jan.).
Both articles heavily psychiatricize the 47th President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump. In two distinct highlighted editorial callouts, one per article (photos reproduced here with highlighted parts), the NYT explicitly foregrounds Trump’s “psyche” as a causal explanatory category.
This development is consistent with a prediction I first articulated in an oral conference presentation at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London (summer 2019), later documented on PsyPolitics (‘Are We Witnessing the Emergence of a New Global Psychiatric Power?’), where — in genuine intellectual isolation — I formulated what was, and remains to this day, to my knowledge, an unprecedented thesis concerning a historically novel transformation: namely, that politics would increasingly be reframed in medical and psychological terms, as a structural mechanism for its displacement into technocratic forms of governance.
See also, in this regard, ‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021).
From the front-page piece: “Foreign policy, the economy, domestic politics — all plans and policies in Washington now come filtered through Mr. Trump’s ‘unpredictable’ psyche.”
From the lead op-ed: “Global events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche.”
After many years of analysis within the PsyPolitics framework, it is evident, even through relatively simple psypolitical analysis, that these kinds of statements are not only anti-political, but also strategically aligned — in both spirit and effect — with the very agenda these articles claim to oppose.
These formulations are misleading insofar as they reduce phenomena as complex as “all plans and policies in Washington” and even “global events” to the psyche of a single political and institutional figure. This is manifestly not the case. Such framing ultimately reproduces the same anti-political and technocratic logic characteristic of the Trump administration itself.
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Cite this article as: Federico Soldani, “NYT: “all plans and policies in Washington”, “global events”, and Trump’s “psyche” (2026)” in PsyPolitics, January 22, 2026, https://psypolitics.org/2026/01/25/nyt-all-plans-and-policies-in-washington-global-events-and-trumps-psyche-2026/
Last Updated on January 28, 2026 by Federico Soldani