When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle
by Federico Soldani – February 1st 2026
Despite the The New York Times presenting itself as radically anti-Trump, its language and mode of narrating politics, when read carefully, prove to be coherent with a very precise logic – one that ultimately aligns with that of the Trump administration itself: the transformation of political conflict into a psychological and clinical issue. In other words, political analysis is displaced by medico-psychological diagnosis.
In his opinion article of 21 January 2026, Thomas L. Friedman — one of the newspaper’s flagship columnists and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner — does not merely criticise the decisions of Donald J. Trump. The text progressively constructs the image of the president as a subject affected by mental illness, incapable of judgement, ultimately implying that the appropriate response should not be political or institutional, but rather “therapeutic” in nature.
The framing is clear.
On the one hand, the issue is posed in terms of the mental health of power:
«Is America now being ruled by a mad king?»
On the other hand, political judgement is translated into personal incapacity, through an explicitly theatrical formulation:
«Mr. President, are you crazy? You can’t put your personal ambition for a Nobel Prize ahead of the whole of the Atlantic alliance.»
Political disagreement is thus recoded as a personal defect of judgement.
This is reinforced by a direct clinical qualification:
«It is so obvious that only a pathological narcissist who insists on having his name on everything — from someone else’s Kennedy Center to someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize — would risk all of the above to seize Greenland»
Finally, the article also suggests what the appropriate response should be:
«If indeed America were a company, the board of directors would have responded to behavior like Trump’s by announcing an “intervention” with the C.E.O.»
As used by Friedman, the word intervention explicitly evokes a clinical-managerial model: a collective action that presupposes the subject’s inability to self-regulate and legitimises the suspension of his decisional autonomy. Political conflict is thus transformed into a problem to be managed, not debated.
This way of constructing public discourse is not isolated. In the same days, another New York Times opinion piece — signed by Ross Douthat — explicitly returned to the figure of the “mad king,” questioning which tools remain available when the president appears no longer containable by ordinary political checks. In that context, the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was also invoked — the mechanism designed to declare the president unfit to discharge the powers and duties of office.
As I have already shown in a previous article in PsyPolitics, in which the NYT spoke of Trump’s “psyche” as the filter through which “all plans and policies in Washington” and even “global events” supposedly pass, we are faced with a recurring model: politics explained through the mind of a single individual.
~~~
The Foucauldian point: the “mad king” and the birth of psychiatry
As Michel Foucault showed in his lectures on Psychiatric Power, psychiatry took shape through the psychiatrisation of sovereign power.
The emblematic case he analyzed as the founding scene of this new discipline was George III of England—remembered as the “mad king,” the last king of America and sovereign of the era’s most important global empire. George III’s treatment by Francis Willis in 1788-89 demonstrated how psychiatric authority could subjugate even royal power, with the physician forcing the king to acknowledge his mastery. This occurred contemporaneously with Philippe Pinel‘s work at Bicêtre and Salpêtrière during the Terror and post-Revolutionary France, where Pinel was developing the conceptual framework that would establish him as a founding figure of psychiatry.
Under George III’s reign, Great Britain lost the Thirteen American Colonies during the American Revolution (1775–1783). The Declaration of Independence of 1776 dates back 250 years, and formal recognition of the loss came with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The sovereign’s madness and the loss of America thus became intertwined in a moment of profound political and symbolic crisis.
When it came to “treating” George III, the issue was by no means medically neutral. A genuine constitutional crisis erupted around his condition: questions of incapacity to reign, suspension of sovereign authority, and even high treason were raised, because intervening on the king’s mind meant calling into question the very foundation of the political order.
A contemporary document makes these stakes explicit. The Pilot, a London political newspaper with a conservative and strongly constitutionalist orientation, intervened in the public debate on George III’s mental illness in 1811. In an article dated 30 January 1811, it protested that although the king’s incapacity had been discussed in Parliament, the British Constitution was not merely being shaken but “dissolved,” and power was being handed over “to every revolutionary projector, who may seek to raise himself hereafter upon the ruins of his country.” In that situation — the newspaper added — “the sovereign becomes the slave of his servants.”
The point is crucial: it is not the king’s madness that is perceived as the true danger, but the very fact that it is recognised, discussed, and managed. Hence the accusation of high treason: to cure the king was equivalent to dismantling sovereignty.
It is against this background that a later reflection by the American psychiatrist Jules Henry Masserman must be situated. In a public televised debate in the twentieth century, Masserman provocatively asked what would have happened if psychiatry had existed and been applied to the rulers of the past: many wars, he suggested, might never have been fought.
The perspective is the opposite of that of The Pilot. What appeared in 1811 as a political threat is presented in the twentieth century as a humanitarian solution. In this sense, Masserman anticipates the present: the “treatment” of power is no longer feared, but publicly proposed — before an audience — as a rational and moral response.
This leads directly back to the origins of the discipline. The founding scene described by Philippe Pinel, the “father of psychiatry,” appears only in the first French edition of his work. It is precisely that scene — central to the Foucauldian interpretation — that disappears in the second edition, the only one translated into English. The detail is decisive because it concerns the founding act itself: without that scene, the birth of psychiatry appears as medical progress rather than as a political dispositif.
The decisive difference between the time of George III and the present lies here. At the end of the eighteenth century, the political problem was to de-sovereignise a single person: the king. It was enough to strip authority from the sovereign to relocate power elsewhere. Today, by contrast, the sovereign is formally the sovereign people. Sovereignty is no longer concentrated in a single person but distributed across tens or hundreds of millions of citizens. For this reason, the dispositif must change scale. It is no longer sufficient to intervene on the leader: one must transform the language through which politics is perceived.
This is where mass media and digital media come into play — of course absent in George III’s time. To de-sovereignise entire populations, psyspeak dissemination translates political conflict into illness, the opponent into a clinical case, dissent into a symptom.
The prediction made in 2019 was that this psyspeak would have to spread, say, in an “epidemic” or “pandemic” fashion on a global scale — a phenomenon without historical precedent. The fact that this diffusion is indeed occurring, and that it has never previously happened in history nor been foreseen in these terms, lends that prediction particular validity: it means that it had grasped some of the structural causes of the transformation underway, especially in the political-media field.
This is the prediction I formulated seven years ago at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London: the progressive reformulation of politics in medico-psychological terms as a structural instrument for the “depoliticisation of citizenship.”
~~~
Trump as the first actor in the psychiatric spectacle
This makes what is happening today even more significant. Just days after Friedman’s article, at a rally on 27 January 2026, Trump himself openly used the same language, defining anti-Trump protesters as “paid insurrectionists,” “paid agitators,” and finally as “sick”.
But the point is not merely reactive. From his very first year as president — and even earlier during the presidential campaign — Trump persistently introduced into public discourse the imagery of asylums, mental institutions, and psychiatric facilities, also recalling childhood stories (his mother explaining how he could safely play baseball in his Queens neighbourhood thanks to a nearby hospital full of bars and “very sick people”). He used this lexicon to describe political opponents and immigrants, often portrayed as coming from emptied asylums.
In this way, clinical language is not merely endured; it is deliberately mobilised as a tool of delegitimation and enemy construction. Strategically, through the media — a most important point that is usually not appreciated — this language is disseminated so as to replace the old language of the external world and of politics with a new psyspeak of the inner world and of technique.
In this passage, Trump is not merely the object of media-driven psychiatrisation: he becomes its active agent.
On the one hand, journalism diagnoses the leader; on the other, the leader diagnoses opponents, protesters, and migrants. Both participate in the same dispositif and the same psycho-spectacle or psycho-show: the reduction of politics to a mental, even psychiatric, clinical issue.
But the ultimate effect goes beyond the leader. The people themselves are reduced to spectators of a politics explained as illness, and citizens are increasingly represented, in their most fundamental characteristic, as patients: subjects to be managed, contained, normalised, treated, cured — for their own good.
Psychiatrisation is not a rhetorical excess nor a linguistic accident. It is a structural mechanism of depoliticisation that transforms conflict into diagnosis and prepares the de-sovereignisation of the public, particularly in democracies. What is progressively being “treated” is not merely the elected representative or political leader, but the demos itself.
Politics today is no longer debated.
It is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle.
~~~
~~~
~~~
[In the photo at the top, King George III of England and U.S. President Donald J, Trump, in a slide from Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power? (2019)]
Cite this article as: Federico Soldani, ““Mr. President, are you crazy?”:The New York Times calls for an “intervention” on the “mad king” Trump, echoing the scene of George III — last king of America — at the origins of psychiatry (2026) When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle, in PsyPolitics, February 1st 2026,
https://psypolitics.org/2026/02/02/mr-president-are-you-crazythe-new-york-times-calls-for-an-intervention-on-the-mad-king-trump-echoing-the-scene-of-george-iii-last-k/
Last Updated on February 4, 2026 by Federico Soldani