Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell

One of the most challenging aspects of navigating the polycrisis is trying to ascertain the seemingly delusional mental states of major players like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and the dominant and dissident voting blocks in the declining West.

That is to say, are these people deluded, drugged, deliberately disinformed or what?

With the breakdown of late 20th Century corporate mass culture and the post WW2 liberal consensus, we are seeing an unprecedented breakdown in shared information sources.

In 2025, spouses, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances can all be primarily informed by wildly varying information sources with few ways of knowing who is aware of what.

Let’s start with POTUS Trump because he made more than his usual a number of claims that appear to be wildly opposed to consensus reality including the usual about victory in Ukraine and peace in Gaza but also some specific claims that shocked this observer.

On October 14, Trump publicly met with Argentinian President Javier Milei and the surrealism was off the charts. The full video is worth a look if you have the stamina and sanity.

The most notable wildly false claim Trump made was the following about countries leaving BRICS (17:30 minutes in):

Donald Trump: I think if Biden would have, you know, Biden, that group would have gotten elected, meaning Kamala, you wouldn’t have the dollar as your currency anymore.

You wouldn’t have a world domination by the dollar if I didn’t win this election. And now the domination like bricks. I told anybody wants to be be in bricks, that’s fine, but we’re going to put tariffs on your nation. Everybody dropped out. They’re all dropping out of bricks. BRICS was an attack on the dollar. And I said, you want to play that game? I’m gonna put tariffs on your on your all of your product coming into the US. They said, like I said, we’re dropping out of BRICS and BRICS is like they don’t even talk about anymore.

Does he actually believe this? Are his staffers telling him that countries are leaving BRICS? Are foreign leaders telling him what they think he wants to hear? Is he taking psychosis-inducing amounts of Adderall?

This is on top of the already grim comedy of Milei’s presidency, the $20 billion U.S. bailout, and Milei’s ridiculous antics, including a stadium concert appearance to promote his new book:

ARGENTINA — after Trump sent his buddy Milei $20 Billion to prop up their economy (as they take market share from our farmers), Milei did a concert to promote his book (+ salvage his election)… while sprinkling in Hava Nagila to show fealty to Israel

Yes, this is real pic.twitter.com/BgcWntPyXL

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) October 7, 2025

Not to mention the way Trump supporting farmers are being screwed by Trump’s attempt to import Argentinian beef while Argentina grabs more of the Chinese soybean market that Trump’s tariffs have frozen American producers out of.

Atrios’ take on Bluesky points out something that should be obvious but is rarely said out loud. This planet is awash in mind-altering drugs and people are addled. Unfortunately it’s not possible to know exactly who’s on what, when:

https://t.co/UUfDEWHxyI pic.twitter.com/VgDwgwdCXO

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 19, 2025

I’ve spent much of my life being oblivious to what I was later told were obvious abuse problems on the part of various people I knew.

And I’m not going from the previous topic to the next topic for any particular reason, beyond my ability to miss the obvious in both instances, in this one, somehow I missed the gossip about Trump Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and would-be Trump 2024 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

If you’re behind like I was, these graphs from Corey’s wikipedia entry should catch you up on the nonsense:

While DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was participating in an immigration raid on April 8, 2025, she was accompanied by Lewandowski, who introduced himself to the federal agents as “chief of staff.” DHS later clarified that he is an adviser to DHS and a Special government employee (SGE)] The Wall Street Journal subsequently described Lewandowski as Noem’s “de facto chief of staff,” adding that there were “White House concerns about their relationship”. When then-FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton testified before Congress on May 7, 2025, stating, “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency”, a position which differed from the Trump administration, he was summoned to Noem’s office the following day, and was fired by Lewandowski, sitting at Noem’s desk.

When U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) was forcibly detained by security agents at a press conference Noem was giving in Los Angeles on June 12, 2025, Lewandowski, according to Padilla, ran to the scene “yelling, ‘Let him go! Let him go!'”

Lewandowski met his future wife Alison Hardy when he was in ninth grade and she was in eighth grade. In 1998, Hardy married Brian Kinney, who was killed onboard United Airlines Flight 175 on September 11, 2001. Four years later, in 2005, Lewandowski married Hardy. Together they have four children. Lewandowski is a Catholic.

In September 2021, Lewandowski was removed from his role as chairman of a super PAC called Make America Great Again Action after reports of sexual harassment accusations from a donor.

That same month, conservative media outlet American Greatness reported that Lewandowski was having an extramarital affair with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, for whom he had long been a political advisor. Noem called the report a “disgusting lie”, saying, “these old, tired attacks on conservative women are based on a falsehood that we can’t achieve anything without a man’s help.” In September 2023, the New York Post and the Daily Mail published similar reports about Noem and Lewandowski, which Noem’s spokesman denied. As of September 2025, according to the New York Magazine, they were widely understood by those who work with them to be romantically attached, although both deny it.

The New York Magazine piece “Top Goon” is worth quoting at length as well:

“She’s going to play a key role in advancing Donald Trump’s effort to consolidate the powers of the presidency,” a former DHS official told me. “I think by the end of this administration, if she stays the whole time, she’s likely to become the warden of the police state.”

On paper, Noem sits at the top of this empire. In practice, power over immigration policy is fractured, shaped by competing factions, starting with deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has vowed in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to destroy nameless forces that have conspired against the right — the long arm of law enforcement, he warned them, “will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.” Noem will be among those at the forefront of any such effort, surrounded by a tight inner circle that can be difficult to penetrate and often impossible to work with. “The culture over there is terrible,” the administration official told me. “People are scared shitless of Corey.”

Lewandowski has been integral to Noem’s rise, her right hand as they run roughshod over the rule of law and, like so many in Trump’s Cabinet, position themselves for a post-Trump future. Lewandowski is not only surreptitiously co-leading DHS without congressional approval but has brought Trumpworld’s manically pugnacious style to the department and drawn out some of Noem’s own pugnacious predilections, too.

After all, Trump’s immigration policies, while broadly unpopular with those who oppose masked men snatching people off the streets and spiriting them away to brutal foreign prisons, remain popular among Republicans. Frank Luntz, the veteran political consultant, thinks this is at least partly owed to Noem, who adds the necessary stage presence to Lewandowski’s muscle and Miller’s brain.

“She is probably the administration’s best spokeswoman,” he told me. “The only thing that bothers me is that her name is not mentioned as a potential 2028 Republican Party leader. She’s underestimated.”

I also have to mention the $172 million his-and-hers private jets Noem purchased.

I admit I’m shoehorning this Noem-Lewandowski thing into this piece, but that’s mainly because I deeply regret not plugging it into my piece last week on Russell Vought and Stephen Miller.

But also, Noem being talked up as future presidential material has me wondering if old Frank Luntz isn’t using psychedelic toads slime to hold down what has always appeared to be his hair piece.

I’m not saying Luntz won’t be right either, I’m just saying we’re collectively through the looking glass.

And speaking of same, this tweet featuring the most maximally triumphant take on Trump’s foreign “policy” has to be included in any catalogue of Trump-era delirium:

Don’t be naive.

Venezuela isn’t some “independent” nation.

We’re not sending 10k troops and 8 warships over drug dealers….

Trump is going after CHINA.

Trump’s Venezuela offensive is a THIRD BLOW to Xi: Iran – Gaza – Venezuela.

Just WATCH… pic.twitter.com/ftYoMLtWo1

— Chanel Rion OAN (@ChanelRion) October 17, 2025

Larry Johnson quoted a Zionist acquaintance with similar delusions last week:

(The signing of the Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Plan) changed everything. Arrayed behind Trump in Egypt were all of the key leaders in the world other than Putin and Xi. Trump has achieved something nobody thought possible. In the process he has isolated Iran, but just as important, he now made Putin look isolated when the rest of the world is trying to end wars and create peace and prosperity.

Putin will be under a lot more pressure to end the war now. At the same time, he is not winning the war, and is losing thousands more casualties just when there are severe labor shortages, and the economy is headed to further deterioration.

The attacks on the energy facilities is having real impact and a continuation of these attacks and attacks on rail lines will serve to cause much additional economic decline over the winter.

Paying men to go die is beginning to not work. It is very expensive and more men are fleeing. Winter is about here and so the fighting season is ending soon and the trees will no longer provide cover from drones. Putin can try to go on for a long time but the longer he does the worse the economy and the energy situation. The more isolated Putin becomes from the Mideast and other parts of the world who are now working together to build the economic growth the world needs.

This is the perfect set up for Vice-POTUS J.D. Vance’s message that “it’s time for Russia to wake up:”

Vice President Vance: One of the things I really admire about the president’s approach to this entire conflict and frankly all the diplomatic efforts of the administration is that it’s very grounded in reality and what’s happening on the ground.

If you go back to the last days of the Biden administration, if you go back to even a couple of months ago, the Russians were conquering large amounts of territory. Every month they were gaining another couple hundred square kilometers, maybe more than that.

And what’s happening right now, as the president articulated, is Russia’s really stalled. They’re killing a lot of people. They themselves are losing a lot of people and they don’t have much territorial gain to show for it.

And so the president is looking at the situation. He’s saying, ‘Look, the Russian economy is in shambles. the Russians are not gaining much on the battlefield.’

It’s clearly time for them to listen to his passionate plea for them to come to the table and actually talk seriously about peace. So, I don’t you ask what’s changed. I think what’s changed is the reality on the ground where the Russians are killing a lot of people.

Which brings us to this piece from Simplicius

Azov Brigade head Bohdan Krotevych says the quiet part out loud. He says European partners are kept from the front because AFU command does not want them to see the true reality of the situation there.

It seems at this point the AFU’s collapse is being hidden from all relevant parties, and this info blackout is trickling up to Trump and his circus who reimagine the war as Russia ‘badly losing’ with millions of casualties.

Or maybe Trump’s not so ignorant after all, per the Financial Times:

Donald Trump urged Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept Russia’s terms for ending its war in a volatile White House meeting on Friday, warning that Vladimir Putin had said he would “destroy” Ukraine if it did not agree.

The meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents descended many times into a “shouting match”, with Trump “cursing all the time”, people familiar with the matter said.

They added that the US president tossed aside maps of the frontline in Ukraine, insisted Zelenskyy surrender the entire Donbas region to Putin, and repeatedly echoed talking points the Russian leader had made in their call a day earlier.

Though Ukraine ultimately managed to swing Trump back to endorsing a freeze of the current front lines, the acrimonious meeting appeared to reflect the capricious nature of Trump’s position on the war and his willingness to endorse Putin’s maximalist demands.

Which is a decent pivot to the latest from Emmanuel Todd on the delusions of the European middle class:

are today’s middle classes, particularly the upper middle classes, reasonable? Are they peaceful? What are their dreams?

They are crazy. The construction of a post-national Europe is a delusional project when one considers the diversity of the continent. It has led to the expansion of the European Union, cobbled together and unstable, into the former Soviet space. The EU is now Russophobic and warmongering, with its aggression renewed by its economic defeat at the hands of Russia. The EU is trying to drag the British, French, German and many other peoples into a real war. But what a strange war it would be, in which the Western elites have adopted Hitler’s dream of destroying Russia!

The comparison by social class therefore allows us to make a major intellectual breakthrough. Europeanism, and therefore Macronism, fall, through their external aggressiveness, on the side of nationalism, on the side of the pre-war far right. If we add to this the increasingly massive and systematic violations of freedom of information and popular suffrage within the EU, we come even closer to the notion of the far right. Founded as an association of liberal democracies, Europe is mutating into a far-right space. Yes, the comparison with the 1930s is useful, even indispensable.

In the grandiose Europeanist project, we find a psychopathological dimension already observable in Hitlerism: paranoia. Europeanist paranoia focuses on Russia. Nazi paranoia made the Jewish threat a priority, without however neglecting Russian Bolshevism (known as Judeo-Bolshevism).
…
Today in Europe, we are dealing with madmen, or rather with a collective madness that has gripped individuals from the dominant social classes en masse. In France alone, thousands of journalists, politicians, academics, business leaders and senior civil servants are participating in the collective hallucination of a Russia that would want to conquer Europe (paranoia). No individual can be held personally responsible. We are dealing with a collective psychological dynamic.
…
The Nazi anti-Semites had a completely different psychological constitution. The death of God, to quote Nietzsche, had certainly launched them on a quest for a Führer, but they were hardly lacking in superego and remained capable of collective action. The tragic performance of the German army during the Second World War bears witness to this. Who today would dare to imagine our upper middle classes rushing to their deaths, at the head of their peoples, towards Kiev and Kharkov? Our war in Ukraine is a joke, a product of the emancipation of the self, the offspring of personal development. Only Ukrainians and Russians will die.

Unless…

Thermonuclear exchanges can do without heroes.

I don’t want to end on a grim note so let’s let Kamala Harris, someone who’s been in all three of our discussed states close us out.

Her new book got ripped in the Guardian for being celebrity addled and delusional:

A striking feature of her campaign was how it leaned into vibes and spectacle rather than substance, or building faith in Harris as a clean break from an unpopular and visibly deteriorating Joe Biden. Her new book, 107 Days, a memoir of the exact number of days she had to win the presidency, goes a long way in explaining why that was. In short, Harris – and those around her, including supportive media parties – got high on their own supply.
…
The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her.
…
My abiding feeling reading was: oh God, this was all just as bad as it looked. The celebrity-packed campaign roster was not, in fact, panicked desperation, but the preference of the candidate and her team. They thought that such a range of characters would show that Harris was “welcoming everyone into the campaign” – as if the power of celebrity could do the unifying work of coalition-building, rather than her own programme and politicking.

The immersion in the filmic, the celluloid of US politics is so complete that there is a line about Jon Bon Jovi performing for her and it being a good omen, because he performed for a candidate who won in The West Wing. The media loved her. “And behold,” Harris quotes a Washington Post writer, praising her approach to Gaza, “she had her boat through the impossible strait.” Jon Favreau said Harris was “a sight to behold” at the Democratic convention.

I’ll close with some quotes from this video from Scott Carney, a YouTuber specializing in exposing frauds and grifts. He argues that we are on the verge of a society-wide collapse of trust so grave it could actually lead to a decrease in grifting opportunities:

we have arrived at the era of peak grift where liars, cheaters, and charlatans will have an ever harder time selling their wares to unsuspecting audiences. And this is not good news. It should terrify absolutely everyone who is watching this video because what happens after the collapse of the grifter economy is going to be so much worse than you could ever imagine.
…
What happens when we zoom out to the overall grifting economy, or if you will, the macroeconomic conditions that allow grifters to succeed. The one resource that all grifters share is a fundamental baseline of truth, or if you prefer, reality. Now, by definition, grifters monetize lies by subverting truth. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be grifting. It would just be selling quality products that actually work.

And herein lies a fundamental problem. For grifters to succeed, they need a stable base, which means a good economy, generally positive health outcomes, and enduring institutions, which ultimately earn the trust of the people in general. Grifters can only thrive by profiting off of the margins and the limits of that underlying foundation of trust.
…
Now add to this a proliferation of AI slop, state sponsored propaganda from Russia, foreign actors, and even our own propaganda, and online scammers who have stolen more than a trillion dollars in the last year. The net effect is that trust, the most important resource that grifters exploit to take your money, is being eroded at its foundations. Like any economic system, once you get an oversupply of one particular commodity, in this case grifting, it becomes increasingly difficult to make money in that niche. It’s simple supply and demand. Now, in a stable society with reliable institutions, people look for ways to beat the system where niche opportunities might let them get ahead. Sometimes they even succeed. But in a collapsing system, people need to seek out reliable information. And while I can’t tell you where that reliable information actually is right now, I do know that the demand for it is higher now than it has ever been in my lifetime.

And naturally our closing quote source repeats the Russian disinformation canard (has any country ever been worse at PR?) and on that note, I’m out.