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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/jeffrey-sachs-calls-trump-pychopathic  

https://theduran.com/jeffrey-sachs-calls-trump-pychopathic-insane-  

Jeffrey Sachs calls Trump pychopathic, insane, and a symptom of American’s complete breakdown and collapse.

22 August 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

In a youtube that has been posted without attribution as recently as 22 August 2026 but that was originally posted to youtube on 31 March 2026, of a panel discussion on that date between Jeffrey Sachs, and two political psychologists, Karim Bettache, and Peter Beattie, Sachs argued that the U.S. and the world have never before been in as dangerous a situation as now, and that while Donald Trump is an important part of this problem, he is actually a symptom of a process going back at least to the Presidency of George W. Bush, and which process is culminating only now, in the rapidly increasing corruptness and utter breakdown and collapse of the U.S. society and empire, which breakdown — because of the psychopathy of the empire’s leaders — is heading the entire world straight into World War Three. Sachs starts by talking about Trump, but then probes deeper into the causes; Sachs views Trump as only a symptom of the post-WW2 American empire’s breakdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk46DNszJBw

“Geopolitics, Iran and the World | JEFFREY SACHS in dialogue with KARIM BETTACHE & PETER BEATTIE”

31 March 2026, YT/MSSC in "global political economy” Sachs

(00:00) JEFFREY SACHS: I’ve never seen anything like this. Who's crazier? Trump or us? How can we not be grown-ups and say that man's a loon? Get him out of there before he kills us all. Nobody says this. KARIM BETTACHE: There’s something about human psychology that people start to uh bow and be so servile in in in in the face of a of a psychopath. There's something uniquely strange about how people deal with Donald Trump. From the Gulf states to Asia to to to Europe, everywhere you will see that, oh, Donald Trump, you're such an amazing man and peacemaker. There there is something very weird about the human psychology when you're confronted with a psychopath. SACHS: And if you go long enough with derangement, we'll blow up the whole world. And Trump is just the kind of guy that can do it. And when I listen to experts that know a lot more about this than I do, I'm inclined to believe a simple fact, which is that Iran has a lot more missiles than the Gulf has and Israel has missile defenses. BETTACHE: Please welcome him, Professor Sachs. >> [applause] >>  PETER BEATTIE: Um, now to get into much more depressing topics, um this time reminds me a lot of the early 2000s. Um I don't know if you probably were living in New York City at the time as well. And uh uh we remember — SACHS: Boston in 9/11 — BEATTIE: Okay, but yeah, around that time. Yeah. At any rate, uh you know, that was the last time our government committed the ultimate international crime, the which the Nuremberg Tribunal uh called the the crime of aggression because it contains within it uh all other war crimes uh themselves. Um, back then, we saw a concerted propaganda campaign to try to get the US public on board with the war on Iraq. Uh this time we haven't seen that. There there really hasn't been any campaign, and I I wonder why that is. It could be changes in the media system. They could have done uh uh focus group testing and found that, you know, nothing worked to to get people in the US to buy into this war. I don't know, the majority of people in the US are opposed to this war from the very beginning, quite unlike uh the war on Iraq. Um so, I'm just wondering, you know, what can we learn, do you think, from the similarities and dissimilarities between this war of aggression on Iran and the earlier one against Iraq? And besides, you know, betting as much as one can on oil to push the price up to put pressure on Trump, what can can people uh US citizens and people from outside of the US do to try to help to bring uh this war to a conclusion? SACHS: Yeah. Well, Yeah. Thanks very much. Uh, and thanks for the chance to uh to have a discussion about what what is going on. Um, first of all, things are opaque as is obvious because uh we don't have a word of honesty from the United States government or from uh the Israeli government. Everything is propaganda morning till night. Also, any statement by Donald Trump contradicts itself by before the end of the sentence. Uh so, uh he's absolutely uh impossible to even understand on his own terms, much less uh on geopolitical terms. So, the situation is uh very strange, very dangerous. I think uh probably the most dangerous moment in the world since World War II. Uh probably even including the Cuban Missile Crisis. I say that uh with two psychologists, I'll say it. You're not responsible for me. Maybe you'll regret that you invited me, but I think uh I think uh Donald Trump is uh literally uh mentally ill to uh a very serious extent. Um he is, from a personality point of view, uh you know, a malignant narcissist, I think, that's the right definition. Uh or if you want a more classical diagnosis, a dark triad personality, which means that he is personally uh narcissistic, uh he is uh Machiavellian, which means uh that in I think psychological terms that uh he's manipulative, untrustworthy, deceitful, uh and uh he is psychopathic, meaning that there is no empathy for how many people he kills or how much damage is done. Um the malignant narcissist definition adds paranoia uh and confabulation to this list. So, I personally think we're dealing with a psychologically deeply debilitated individual who happens to have a lot of power. And according to one psychologist I was listening to yesterday uh that I thought made a lot of sense, there's an element of frontal dementia added to this, hh that you see through the incoherence of the sentences, the drift of thought, and even uh the uh confusion of words, so that uh, the words don't even end as they begin. There's uh a lot of uh uh uh what was the definition? What the I'm missing the technical definition. Sorry, maybe it'll come back to me. But in any event, uh that um there there's real signs of dementia on top of what is a lifetime of anti, uh, personality disorder. A man like this should not be president. Uh this is the most basic point. He is president because of much deeper problems in the American political system. So, he is a symptom as well as a cause. Uh, you don't elect a person like this in a healthy political system. The American political system is deeply — The ability of a man like this to have the power that he does to order a war is a profoundly broken uh political order. It has nothing to do with our constitutional system, where only Congress has the ability to declare war. We're so pathetic right now in our politics that the only thing Congress does is vote repeatedly that they don't want to have anything to do with overseeing this war. It's not a choice that they have under the Constitution. It's a complete abnegation of responsibility. How can the Senate say now in three votes, "Don't ask us. It's none of our business. That's just Mr. Trump's business." That's exactly what the US Senate has said. So, I think that there are very particular circumstances right now. My own feeling is that Trump has uh actually uh again, now I'm completely amateur psychologist, but he seems to have deteriorated uh and lost any kind of self-control in the last three or four months, so there's a degree of impulsivity, which is absolutely beyond anything that I've seen before. By the way, this is the second time in a row uh that we have had a president suffering from dementia. Uh and what's interesting also is that with Biden, who was had dementia for the last two years at least of his administration, it was all covered up until he stood there gaping in front of a camera drooling uh to all of the American people watching in a debate, and no one could hide it on camera. My country's pathetic right now in the political system. It's a show. It's PR. Anything can get said. There's no planning. There's no systematic review. There are no checks and balances. There's nothing. And this was true with Biden, but it's much worse with Trump. Biden was not a nice person. I've known him for about 30 years. He never was a nice person, but he was not like Trump with the deeply antisocial personality disorder. And so, I just want to say we're dealing with psychology here in the most individual sense. This is denied every moment of public discourse. It's just amazing. Take what happened in the last three days. First, the president said, "I'm going to blow up everything. I'm going to kill all of you." That's normal. There's Oh, then you have the commentators. Oh, will he kill everybody? Well, that's an interesting question. Not are we in the hands of a madman? Nothing like that. Not one commentary says, "That's a little strange for the president of the United States to be talking like that.” Talking, sorry, like Adolf Hitler. No. Not even a mention that this is a little strange. Then 2 days later when he decides he's not going to kill everyone, he says, "Oh, we're close to an agreement." And of course, there was no negotiation. Period. But what does the press say? Oh, well, will Donald Trump be able to get an agreement? Not what a loon. What a liar. Nothing. It's a complete normalization of something completely abnormal. I've never seen anything like this. Who's crazier? Trump or us? How can we not be grown-ups and say, "That man's a loon." Get him out of there before he kills us all. Nobody says this. Sorry, this is not a partisan statement. I've hated all our recent presidents. Because they don't make us safe. They don't tell the truth. But this is something absolutely different, what's happening right now. And it's all normalized. And the New York Times story today, all I do these days is write, I write letters to the reporters whom I've known for decades and they don't write back. Because they don't have the dignity to get into a serious discussion on anything. Sometimes, by the way, they write back and they say, "Yeah, I agree with you, Jeff, but higher-ups edit my article. So, that's the main thing." That it's complete shutdown of truth at the New York Times, which used to be my go-to place to get just the straight story. It's useless. Completely useless right now. But anyway, this story was uh Yes, will Donald Trump be able to negotiate a deal without mentioning how weird it is that there were no negotiations. But he said that there were. That's the real story of the last day. That's the really interesting story. Were there negotiations? The story that said this is by David Sanger. He's an experienced journalist, 40 years. He says, "Well, Donald Trump didn't tell us who he was negotiating with." David, come on. Are you serious? You're going to write that to me? He didn't tell who he was negotiating with. Maybe, David, he wasn't negotiating with anybody. Maybe he made it up. Can't you ask a question as a grown-up writing for the New York Times who's been doing this for 40 years? So, I wrote to David [Sanger] this morning. I will not hear back from David. I've known David for probably 40 years. Because they don't talk. Because we're in really a crazy land right now. Where anything goes. And the whole story is, "Well, what will Donald Trump do next?" As if this is a spectator sport. Not your life and not my life. I'm more interested when are they going to take him away? Before he does more harm to us. When is some grown-up going to say, "This is a very bad idea." Okay. So, that's the immediate issue. But the system is more deeply broken. There are no checks on presidential power to launch wars. And there haven't been for decades, actually. Congress basically doesn't exist when it comes to foreign policy. It basically doesn't exist. [It’s even worse than that: the Congress, in BOTH Parties, is pushing Trump to be even more neoconservative than he already is and has always been.] Because we live in a security state. Foreign policy is carried out by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Security Council. It's not carried out by anything resembling democratic institutions at all. You may say, of course, Jeff, I had to come here to learn that. But it's rather alarming, actually, because it's not only 2003. We're in nonstop wars. Nonstop. It's not just the Iraq war. In 1999, we bombed Serbia for 78 days and broke the country apart. And created Kosovo as a country. And then put the largest NATO base in Kosovo, Bondsteel. And then we say, by the way, "We have sacrosanct borders in Europe." Yeah, sacrosanct borders except when we decide to change them. When the US military decides to change them. Okay, so that was 1999. Then, Yes, in 2001, we invaded Afghanistan. Clever move. We had to invade because of Al-Qaeda, which the US had created starting in 1979. Who created Al-Qaeda? Excuse me, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA. Because they wanted to bring the Soviet Union into, lure the Soviet Union into, a war in Afghanistan. Very clever. Yeah. The operation worked. It destroyed Afghanistan for the next several decades. But this is uh 2001, we went in to clean up our own mess that had either boomeranged or just continued and we had to clean up what what we had done. Then 2003, a war under completely phony pretenses. But don't forget 2011, the United States overthrew Libya. 2011, the CIA was tasked with overthrowing the Syrian government. They thought this would be quick. It took them 14 years and hundreds of thousands of lives. But that's all in a day's work. In 2014, they overthrew the Ukraine government. We called it a revolution of dignity. The dignity was my colleague Victoria Nuland handing out cookies and millions of dollars to organize the protests. So, this is nonstop. It's been this way, but it's getting worse. Because there is absolutely no self-control right now. Kidnap presidents, invade, declare that Hutchinson is a security threat to the United States if it has a port service operation in Panama. That's normal. Normal? No, this is not normal. This is deranged. And if you go long enough with derangement, we'll blow up the whole world. And Trump is just the kind of guy that can do it. Because he has no self-control and apparently no one around him that gives him a warm cup of tea in the evening with some honey in it and puts on some slippers and says, "It's going to be all right, Donald. Don't Don't post tonight on Truth Social.” KARIM BETTACHE: Um Can I Can I jump in on this for a moment? So, you talk about nobody's pushing back Donald Trump. SACHS: Yes. BETTACHE: And that is exactly what I also wanted to ask you today. You were talking about my my country is pathetic, you said. Uh I come from the Netherlands. That's even more pathetic. SACHS: Well, your your former prime minister, right. BETTACHE: That's what I was going to talk. Yeah, exactly. So, I was going to talk about our very pathetic former prime minister Mark Rutte, who is a, who is the head of NATO right now. And I've noticed something and not only with Mark Rutte, but also with other uh uh people around the world, world leaders, et cetera. There is something about human psychology that people start to uh bow and be so servile in in in in the face of a of a psychopath. There is something uniquely strange about how people deal with Donald Trump. From the Gulf states to Asia to to to Europe, everywhere you will see that "Oh, Donald Trump, you're such an amazing man and peacemaker." There There is something very weird about the human psychology when you're confronted with a psychopath. So, my question is what is it that makes Europe so incredibly servile to the United States? As structurally actually. I'm very curious. What is it structurally that makes Europe so pathetic and unable to push back? What what's going on here and how can we get out of this? SACHS: It's a very good question and I think your observation is right at a personal level that there is something unusual it —  even I think in Max Weber's terms — there's an element of charisma to a psychopath. A psychopath is so self-assured so bullying, so threatening, it taps something deep, of fear or of hierarchy, or of magnificence, that a lot of the great conquerors of the world in the past have been psychopaths. And and they get a lot of support because there is something quite deep in this. Trump has a lot of support. He has ardent support of about 25% of the US population. About 60% think he's a nut. But about 25% would you know, go to the sword for him. Some think he's a Messiah. This is real. It's a minority definitely. Not a big minority by the way. So, I'm saying maybe 20 or 25% but it's an ardent following. So, this is something quite unusual. What psychopathy is able to generate in terms of political political following. Um And I think there's a personal element in it. I speak to lots of world leaders and um many of them know what they're dealing with in some sense but almost none of them say publicly a word about it. Of course, partly they think that's prudent, partly they're cowards, partly they're bought off partly, it's a free-rider problem you know, who's going to bell the cat? Not me. Let someone else play that role. But it's really really alarming how far the bully can get. And we're you know, it's not threats. We've had a genocide in Gaza. So we're losing lots of lives of the most brutal kind. We've had mass bombing of Iran. And thousands and thousands of people dying in short order. But nobody says a word almost in Rutte said just on Sunday that this is a hugely important war and we have to get behind the president of the United States. And he's the one that called Trump daddy. And where does one start with this? So there's a personal element that is very interesting. There is of course the structural element. And the structural element is very simple. NATO is the US military alliance. It's not it's not an association. It's not a treaty organization of various sovereign countries. It's the United States military that operates in Europe and that occupies Europe militarily to an important extent. And it's interesting that Europe has been militarily occupied since 1945. Europe never had the gumption to say, "Okay, it's 80 years 81 years since the war ended. Why don't you go home?" And if Europe had sovereignty, it would say that. But after 80 years, all of the politicians have been cultivated to be US vassals basically. So, there is no such thing. And you cannot be an anti-American politician in Europe above maybe the mayor of a small town because you'll get your head chopped off well before you reach anything higher than that. This is an American occupied continent and has been for 81 years. Maybe you know, in in the past we would just draw the continent as American territory. But in our world today, you don't need to do that. I call it regime control rather than territorial occupation. So, the American Empire operates across Europe. It's uncontested. And it's not on the map shown as the United States. But if it were a map from you know 1200 AD, you would show it as American territory because it would be basically indirect imperial control. We would call it a satrapy if we're the Persian Empire. We would say that the US is suzerain so that there's no independent foreign policy if we used the language of the past. But Europe has no independent foreign policy at all. The previous Secretary General of NATO was Jens Stoltenberg whom I knew when he was finance minister of Norway and then when he was prime minister of Norway. And we were friends. And then he became Secretary General of NATO. And I could not stand one word that he said. Just everything he said I thought was horrible. And and the poor man had to sit next to me every September at the UN General Assembly because our seats were next to each other. And so we'd greet each other and then I'd start complaining. And he'd get up and leave after a little while. I don't blame him. But in any event then he stopped being Secretary General and the next week he said something sensible. And so I spoke to a leader in Europe a prime minister and I said, "Stoltenberg said something sensible. Why didn't he say that when he was Secretary General?" And the person said to me, "Jeff what was his position?" I said, "Well, he was NATO Secretary General." He said, "Who did he work for?" I said, "Oh, you mean the United States?" "Yes, Jeff. Now he doesn't work for the United States. So, these are not independent voices. These are employees of the US security state. It's painful to hear because Europe is about at least 3,000 years old in civilization. The United States is 250 years old and has been civilized very few years of that. And yet the 250-year-old uh power runs the 3,000-year-old civilization. So, I think it's probably a little bit of the feeling of Europe when the Huns invaded or something. I But nobody says it. It's not normal. This is the most fundamental explanation. When you said the UN Security Council is paralyzed, it's actually not even that good as being paralyzed. It's it's actually right now in the hands of the United States which is very weird. Of course, there's China and Russia that are the only independent voices. But the Security Council meeting of that I attended four weeks ago this was at the very start of the US war of aggression, US-Israel war of aggression. Um was completely surrealistic because that day the US and Israel attacked I Pearl Harbor style attacked Iran. As the negotiations were supposed to take place the next day in in in Vienna. Okay. So, they made their surprise attack. They killed the 40 leaders and there was a Security Council meeting that afternoon at 3:00 p.m. And I got called that morning by some of the governments and said, "We'd like you to testify, Mr. Sachs." And I said I would be pleased to do so. And I prepared testimony. And then I when I arrived at the Security Council, I was told, "Well, the UK, which chairs that month as president of the Security Council, has ruled out your testimony. So, you won't be able to testify." Um I thought, "That's nice. Let's have a good grown-up discussion." Uh but um they didn't want that. Okay, so the Security Council meeting started and the first uh ambassador that spoke was from Bahrain, which has a 2-year seat. And the Bahraini ambassador said, "I'm here." This was, by the way, a Security Council session called by Iran. They had just been attacked by the United States. Uh and there was no conceivable justification under the UN Charter, which says that under Article 2, paragraph 4, uh that no state may use force or threaten the use of force against the territorial sovereignty or political sovereignty of another state. It's very clear. It's the essential purpose of the United Nations. So, Iran called this session, this emergency session, and Bahrain started, and Bahrain's first words were, "We are here to condemn the unprovoked attack on us by Iran." Well, it's true that um Iran was bombed and then Iran launched missiles against the uh US naval base in Bahrain. You would think a grown-up might say, "Well, it wasn't exactly unprovoked. There was a reason that today Iran struck us, so you could say, 'We are here to protest that Iran has bombed us, but we understand that Iran was attacked this morning.'" No. Not one word. Not one sentence that Iran was attacked by the United States and Israel. Not a sentence. I thought, "This is really unpleasant." Not a complete surprise, but unpleasant. Then the next speaker was the French ambassador. The French ambassador said, "We are here to condemn the attacks by Iran on the Gulf countries, which we stand by." Didn't mention that Israel and the United States had attacked Iran. Not even a sentence. Ladies and gentlemen, this went on for eight countries. It was Latvia, Greece, Denmark. I don't even remember. Uh Britain, of course, the United States. It's surrealistic. You can't even believe this. How are we not going to blow up the world if you can't say the day of a massive attack that there's a problem here coming from the massive attack. Not even mention it. That's the state of affairs that we're in. Well, it is simple. By the way, it was also Colombia and Panama on that list. All you had to do was look at the list of where the US has military bases. That's all. If you have military bases, then Iran made uh unprovoked attacks on its neighbors. Because you're an occupied country. Because that is the American empire. Because you have lost your sovereignty and you're basically uh an instrument of US imperial policy. So, that's our situation right now. And it's extremely dangerous. (34:13)

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That is the presentation’s half-way point.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.