Has Trump Lost His Mind?

James Greenberg

Is Donald Trump becoming more psychotic or senile—or are his recent posts and videos something else entirely? The question is not rhetorical. In the past month, Trump has posted a video of himself in a fighter jet labeled King Trump, dropping feces on protestors in Times Square, and claimed that “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6.” These artifacts are grotesque, conspiratorial, and emotionally saturated. But they are not incoherent. Within his symbolic system, they are tightly constructed—designed to dominate, invert, and mobilize.

The jet video is not satire. It is a coronation. Trump appears not as a president but as a sovereign ruler, airborne and unaccountable. The crown signals divine authority. The jet signals coercive force. The aerial perspective mimics drone footage and military propaganda. The fecal payload is not juvenile humor—it is symbolic defilement. Protestors are not opponents. They are contaminants to be purged.

Here the scatology matters. Excrement is the paradigmatic “matter out of place.” To drop it from the heavens onto dissenters is to mark them as pollution in need of removal. The act is not simply mockery but ritualized humiliation, an inversion that renders opponents abject. In ritual terms, this is a cleansing rite enacted through defilement, where power is asserted not by reason but by the capacity to degrade. The grotesque becomes a tool of sovereignty, mobilizing disgust and solidarity in equal measure.

The January 6 post operates in parallel. The claim that Biden placed 274 FBI agents into the crowd is chronologically impossible, but symbolically potent. It rewrites the timeline to shift blame away from Trump and onto a fabricated enemy state. The specificity of the number mimics intelligence leaks, lending false credibility to a mythic inversion. The insurrectionists become patriots. The investigators become saboteurs. The sovereign becomes the victim.

These posts are not isolated. They are part of a mythic arc—betrayal, resistance, restoration. Trump is not simply posting; he is narrating a cosmology. Institutions betray him, protestors mock him, and retaliation restores his stature. The spectacle is not commentary. It is governance by other means.

The use of AI-generated media marks a turning point. Trump no longer relies on filmed reality. He fabricates it. The jet video, the sword-wielding coronation clips, the stylized propaganda—these are not amateur memes. They are curated artifacts of symbolic warfare. AI allows infinite fabrication. The sovereign can now generate his own battlefield, his own enemies, his own myth.

What looks chaotic is in fact staged. The posts are emotionally calibrated, visually saturated, and strategically timed. They activate grievance, humiliation, and vengeance with precision. They bypass reason and lodge themselves in the limbic system. The spectacle becomes a loyalty test. Will followers defend the indefensible? Will institutions absorb the inversion?

The appearance of being unhinged serves a purpose. It floods the zone with symbolic excess. It destabilizes norms. It isolates dissenters. Erratic behavior becomes a fog of war. Accountability dissolves. The sovereign is not bound by rules, because he is not playing the same game.

What emerges is a sovereign fantasy enacted through generative media—a shift away from policy toward performance, from debate toward domination. These are not symptoms of decline but of escalation. Trump is not losing control; he is asserting it through symbolic saturation.

The threat lies not only in the content but in the architecture. These posts corrode shared meaning, destabilize civic memory, and normalize transgression. By inserting false precision—like “274 FBI agents”—they erode the timeline itself. Chronology fragments, civic time collapses, and accountability slips away. Generative media accelerates this erosion by producing an endless present of spectacle, where memory never settles and grievance is always renewed. Authoritarianism thrives in this fractured temporality: it rules not just through force but through the breakdown of shared sequence and duration.

The jet video enacts a digital ceremony. The January 6 claim works as a mythic retelling. Both operate within a cosmology where truth is subordinate to loyalty and reality is curated for maximum grievance. The sovereign persuades no one; he punishes and performs.

We must treat these artifacts not as outbursts but as declarations. They reveal the moral architecture of a regime that governs through grievance, spectacle, and symbolic violence. Understanding them does not excuse them. It exposes the machinery of meaning that sustains authoritarian power in the age of generative media.