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. When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle. Blog post. PsyPolitics. A blog about the psy disciplines and politics , February 1st 2026
Despite 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.
[Editor:Refers to Foucault’s reading – from the lecture series on Psychiatric Power – of king George III psychiatrization as described by Philippe Pinel]
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