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analysis
The American government is becoming a madhouse.
April 20, 2026, 1:13 p.mApril 20, 2026, 1:13 p.m
Recently, FBI Director Kash Patel panicked. As The Atlantic magazine reports, he was briefly unable to log into the internal computer system and was therefore convinced that he had been fired. The boss of 38,000 employees was making frantic calls, driving half of Washington crazy before he realized it was a technical problem.
Not that there aren’t more than enough reasons to remove Patel from office. He is neither technically nor politically qualified for this. He originally attracted attention as an employee of Devin Nunes, a former MP loyal to Trump. Despite major concerns, the president elevated Patel to the important office, primarily because he had promised to subject Trump’s opponents to criminal investigations.
Likes to drink: FBI Director Kash Patel.Image: keystone
Since then, Patel has been trying unsuccessfully to fulfill the president’s heartfelt request. He failed in the case of former FBI Director James Comey as well as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Adam Schiff, a senator from California.
Patel, on the other hand, stood out for his boasting and drinking. FBI officials repeatedly have to get their boss out of bed when he’s completely drunk. According to “Atlantic,” they once even had to break down the door of his apartment to wake up the comatose boss. “Some of Patel’s colleagues fear that his personal behavior has become a security risk,” according to the Atlantic.
The FBI and the White House, of course, deny it. However, they cannot deny the fact that Patel had already reported early successes on several occasions, such as the assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk. Actually, something like this leads to an immediate dismissal. Patel, on the other hand, is diligently firing FBI officials who were involved in the investigations against Trump. So stupidly does a force that specializes in Iran. This happened shortly before the attack on Tehran.
Finally, Patel’s ostentation and vanity are also notorious. He has his girlfriend flown in on the government’s private jet and in turn refuses to leave the jet until he has the appropriate uniform.
Liked to drink: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.Image: keystone
When it comes to incompetence, Pete Hegseth is as good as the FBI director. The Minister of Defense, sorry, Minister of War, barely achieved the rank of major as an active soldier. That didn’t stop him from summoning the 800 highest-ranking military officers around the world back to the United States last year – a billion-dollar, highly complex undertaking – just to tell them that they were too fat and should please not wear beards.
Like Patel, Hegseth also has or had a serious alcohol problem. Unlike the Indian-born FBI director, however, he is a fanatical, fundamentalist Christian. That’s why he regularly has services conducted by an evangelical priest. He himself also tried to be a preacher and declared:
«I will, filled with vengeance and with furious anger, strike down those who seek to destroy my brothers. And you will know that I am God when I inflict vengeance on you.”
Embarrassingly, this text does not come from the Bible, as Hegseth incorrectly assumed, but from “Pulp Fiction,” the cult film by Quentin Tarantino. There, a mafioso utters this sentence as he is about to shoot a business partner.
Trump himself is also said to oscillate between megalomania and panicked fear. The Wall Street Journal reports that the president raged for hours after learning that two American pilots had been shot down. “Don’t you know what happened to Jimmy Carter with the destroyed helicopters and the hostages?” Trump is said to have shouted.
For the younger ones among you: In 1979, an American elite force’s attempt to free the hostages held in Tehran in a special operation failed. That was one of the reasons why Carter subsequently lost the election to Ronald Reagan.
Trump is also prone to paranoia. In Mar-a-Lago, he leaves the parasols open at night because he is afraid of a drone attack. In the manic phase, however, Trump believes himself to be invincible. According to the Wall Street Journal, he is said to have even considered awarding himself the Medal of Honor, the highest military award. The reason he is said to have given is that he survived a dangerous night landing in Iraq during his first term in office. (No joke)
John Gartner is a professor of psychology at John Hopkins University and a specialist in borderline cases. For some time now, he has been diagnosing Trump as a pathological narcissist and detecting signs of frontal lobe dementia in him. After the Jesus and Pope affair, Gartner goes one step further. In a podcast with the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles, he now explains: “The president has become psychotic in a medical sense.”
To prove his thesis, Gartner cites a number of symptoms: The president babbles incomprehensibly. He thinks he is Jesus. He posts crazy posts all night long. He cannot provide a coherent argument for the Iran war. He thinks he is the President of Venezuela and even the Ayatollah of Iran. He wants to have his name plastered everywhere. Gartner even compares Trump to Hitler in his Berlin bunker in recent days. “Trump also wants to drag the world into the abyss,” says Gartner. The renowned psychologist’s conclusion is unambiguous and frightening: “Our president is now completely crazy (raving mad).”