by Giorgio Agamben

March 30, 2026

from Quodlibet Website

translation by Biblioteca Pleyades

Original Italian version

It's worth reflecting on a fact so incredible that people are trying to erase it at all costs:

that the state that claims to be the most powerful in the world has been governed for years by men who are technically demented...!

This isn't about giving an extreme form to a political judgment:

that Trump - like Biden before him, certainly - should be considered demented in the pathological sense of the term is evidence now shared by many psychiatrists, and anyone who observes his way of expressing himself cannot help but agree.

It goes without saying that what interests us here is not the clinical case of individuals named Trump and Biden.

Rather, the question we cannot help but ask is:

What is the historical significance of the fact that a country like the United States - which in some ways leads the entire West - is governed by a mentally ill person?

 

What radical spiritual and moral decline, even before a political one, could have led to such an extreme consequence?

That the fate of the West was sealed by nihilism is something Nietzsche had already diagnosed over a century ago, along with the death of God...

but that nihilism would take the form of dementia was not a given.

Perhaps it is in some way out of compassion and pity that the God who wants to destroy the West leads it to its end, not in awareness and responsibility, but in recklessness and madness...!