Trump’s Tin Ear
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept 8, 2025
Whatever else the weekend’s Truth Social “Chipocalypse Now” post is churning up, it is an exceptional distillation of Donald Trump’s complete tin ear to the inhumane and impolitic.
The post, with Trump’s knockoff line that “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. . .,” rewriting the move line, adding that “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” over an AI warfare image of helicopters circulating a burning city, is supremely insensitive and provocative.
That is the point, of course, but while it will anger foes, it hardly will win new political support for commitment of more troops to U.S. streets supposedly towards reducing crime. Yesterday, Trump tried to walk away from the post.
The effort clearly seems focused on expanding deportations and harassing local officials whom Trump is targeting as political enemies. If Trump can get away with illegally declaring emergencies every other week to justify militarization, who is going to stop a move to delay or interfere with elections?
The signature post — posts now substitute for White House announcements — seems an unnecessarily brutal message for America’s Democratic cities, especially in a week in which it appears Trump is looking for an excuse to unleash bombing inside Venezuela and Mexico. Apart from all else, this is the same Donald Trump who demeans military service and promotes himself as a global “peacemaker,” yet rues being left out of a gathering of global dictators for a military parade in China this week.
Those same target city streets were filled with protesters this weekend — not in defense of crime, but against the heavy-handed, illegal deployments of more National Guardsmen to salve Trump’s authoritarian itch. In Washington, D.C., grand jurors were rejecting the overhyped criminal charges being brought for minor crimes that Trump forces were describing as erasing serious street crime.
The post comes in a week in which Trump summarily and illegally changed the Defense Department into a Department of War amid continuing bad economic news, international developments that undercut Trump’s global policies, and poor political performance. The post with its made-up imagery and pretend lethality came across as an impotent puffball of would-be masculinity, the mind of a boy unfortunately playing with real military toys.
Returning from ‘Death’
Much has been written lately about Trump’s lack of transparency about his physical health and the string of bland explanations for layers of makeup and desk-bound photo shoots, but less about Trump’s mental state. Trump felt obliged to answer Internet queries about whether he had died with a fund-raising appeal to ease his way to ‘heaven.’
Trump’s language is already hard to follow as cohesive, but if his judgment, focus and leaps of logic truly are growing medically worse, who in his government is going to say so? Are we stuck for the remainder of his term with someone unstable in the Oval Office? Certainly not members of a Cabinet that spends nearly four hours in a meeting simply to lavish praise on an ego-fragile president whose policies at the very least controversial and regularly skirt the law.
Even for non-medical folks, for a personality that is clearly overly narcissistic and delusional with cruel tendencies that point to sociopathy, Trump’s insistency on blind loyalty on everything from the Epstein files to separation of families to his views on toilet water flow is way beyond anything we would recognize as “normal.”
Trump was quick and never-ending about Joe Biden’s mental state in the waning months of his presidency but seems unable to look at his own. Neither do his doctors, or, if they have been looking, we’ll never know about it. It is far more likely that Trump will lean on inside word from MAGA influencer Laura Loomer about which doctor is politically disloyal.
The political commentary about this posting and the campaigns it reflects will be about polling numbers and spin, about the responses of Governors Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, and the mayors of the cities involved, about veterans offended by the adopted warlike ferocity of a draft-dodging president who cuts health services for veterans.
More appropriately, attention should be triggering a discussion about the mind that thinks that pulling the wings off flies is a healthy way to spend the nation’s time and treasure.
There is nothing positive about spreading fear about Trump’s manic grab for power, as reflected in this posting’s singular, muscled distillation of power. Crime is not down, jobs are. Order is not up, prices are. Peace is not at hand, war and disruption are. Government is hard work, not mere slogans.
If Trump wanted to pull lines from political movies, he ought to have looked at the fictional President Andrew Shepherd who in American President reminded voters that “This is a time for serious people.”
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