Trump’s Collapse Is On the Way

By David Brooks

Last week, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said that what he fears most is “the moment when everything explodes.” I share his concern. If we follow the trajectory of events, it is quite clear that we are heading toward some kind of collapse.

We are in the midst of at least four collapses or declines: the collapse of the postwar international order. The decline of domestic tranquility wherever Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents deploy their abuses. The even greater collapse of democratic order, with attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve and baseless prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the decline of President Donald Trump’s mind.

Of these four, the decline of Trump’s mind is the primary one, and it drives all the others. Sometimes narcissists get worse with age, as they become more uninhibited. The effect is inevitably profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.

Every president I have covered becomes more conceited the longer they remain in office, and when you start with Trump’s level of self-esteem, the effect is flamboyance, arrogance, lack of empathy, and a fierce and exaggerated reaction to what he perceives as slights.

Moreover, in the last year, Trump has resorted more and more quickly to violence. In 2025, the United States carried out or contributed to 622 bombing missions abroad, causing deaths in places ranging from Venezuela to Iran, Nigeria, and Somalia, not to mention Minneapolis.

The arc of tyranny bends toward degradation. Tyrants typically become intoxicated with their own power, which progressively reduces restraint, increases their sense of entitlement and egocentricity, and amplifies risk-taking and overconfidence, while increasing social isolation, corruption, and defensive paranoia.

These days, I have found it useful to return to the historians of ancient Rome, starting with the originals such as Sallust and Tacitus. Those guys observed tyranny from the front row, with case studies scattered before them: Nero, Caligula, Commodus, Domitian, Tiberius. They understood the intimate connection between private morality and public order, and that when the former declines, the latter will collapse.

“The desire for power stands out among our desires and passions, since the arrogance of one individual requires the subjugation of countless men,” wrote Edward Gibbon in his 1776 classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He continued, “In civil unrest, social laws are distorted, and the dictates of humanity rarely prevail. The heat of strife, the conceit of victory, the desperation for success, the memory of past grievances, and the fear of future dangers—all inflame the spirit and silence the voice of compassion. These motives have stained the pages of history with blood in various ages.”

The 18th-century English historian Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, as it can drive people to serve the community in order to earn public admiration. The lust for domination, he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that leads us to “center everything on ourselves, which we believe will allow us to satisfy any other passion.”

The insatiable craving for domination, he continues, “banishes all social virtues.” The selfish tyrant only associates with those who share his selfishness, who are willing to wear the mask of perpetual deceit. “Their friendship and enmity will be equally unreal, and easily convertible, if the change serves their interests.”

Those historians were impressed by how much personal force ancient tyrants could generate. The man who craves power is always active, the center of the show, relentless, vigilant, distrustful, restless when something gets in his way.

Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect that the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a rush “into servitude,” as large swarms of flatterers fawn over the great man. The flattery must intensify forever and become more servile, until the dignity of each follower is nullified. Then comes what might be called the disappearance of goodness, as morally healthy people hide away in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole of society tends to become numb. The incessant flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed appalling, comes to seem banal.

As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may end up losing the habits of democracy: the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, intolerance of corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “Thus you will more easily stifle than restore ingenuity and learning,” wrote Tacitus. “For undoubtedly the sweetness of idleness itself infiltrates, and, being detestable at first, idleness is finally loved.”

I don’t have enough imagination to know where the next crisis will come from: perhaps from some domestic, criminal, or foreign crisis? Although I was struck by a sentence Robert Kagan wrote in an essay on the effects of Trump’s foreign policy in The Atlantic: “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post-Cold War world a paradise.”

And no, I don’t think the United States is headed for anything like a Roman-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, at heart, still hold the same democratic values.

But I do know that events are being driven by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a leader maddened by power who is rushing toward tyranny suddenly regains his sanity and becomes more moderate. On the contrary, the normal course of the disease is toward ever-accelerating deterioration and debauchery.

And I understand why America’s founding fathers spent so much time reading historians like Tacitus and Sallust. Thomas Jefferson called Tacitus “the first writer in the world, without a single exception.” They understood that the lust for power is a primary human impulse and that even all the safeguards they built into the Constitution are no match for that lust when it is not ethically restrained from within.

As John Adams said in a letter in 1798: “We have no government armed with power capable of confronting human passions unrestrained by morals and religion. Greed, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest ropes of our Constitution like a whale breaking through a net.”

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English