"DELUSIONAL:" Delusional is as delusional does!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2025 

Delusion's possible faces: This morning, at the Washington Post, we encountered an intriguing report about President Trump's prodigious acts of messaging.

There's nothing wrong with this sort of messaging—until such time as there is. The Post report starts as shown, headline included:

Tallying Trump’s online posting frenzy: 2,262 ‘truths’ in 132 days

President Donald Trump is posting on the internet with a velocity and ferocity far beyond that of his first term, surprising aides with predawn messages fired off at a blistering pace.

As of Sunday, Trump had posted 2,262 times to his company’s social network Truth Social in the 132 days since his inauguration, a Washington Post analysis has found—more than three times the number of tweets he sent during the same period of his first presidency...

[...]

His prolific posts also allow him to communicate directly to his fans, without any filtering from media outlets.

At 7:22 a.m. on Memorial Day, he commemorated the day of mourning for American service members killed in the line of duty with a 172-word stem-winder written in all capital letters: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds, who allowed 21,000,000 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane.”

And on Saturday night, he reposted an outrageous item to his nearly 10 million followers saying former president Joe Biden had been executed in 2020 and replaced by a “soulless mindless” robotic clone.

Uh-oh! On Memorial Day, he offered an all-caps post wishing a happy day to all—even including THE SCUM. Then came that deeply peculiar repost, in which he passed along the claim that President Biden—remember him?—has been killed and replaced with a clone.

What can you say about a Truth Social message like unfolds like that? Today, the Post bumps its assessment of that report up to "outrageous." (With unintended comical effect, some other major news orgs scored the statement as "false!")

When we first read about that repost, we wondered if the post might involve a hint of delusion. For that reason, we started to google.

Full disclosure! As Mother Gump used to say, delusional is as delusional does. We'll briefly return to Professor Quine, a good decent person, with this passage from Word and Object, perhaps his most famous book:

CHAPTER SEVEN
Ontic Decision

§48. NOMINALISM AND REALISM
One finds or can imagine disagreement on whether there are wombats, unicorns, angels, neutrinos, classes, points, miles, propositions. Philosophy and the special sciences afford infinite scope for disagreement on what there is. One such issue that has traditionally divided philosophers is whether there are abstract objects. Nominalists have held that there are not; realists (in a special sense of the word), or Platonists (as they have been called to avoid the troubles of 'realist’), have held that there are.

General definition of the term ‘abstract’, or ‘universal’, and its opposite ‘concrete’, or ‘particular’, need not detain us. No matter if there are things whose status under the dichotomy remains enigmatic—“abstract particulars” such as the Equator and the North Pole, for instance; for no capital will be made of the dichotomy as such. It will suffice for now to cite classes, attributes, propositions, numbers, relations, and functions as typical abstract objects, and physical objects as concrete objects par excellence, and to consider the ontological issue as it touches such typical cases.

Say what? A person can imagine disagreement "on whether there are miles?" 

Fellow inhabitants of the planet, do you have even the slightest idea what that formulation might mean? And with that, we're back to those "abstract objects" again, whatever they might be.

As the passage continues, we seem to be told that the North Pole isn't an abstract object—instead, it's an abstract particular! That said, numbers are typical "abstract objects," whatever that might be taken to mean.

Question: Is the number 2 really an "abstract object?" In what sense can the number 2 be described an "object" at all? 

Also, might Mother Gump perhaps have imagined that a type of "delusion" is at work here? As we've noted in the past, Professor Horwich attributed this analysis to the later Wittgenstein with respect to such "philosophical" musings:

Was Wittgenstein Right?

[...]

Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on—and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking...“What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand."

So said the later Wittgenstein concerning this type of discourse. Or at least, that's what Horwich says.

In fairness, the key term in that passage is "illusion," not delusion. The key term is linguistic illusion, but we think it comes close enough for journalistic work.

In truth, disordered cogitation is quite widespread within our human family. Imaginably, that could even be true in the case of the late Professor Quine, a good and decent person who was voted the fifth most important analytical philosopher of the past two hundred years.

Back to the text-in-itself! We've suggested that writing like that helps explain why you can't name a single important academic philosopher of the past however many years—why you can't identify any contribution such logicians or ethicists, or even such students of ontic decision, have ever made to the planet's actual public discourse. 

Was Professor Quine a bit "delusional?" Presumably, you can teach it flat or round! But then we come to President Trump, and to his endless supply of very strange statements, not excluding last Saturday's bizarre repost about the execution of President Biden—but also including his other claims, so hotly advanced:

His claim that no one was actually present at Candidate Harris' rally in Detroit last summer. His repeated insistence that Haitian immigrants were eating our nation's cats and dogs.

His dogged insistence about who actually pays the bill when a tariff is implemented. Perhaps most consequential of all, his endless, unexplained claim that the 2020 election was stolen in some unexplained way. 

His claim, made over and over again in his famous phone call to Georgia, that he actually won that state by 100,000 votes.

On this campus, we actually listened to the tape of that hour-long phone call. Along the way, we'll have to admit that it sounded to us like President Trump really believed that claim.

Did he believe the unsupported claim he was insistently making, in a phone call he didn't know was being reported? In the end, we can't tell you that— but it sounded like he maybe possibly did!

(Later, the Washington Post published a lengthy report in which many associates of the former president, including many who has turned NeverTrump, said that they themselves weren't sure whether he believed his delusional claim that the election was stolen.)

After his latest peculiar post— his post about the cloning of President Biden— we found ourselves wondering, once again, if some measure of "delusion" might have its grips on the president.

We began to google around in such of a fuller understanding— and sure enough! According to the leading authority on the topic, "delusion" is a clinical term as well as familiar part of everyday speech which is merely colloquial.

Here's what the authority says:

Delusion

A delusion is a fixed belief that is not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, hallucination, or some other misleading effects of perception, as individuals with those beliefs are able to change or readjust their beliefs upon reviewing the evidence. 

[...]

Delusions have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both general physical and mental) and are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders including schizophrenia, paraphrenia, manic episodes of bipolar disorder, and psychotic depression.

Persecutory delusions are the most common type of delusions and involve the theme of being followed, harassed, cheated, poisoned or drugged, conspired against, spied on, attacked, or otherwise obstructed in the pursuit of goals. Persecutory delusions are a condition in which the affected person wrongly believes that they are being persecuted. 

[...]

According to the DSM-IV-TR, persecutory delusions are the most common form of delusions in schizophrenia, where the person believes they are "being tormented, followed, sabotaged, tricked, spied on, or ridiculed." In the DSM-IV-TR, persecutory delusions are the main feature of the persecutory type of delusional disorder. When the focus is to remedy some injustice by legal action, they are sometimes called "querulous paranoia."

Within the realm of schizophrenia, persecutory delusions are the most common type! Those would be the types of delusion in which the (clinically) afflicted party believes that he's being harassed, cheated, conspired against, spied on, attacked, or otherwise obstructed in the pursuit of his goals. 

Legal action will sometimes be taken to address such delusions! Does any of that sound like President Trump? 

In fairness, we quickly note this:

As the leading authority notes, a delusion almost surely isn't a delusion if the beliefs in question are true. In the matter of President Trump, supporters could perhaps reasonably say that some of the president's claims of persecution may perhaps possess the germ of possibly being accurate.

Also, let's be fair! DSM-IV is the previous DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Medical science has now moved on what's known as the DSM-5. 

The DSM-5 now rules the roost. According to this web site, "this is how delusions are described in the DSM-5 (Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders):"

Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. Their content may include a variety of themes (e.g. persecutory, referential, somatic, religious, grandiose).[…] Delusions are deemed bizarre if they are clearly implausible and not understandable to same-culture peers and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. […] The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity.

Does any of that sound like President Trump? Remember, we're looking for a way to understand the stranger claims the gentleman makes, often late at night and with a high degree of conviction. Stating the unmistakable, some of those claims seem to involve the types of "fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence."

We're speaking here of diagnosable elements of modern medical science. Moving along to a further discussion, the leading authority offers this overview of what seems to be one type of a (clinical) personality disorder:

Delusional disorder

Delusional disorder, traditionally synonymous with paranoia, is a mental illness in which a person has delusions, but with no accompanying prominent hallucinations, thought disorder, mood disorder, or significant flattening of affect. Delusions are a specific symptom of psychosis. Delusions can be bizarre or non-bizarre in content; non-bizarre delusions are fixed false beliefs that involve situations that could occur in real life, such as being harmed or poisoned. Apart from their delusion or delusions, people with delusional disorder may continue to socialize and function in a normal manner and their behavior does not necessarily seem odd. However, the preoccupation with delusional ideas can be disruptive to their overall lives.

For the diagnosis to be made, auditory and visual hallucinations cannot be prominent, though olfactory or tactile hallucinations related to the content of the delusion may be present. The delusions cannot be due to the effects of a drug, medication, or general medical condition, and delusional disorder cannot be diagnosed in an individual previously properly diagnosed with schizophrenia. A person with delusional disorder may be high functioning in daily life. Recent and comprehensive meta-analyses of scientific studies point to an association with a deterioration in aspects of IQ in psychotic patients, in particular perceptual reasoning, although, the between-group differences were small.

"For the diagnosis to be made, the delusions cannot be due to the effects of a drug?" That may disqualify Elon Musk, despite his endless weird claims.

On the other hand, does any of that sound like the current sitting president? For the record, "a person with delusional disorder may be high functioning in daily life," the leading authority says.

Where do these ruminations lead us? It's always possible that someone will end up "telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence." 

Imaginably, that could happen! But as we all understand, no one within our contemporary "mainstream press corps" will be telling any version of this story today.

There will be no attempt to explore the reasons for the kind of strange behavior the president unloosed last Saturday night—for the kinds of strange behavior, connected to various fixed beliefs, he has exhibited again and again since getting involved in politics.

We've long recommended empathy for people afflicted with clinical disorders—even "pity for the poor [metaphorical] immigrant." In the case of President Trump, we've even advised you to "pity the child," even as you try to limit the ability of the adult to cause societal harm.

Very few people will take that advice; we humans don't seem to be wired for that sort of behavior. We will remind you of what the sitting president's niece wrote about her powerful uncle in a recent best-selling book:

 A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy... 

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

The lady in question is a doctorate-holding clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her assessments are correct, though it may suggest that they could be.

Professor Quine believed that the number 2 is some type of "object." He thought that disagreements could arise as to whether "there are miles," whatever that could possibly mean.

Disorder is quite widespread within our human family. Is it a form of disorder when the men and women of our upper-end press agree not to ask the world's most obvious questions about our commander in chief?

Tomorrow: 2 + 2, the sitting president said

For extra credit only: While we're at it, what the heck does "ontic" mean?