"DELUSIONAL?" Regina George, but also a Karen!

FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2025

This may be all we have: At 11 o'clock last night, Stephanie Ruhle got the last shot at explaining what had happened.

LET'S GET SMARTER, her chyron said, as she introduced her panel. 

Her chyron offers that fatuous invitation every night. Last night, Jessica Yellin was soon offering this:

YELLIN (6/5/25): There's a lot of dispute in Silicon Valley and in the tech world right now about what's really driving this by Elon Musk. And—so the folks I'm  talking to, some of them think it's just, "He's Space Karen. He's basically—"

RUHLE (laughing): Whoa whoa whoa! He's Space Karen?

YELLIN:  That's the saying, yes. He's Regina George, you know, releasing the burn book, right? It's just a meltdown.

Commandante Musk is "Space Karen." He's a Regina George.

Full disclosure! We were saddened by the first reference on the basis of sexual politics. We didn't get the second reference, so we looked it up:

Regina George (Mean Girls)

Regina George is the main antagonist of the 2004 film Mean Girls. She is portrayed by Rachel McAdams in the film, Taylor Louderman in its Broadway musical version, and Reneé Rapp as the Broadway replacement and in the 2024 film adaptation of the musical. 

A queen bee, Regina is a bully and leader of a social clique called The Plastics at the fictional North Shore High School. Regina garnered positive reviews of her character upon release. In subsequent years, Regina has been described as a cultural icon. She has frequently appeared in popular meme templates online and is often referenced in political commentary, particularly in reference to American politician Donald Trump.

Normally, it's Trump who gets fashioned as Regina George! In this instance, it's Musk who was Regina George, though he was also a Karen.

So it tends to go in our cogitations. That's even true in our own Blue America, in this admittedly brightest of all possible worlds.

By the end of the segment, Ruhle and her panel had struggled to build a framework around the meltdown which had occurred. 

They struggled to explain what had happened. As she ended the segment, Ruhle now offered this:

RUHLE: When we return [performatively exhales], how this very public feud could put America's national security at risk. We're laughing about Regina George. It is so much more serious than that.

It's true! They had been laughing about Regina George. For better or worse, this is the culture we've chosen.

What had happened yesterday as the brawl occurred? For ourselves, we'd start by saying this:

There he went again! During yesterday's Oval Office session with German Chancellor Merz, he advanced his favorite claim, two separate times, saying that the 2020 election was "rigged."

(Regarding the war in Ukraine: "That's something that would have never happened if I were president. The election was rigged, I didn't get to be president, but I got to be president now.")

Inevitably, he said it again—the 2020 election was stolen. 

He never stops making the inflammatory claim—and this conduct has been thoroughly normalized. No one asks him why he says it, or what his evidence might be.

Why in the world does President Trump keep making that inflammatory statement? Over here in Blue America, our journalists have agreed that they mustn't ask.

Messengers on the Fox News Channel don't even bother with that silly pretense any more. That said, the American president keeps making the claim, and no one seems inclined to wonder why he insists on doing that.

Is something "wrong" with President Trump? That strikes us as one of the world's most obvious questions. 

We've asked it again and again and again, but no journalist is going to follow suit. Also, could something possibly be "wrong" with Elon Musk? Or is he just a Karen (insert chuckling)? Is he just a Regina George?

Among the various lunatic claims which relentlessly drive the American discourse, Trump and Musk teamed to create a world-class crackpot confection. With apologies, but under the circumstances, we're going to show you the transcript once again:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (3/4/25): We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.  Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.

It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119.  I don’t know any of them.  I know some people that are rather elderly, but not quite that elderly.  

(LAUGHTER) 

3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129.  3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139.

3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now. 

In fact, Pam [Bondi], good luck.  Good luck.  You’re going to find it.

But a lot of money is paid out to people because it just keeps getting paid and paid, and nobody does—and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country.

1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159.  And over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.  

We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby [Kennedy Jr.]. 

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age—

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Joe Biden!  

(LAUGHTER)

THE PRESIDENT: —more than 100 years older than our country. 

President Trump and Warlord Musk joined forces to create that confection. The president made that endless presentation during an annual joint session of Congress, before a national audience.

Everyone knows that his lengthy presentation made no sense. But no one within Blue America's mainstream press is ever going to swallow hard and ask him why he said it.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Is it possible that something is clinically wrong? 

Is something—perhaps including the undiscussed ketamine use—actually wrong with Musk?

By now, these are the world's most obvious questions. That said, people like Ruhle and her panelists are never going to explore those questions, even as we're told, in a nightly branding hook, that they're helping us Blues GET SMARTER.

Full disclosure! No one wants to talk about "mental disorder" (mental illness) because, despite our known intellectual greatness, we tend to regard any such diagnosis as some sort of insult. 

We don't regard physical illness that way, but that unmistakably is the way we think about mental "disorder." Also, the mainstream press corps has a rule which stretches back many years. 

(That rule is only disregarded when doing so involves no danger for the press.)

Is something wrong with President Trump? Why does he keep saying that the 2020 election was stolen? What was he thinking when he went before the Congress, and before the nation, and made the lunatic presentation in which upwards of twenty million people—ages 150 and up—were still receiving Social Security checks?

Is it possible that the president actually believes such claims? Is he simply lying when he says such things, or is it possibly that he believes his statements?

Also, what was he thinking, just last weekend, when he reposted a claim which said that President Biden was executed in 2020 and was replaced with a clone? What could the president have been thinking when he reposted that? In what world can a president say that and every journalist agrees to say this:

Nothing to look at here! Just keep moving along!

Why would this powerful man behave in some baldly peculiar ways? Even as they help us GET SMARTER, people like Ruhle are going to chuckle about Karens and Regina George, and they plainly aren't going to ask.

In Wednesday's report, we showed you the outlines of some contemporary medical science. We posted several overviews concerning the role that (clinical) delusion can play in human life.

We showed you several overviews. When we showed you what we're reposting here, we asked another obvious question:

Does anything here possibly sound a bit like President Trump?

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." 

Does any of that sound like someone you know? On Wednesday, we posted additional overviews, but for today, let's restrict ourselves to that.

Friend, do you want to stick to "the Goldwater Rule" as it's been extended to journalists? We can only tell you this:

It seems to us that there's no way to discuss the endless strange behaviors of President Trump without interviewing (carefully selected) specialists in the field of "abnormal psychology." Absent some such investigation, we're thrown back on the simpering work in which we deliciously chuckle about Space Karens and Regina George. 

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that's a human tragedy, as such things always are. 

That said, it could also constitute a dangerous state of affairs. As we've noted again and again, here's what one clinical psychologist said in 2020:

The fact is, [President Trump'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.

That's what the clinical psychologist said. In this most intelligent of all possible worlds, Blue America's best and brightest prefer to chuckle about the latest Karen.

One last point:

Little help will be coming from academia's highest peaks. In Wednesday's report, we also journeyed to the distant land where our greatest logicians have been sequestered over these many long years:

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.

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

Also, "Philosophy and the special sciences afford infinite scope for disagreement" concerning some such assertion?

No help has come, or will be coming, from these cosseted scholars. We're on this darkling plain by ourselves, and we may not be up to the current challenge.

Is something wrong with President Trump? He hatched that lunacy about Social Security with the help of Elon Musk. 

Could something also be wrong with him? In his case, it might be the ketamine talking. That said, our journalists in Blue America aren't even willing to talk about that!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans never were "the rational animal" in the way we've long imagined. Our actual makeup differs from that. 

Is it possible that President Trump is (clinically) "delusional?" If so, that's a human tragedy, but our "journalists" have agreed not to ask!

This afternoon or tomorrow: We point to one key word in the passage posted above:

"Persecutory delusions are a condition in which the affected person wrongly believes that they are being persecuted."

In which a person wrongly believes? How wrong are this president's apparent beliefs about his alleged persecution?