When the crazy comes calling: How did everything go so mad?
Saturday, 18 April 2026
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular opinion contributor. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.
OPINION: This is batshit crazy.
A smiling DoorDash courier hands President Donald Trump his Maccas order at the door to the Oval Office, while Trump explains that the AI picture of himself as Jesus was “me as a doctor”.
If my doctor dressed in flowing robes and floated towards me clutching a glowing orb, I would see a doctor. Not that one, though.
Potus Almighty went missing from a maniacal autocrat’s war in Europe, then, threatened to invade Greenland, tariffed everyone and called them cowards for not supporting his illegal war of choice.
He picked a fight with the Pope, threatened to destroy a civilisation, babbled about opening the “f…in’ Strait you crazy bastards” and, weirdest of all, sent J D Vance to stump in Hungary like it was a Midwestern swing state.
It’s not just the deranged, nonce-adjacent narcissist in the White House. The oddballs are all over: Argentina, North Korea, Russia.
The obvious point is that it’s mad. Crazy. Bananas. The harder point is: how does he still have 80% approval ratings among Republicans?
And the harder point still: how did it all get so mad?
Read more:
Rationing is irrational - don’t let bureaucrats decide who gets petrol
A lesson at Easter: The experts may be right, but sometimes faith wins over facts
First, turning away from carnage is natural, like putting a bill you can’t pay in the drawer and pretending it doesn’t exist. Data point: 78% of us are wilfully trying to ignore the news. Hey, come back, this is commentary, not news!
The greatest danger is not only aggression itself, but the world's gradual adaptation to it, as chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said. “Each tolerated violation becomes a precedent for the next.”
I see it in aid workers operating in war zones, violence all around. One colleague forgot to report being shot at. ”But he missed.”
We get used to anything, if we let it.
Second, here at least, we feel powerless. Small, a long way from the shooting. We are takers not market-makers in the great global game.
Third, the firehose of outrage is part of the strategy. “Shock and awe” was coined in the nineties to describe a military strategy of whacking opponents so hard and suddenly they are dazed and paralysed.
It has more success as a political strategy than a military one. No one can remember Monday’s corruption scandal, after Tuesday’s blasphemy, Wednesday’s bigotry and Thursday’s threat.
Fourth, the dirty trick of autocracy is the calculus: standing up to bullies is costly. Trump’s former allies who abandoned him have been harassed. Shonky charges in court, houses searched by the FBI.
But go along with the corruption and you might get enough loyalty points for a kitchen appliance. It won’t be 6 cents off your petrol though.
Ask Saudi or the UAE. They placed big bets on Trump, gave him a plane, bribed his family, and now they’re getting bombed.
But the fifth reason is the most painful of all: Hungary shows you can fight back. The world hasn’t. It has tried to live with the crazy instead of making a red-blooded defence of the good.
At a United Nations function recently, a UN flunky was asked how she could defend an institution that had failed to muster a muscular response to atrocities in Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran.
“The UN is a wonderful institution,” she stumbled.
What she should have done is admit the failure but defend the astonishing values that led to the post-war liberal institutions; the rights of sovereign states not to be invaded, the emancipation of slaves, women’s equality, racial equality, the right to live free of violence and prejudice.
When we were the populists, liberals won.
People assume the great political fight of the 20th century was between communism and capitalism, and capitalism won. But as the political scientist Sheri Berman points out, it was social democracy that won.
The mixture of the welfare state and markets won nearly everywhere, even in the United States, and governed successfully and transformatively.
Instead of standing up for that, the activist left these days is throwing tomato soup at van Gogh paintings.
But even worse, instead of campaigning on the platform that has always won before, now they try to fight crazy by being careful not to offend.
So really, how does the crazy happen? It happens because countries did exactly what Labour is doing here.
You become so pickled in careful, so bloodless, stuck in dogma irrelevant to real needs, that people who want something different and better have nowhere to turn.
It happened in the UK, which is how they got the Brexit disaster that is tearing the country apart a decade on. It’s how Starmer’s Labour went from a landslide to fourth and the people have turned to the crazy Trump-loving Reform.
It happened in Europe, where social democratic parties are going out of existence.
You don’t beat crazy by being even more crazy, but you also don’t beat it by being bland like a bread roll, hoping to drift into office.
Keep doing that, and don’t be surprised if the crazy comes calling.