ESSAY
History is complete with examples of world leaders who suffered severe mental decline during their rule, much to the detriment of their people, country, and millions of others. Britain’s mad King George III, who fumbled away the American colonies, comes readily to mind. And the obscenely cruel Caligula, who repeatedly issued bizarre military orders until his assassination in 41 AD. Then there’s Josef Stalin, whose swelling paranoia led him to dismiss or execute scores of officials and generals, including those warning of a secret Nazi plan to invade Russia. It’s amazing the USSR survived, however badly, until its collapse from decades of insanely communist misrule in 1991.
Close to home, the mental decline of Woodrow Wilson altered the course of history. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil details how the ailing president sabotaged the Versailles peace treaty and his own dream for a League of Nations when he couldn’t get fellow Democrats to go along with a provision on collective defense, a vacuum that led to the allies’ overly severe demands for reparations from Germany, thus opening the path to World War II. John Maynard Keynes, the budding economist and British delegate to the peace conference, later commented, “Wilson effectively killed his own baby, prompting many close observers to wonder whether he had gone mad.”
And then there’s Joe Biden, whose foggy syntax and memory loss were on full, ruinous display in that 2024 campaign debate with Donald Trump. That changed history. The faltering octogenarian’s stubborn, irrational refusal to give way to a younger successor until it was too late effectively ceded the election to an extreme narcissist who had already, in his first term, demonstrated his low impulse control, financial grifts and disdain for American alliances and institutions (even including, it would turn out, the White House East Wing).
But there have been many less well known others whose slow motion crackups led to the weakening, or even destruction, of their countries. For me, the one that most closely resembles what we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic outbursts, personal insults, middle-of-the-night social media postings, and policy reversals—not to mention his penchant for dozing off during televised White House meetings—is Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ignited World War I and presided over Germany’s descent into postwar misery and chaos. A look at the Kaiser’s spiral into madness offers a handy, if unscientific measuring stick for what we’re seeing in Washington today.
