Madness in Power

The real question is not how history will judge mad leaders, it will be harsh, but how harshly it will judge those of us who watched, explained, excused, and waited.

Illustration by Mika Horelli & AI

By Mika Horelli

It is tempting to imagine that our era is unique. But power in the hands of the unhinged is an old story. Trump and Putin are not aberrations: they stand in a long tradition of rulers whose erratic minds defined whole nations. The question is not whether they will be judged as such, but why we keep repeating the same mistake. Living in a small country (Belgium), and coming from an even smaller one (Finland), it is frightening to watch how world politics is led by people who, without the protection of their office, would be diagnosed as mentally ill.

The Romans gave us one of the clearest examples: Caligula, who ruled for only four years in the first century. Contemporary accounts describe a man intoxicated with cruelty, prone to hallucinations, who declared himself divine and ordered senators to prostrate themselves bef…