The Hamlet Game: Madness, Strategy, or Both?

Iran may be the definitive test that will tell us what goes on inside Trump's mind

Image by Seedream 4.5

I don’t know what’s your impression, but mine is that the worries about Trump’s mental health are not just increasing, they are exploding. That might be just an impression, everyone of us lives in a bubble in which ideas bounce back and forth, and get reinforced by being repeated. So, I asked Grok to analyze the trends. And yes, the meme “Trump’s dementia” is growing through a typical feedback effect.

Yes, your impression aligns with observable patterns on X (formerly Twitter), where discussions and concerns about Donald Trump’s mental health — particularly terms like “dementia,” “cognitive decline,” “senile,” or “mental health” — appear frequently and consistently in recent posts. …. High-engagement posts (hundreds to thousands of likes/reposts) often tie into current events like press briefings, speeches, or policy claims, suggesting the topic resurfaces with triggers like visible gaffes or “low-energy” appearances. Web sources confirm this isn’t just anecdotal on X. …. based on recent media reports, expert analyses, and public polling, the volume and intensity of discussions about Donald Trump’s mental health on social platforms like X appear to be increasing rather than remaining merely steady. This uptick has been particularly noticeable since the start of his second term in January 2025, accelerating into late 2025 and early 2026 amid visible incidents like erratic speeches, social media rants, and health disclosures that have fueled speculation.

I would say that the situation is extremely worrisome. Some of the past reckless military adventures that Trump ordered or threatened to order can be explained in terms of a deception strategy. Trump, it might be, plays the Hamlet game. He feigns to be a madman, but he does have a plan.

About Venezuela, it makes sense that the US may want to have exclusive access to the Venezuelan oil fields to supplement its domestic declining production. About the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, it was a limited operation that made some sense in strategic terms. About Greenland, it is an easy military target that carries no risks of escalation and would put Trump among the presidents who added a star to the US flag.

But a massive attack on Iran? The risks are enormous; the whole thing could escalate out of control. And even if the attack were successful, what exactly would the US gain from destroying Iran? To say nothing about the suffering that it would inflict on the Iranian people, even without the use of nuclear weapons. What kind of deception strategy would that be?

The coming days will give us some kind of answer: if Trump backs down, maybe after having obtained some concessions from the Iranian government, then he may have been playing the Hamlet game. If bombs start falling on Tehran, instead, we’ll know that dementia now rules Trump’s mind.

Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe it is all a sophisticated 3D chess game played by entities we don’t even know exist. Maybe, although losing focus and sharpness, Trump still maintains a minimum of common sense. Maybe he is smarter than we think. Maybe he is really a modern version of Prince Hamlet.

But the thought that a demented person has the power to start a war that can kill millions, or even billions, of people is not the kind of thing that makes one sleep well at night. Are we sure that our democracy is such a good idea?

Democracy comes from ancient times, when nobody could imagine the combination of weapons capable of ending civilization, a media system that rewards screams over reasoning, and individual leaders with enormous destructive power and no checks that could stop them before using them. How did we end up in this situation? It is a system that’s designed for catastrophic failure.

Maybe we’ll escape alive, this time. But the Seneca Cliff awaits us if we don’t find a better way to manage things on this planet.