ARGUMENT
The Madness of King Donald
When people start asking questions
about a king's mental stability, the story usually doesn't end well for the
monarch.
BY RICHARD EVANS
ILLUSTRATION BY BRUCE EMMETT
JUNE 13, 2017
Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States,
has not been in office for very long, but already the contours and
characteristics of his rule have become clear. Rather than govern
conventionally, through officers of state appointed for their competence and
experience and with the agreement, however reluctant, of Congress, he has
chosen to gather round him an informal coterie of friends, advisors, and
relatives — many of them, like himself, without any experience of government at
all — while railing against the restrictions imposed on him by constitutional
arrangements such as the independence of the press and the judiciary.
Trump’s entourage resembles nothing more closely than the
court of a hereditary monarch, with informal structures of rule elbowing aside
more formal ones. Trump did, after all, win widespread support in the
electorate by promising precisely this: shaking up, bypassing or overthrowing
the Washington establishment and trying something new.
He may not be mad, but a growing number of commentators
allege that Trump is suffering from dementia, or is mentally subnormal, or is
suffering from a personality disorder of some kind.
The result, however, has been chaos and confusion,
contradiction and paralysis. It has become clear that the president of the
United States is someone who does not read his briefs; who does not take the
advice of experts in the intelligence field or indeed in any other; who fires
off brief statements without thinking whether they are consistent with his
administration’s declared policies; who is seemingly incapable of putting
together a coherent sentence with a subject, a verb, and an object; who is apt
to give away state secrets to a foreign power; and who seems to have no respect
either for the truth or for the Constitution (not least in respect of freedom
of religion and freedom of speech). He may not be mad, but a growing number of
commentators allege that Trump is suffering from dementia, or is mentally
subnormal, or is suffering from a personality disorder of some kind.
In a situation where a head of state is incapable of
carrying out his duties properly, what guidance can history offer us? The relevant
history isn’t so much the history of the presidency of the United States, where
no incumbent has ever been successfully removed from office by Congress, but
rather the history of incompetent — or allegedly incompetent — rulers at other
times and in other parts of the world.
What happens when a political elite concludes that the real
or titular head of state has to be deposed in the interests of the country as a
whole? Of course, given Trump’s leadership style, the pertinent question might
be narrowed down further: What happens when a monarch is judged as mentally
unfit to rule?
Francesco_Hayez_047 An 1840 portrait of Ferdinand I of
Austria by Francesco Hayez.
In modern times, just as further back in history, madness is
a slippery concept, hard to pin down unless there are obvious signs of
delusion, derangement, paranoia, or actual physical aggression.
But madness of that sort was far from uncommon in Europe’s
royal families, not least because of the inbreeding favored by their convention
that members of a royal family could not marry beneath their station. As Erik
Midelfort explains in his entertaining 1996 monograph Mad Princes of
Renaissance Germany, in 16th-century Germany nearly 30 dukes, landgraves, and
counts were regarded by their courts and ministers as mad enough to require
medical attention or removal from office. But what exactly was meant by “mad”?
Midelfort explains that advisors and family members spoke of “weakness, folly,
debility, and the condition of not being right,” or sometimes “furor, or
melancholy, or sickness” when they encountered princes who seemed to be
mentally unsuited to rule. The notion of clinical insanity or certifiable
madness is one that only became current in the 19th century.
In the early modern period, a few princes were clearly
completely deranged, like Don Julius Caesar d’Austria, son of Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolf II, who tortured his mistress to death and walked about for days
covered in her blood and brains, attacked his servants, destroyed his
furniture, tore up his clothing, babbled and roared nonsensically, and was
(allegedly) eventually strangled on his father’s orders in 1609. Some suffered
from delusions, like Duke Albrecht Friedrich of Prussia, who slept in his
clothes in case the Turks came for him in the night, poured his medicines on
the floor, spoke to people who were not present in the room, and threw a clock
at an envoy sent by Emperor Maximilian II. Relatives were appointed to carry
out the business of ruling, bypassing the unfortunate duke, who was left to
amuse himself with his collection of 100,000 coins while being subjected to a
variety of grotesque “cures” applied by rival schools of medicine.
More common, however, was “melancholy,” or, as we would put
it today, depression, sometimes attributed in the medieval or early period to
demonic influences.
More common, however, was “melancholy,” or, as we would put
it today, depression, sometimes attributed in the medieval or early period to
demonic influences. And debilitation from such melancholy — or through
paralysis or speech impediments caused by strokes, senility, dementia, and
other afflictions of old age — were typically dealt with by finding someone
else to rule without actually deposing the prince.
But not always. Consider the example of the 1848 revolutions
in Central Europe. The fact that the Austrian Empire’s ruler, Ferdinand I, was
barely capable of carrying out his duties had been known from the moment he
came to the throne, following the normal line of hereditary succession in the
House of Habsburg. Stories of his limited intellectual capacity were legion.
When he was told one day that he could not have apricot dumplings because they
were out of season, he lost his temper. “I’m the emperor,” he shouted at his
cook, “and I want dumplings!” The offspring of double first cousins — his
parents, in other words, shared all four grandparents — he was slow to learn to
read and write, subject to epileptic fits, had a speech impediment, and was
clearly incapable of carrying out his imperial duties. When he came to the
throne in 1835, the country’s leading statesman, Prince Klemens von Metternich,
ensured that the business of the emperor was carried out by a council
consisting of himself, another politician, and the emperor’s uncle, Archduke
Louis.
But this situation could not stave off the revolution that
came in 1848. As the crowds marched toward the imperial palace in Vienna,
Ferdinand summoned Metternich and asked “what are all those people doing there,
then?” “They are making a revolution,” Metternich replied. “What, are they
allowed to do that?” Ferdinand asked in astonishment. Not surprisingly, as the
revolution took a grip, he was persuaded by his family to abdicate in favor of
his 18-year-old nephew, who became Franz Joseph I. (The Habsburgs were always
optimists, but there never was a Ferdinand II or a Franz Joseph II.) As Franz
Joseph was defeated by Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian armies in the war of 1866,
Ferdinand had the last laugh. “I don’t know why they appointed Franz Joseph,”
he is said to have remarked: “I could have been just as good at losing
battles.”
The Habsburg Empire in the mid-19th century was in a
desperate situation requiring desperate remedies, which is why the hapless
Ferdinand accepted his deposition, if with great reluctance. In the case of
monarchical incapacity, deposition was seldom resorted to because a general
belief in the divine right of kings got in the way. If God had put the monarch
on the throne — and the belief was a central part of monarchical legitimacy —
then only God could remove him; mere humans had no right to. So, in more normal
times, when the political structure as a whole was not under threat, abdication
was typically avoided.
It was usual instead to appoint a regent to take care of
royal business when the monarch became incapacitated, as for example during the
few weeks in 1878 when the German Kaiser Wilhelm I was recovering from a nearly
successful assassination attempt. Regents assumed all the powers of the monarch,
just not the title of king.
The prince regent, who later became King George IV on his
father’s death, was not exactly a model monarch either: Addicted to opium, a
heavy drinker, and a gluttonous eater, he weighed 245 pounds and had a 50-inch
waistline.
The most famous appointment of a regent was to King George
III, after he began talking to trees and speaking continuously to nobody in
particular for hours on end in the early 19th century. In a rare moment of
lucidity, he agreed he was no longer capable of ruling, and in 1811 conceded
the appointment by act of Parliament of his eldest son George as prince regent.
The prince regent, who later became King George IV on his father’s death, was
not exactly a model monarch either: Addicted to opium, a heavy drinker, and a
gluttonous eater, he weighed 245 pounds and had a 50-inch waistline. His
extravagance and drunkenness made him unpopular, and his brother William IV,
who succeeded him in 1830 at the age of 64, the oldest person to come to the
throne so far, was accustomed to wander the streets off on his own, going up to
ordinary citizens to speak to them (“I’m the king, you know”). The courtier and
diarist Charles Greville declared that William IV “made a number of speeches,
so ridiculous and nonsensical, beyond all belief but to those who heard them,
rambling from one subject to another, repeating the same thing over and over
again, and altogether such a mass of confusion, trash, and imbecility as made
one laugh and blush at the same time.” Greville thought the king was mad, and
indeed the monarch was known as “Silly Billy” by the populace at large.
But the British monarchy of the early 19th century, for all
the weaknesses of its incumbents, survived because by this stage of history the
kings and queens of England had very little real power. Over time, leading
politicians became less hesitant to transgress alleged monarchial power that
was no longer extant. It was not long before the idea of a regency fell
entirely out of favor in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. When a British
monarch transgressed the largely unwritten rules of the job, as King Edward
VIII did in 1936 by declaring his intention of marrying an American divorcée,
Wallis Simpson, the politicians had little difficulty in simply removing him
from the throne. Europe’s last enactment of a regency was in the case of King
Otto of Bavaria, younger brother of the eccentric Ludwig II, builder of the
fairy castles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau. On Ludwig’s unexplained and
sudden death, Otto succeeded to the throne, but succumbed rapidly to a deep and
incurable depression, probably caused by syphilis (he was paralyzed during the
final period of his life). A prince regent, Otto’s uncle Luitpold, took over
for Otto, ruling from 1886 to 1912, followed by a cousin, Ludwig, who quickly
got the Bavarian parliament to depose Otto and declare himself king.
In a situation such as this, the royal family’s role was at
least as important as that of the political elite. Both had a strong interest
in ensuring the business of government was carried on in the usual way, just
not by the existing monarch. The most favored way of removing from office a
monarch who has shown himself to be unfit to rule has indeed in modern times
been abdication at the behest of leading politicians, usually with the support
of the royal family. After the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz was deposed by his
ministers because of incompetence, his chosen successor, his nephew Murad V,
threw himself into a pool in the palace gardens, shouting to the guards to save
him from assassination, and was reported to have vomited continuously for a day
and a night in sheer terror. He had reason to be frightened: Within a few days
it was implausibly reported that Abdulaziz had committed suicide by cutting
both his wrists simultaneously with a pair of scissors. Within a few months,
Murad was deposed by a coalition of family members and government ministers
amid allegations of paranoia and schizophrenia, and imprisoned for the rest of
his life. (Two assassinations of Ottoman sultans in a single year would have
aroused too many public suspicions.) The young man was probably glad to be
relieved of the burdens and cares of royal office.
What would happen if a monarch does not cooperate with
political elites who consider him deranged? In that case, removal by force
becomes an option, though sometimes it can only be effected through the
intervention of a foreign power. This is what occurred to the self-styled
Emperor Bokassa of what is now the Central African Republic in 1979. Bokassa
had himself come to power in a military coup, and almost immediately dissolved
the national assembly and banned all political parties except his own. Until
that point, his career was similar to that of any other tin-pot dictator.
His extravagant pseudo-Napoleonic display and absurd,
self-awarded titles earned him the mockery of the rest of the world, but there
was a darker side to his rule: He arrested, tortured and personally murdered
many of his opponents.
But he soon began to show signs of megalomania. In 1976, he
had himself crowned emperor, in a lavish ceremony that cost a third of his
impoverished country’s annual budget. His extravagant pseudo-Napoleonic display
and absurd, self-awarded titles earned him the mockery of the rest of the
world, but there was a darker side to his rule: He arrested, tortured and
personally murdered many of his opponents. He killed a number of schoolchildren
who had thrown rocks at his car in protest against their families being forced
to buy expensive school uniforms with a picture of his head on them from a firm
owned by one of his many wives.
What may have done him in were the lurid allegations that he
had eaten the bodies of some of his victims — or, more specifically, that he
had them cooked and served up to the visiting president of France, Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing. Afterward, in 1986, he was deposed and arrested by a
military expedition sent by France to restore order in its former colony, and
then put on trial in the Central African Republic. Found guilty on charges of
murder and many other offenses (though not including cannibalism), he was
sentenced to life imprisonment but subsequently released on amnesty in 1993.
Meanwhile, his mental state deteriorated still further until within a few years
he was claiming to be the 13th apostle of Christ.
Emperor Bokassa’s power was not only real, it was absolute,
and in general it is a fairly obvious point that the more actual political
power a monarch possesses, the more difficult he is to remove through legal
means, and the more likely it is, therefore, that he will be coerced into
abdicating, whether by his own subjects, or by outsiders.
If we look back beyond the 19th and 20th centuries to more
remote periods of history, we encounter many such examples. One of very few
monarchs to have earned madness as a title, the 16th-century Spanish Queen
Juana la Loca, was dealt with by being forcibly confined to a nunnery. An
earlier insane monarch, Charles the Mad of France, was not actually deposed,
but after he murdered several of his entourage without warning in 1392 he was
pushed aside by his wife and his closest male relatives and completely excluded
from power. This was just as well, since his madness grew more pronounced and
manifested itself in disagreeable episodes such as his refusal to wash or change
his clothes for several months in 1405.
History is littered with scores, even hundreds of examples
of coups d’état, revolutions, rebellions and revolts, assassinations, murders,
and other ways of overthrowing a monarch, including imprisonment and
banishment. But more often than not, such incidents are political in nature:
the outcome of intense rivalries of one kind or another, from family feuds to
ideological upheavals.
Constitutional systems have the great advantage of
channeling such rivalries into legal provisions that are almost always already
in place providing for the dismissal, impeachment, or prosecution of
politicians. American legal scholars have argued, for instance, that the 25th
Amendment of the United States Constitution, which allows for the removal of a
president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” would
apply in the instance of mental debilitation.
But a note of caution is required. Donald Trump has proven
unwilling to play by the rules or respect the constitution of the country that
elected them. But that isn’t necessarily proof of insanity; it may just be a
demonstration of his commitment to populism, which consists in showing
precisely such disrespect to convention.
Populists’ contempt for the rules and conventions of
politics generally gets them into trouble if ever they succeed in assuming
power. A case in point is the Hamburg judge Ronald Schill, whose upstart
right-wing party won 20 percent of the vote in state elections in 2001 and
entered a coalition government with the moderate-conservative Christian
Democrats. Schill announced he would cut crime by 50 percent, called for the
legalization of cannabis, demanded that sex offenders be castrated, and urged
the use of poison gas to paralyze hostage-takers (not a tactful suggestion in
postwar Germany). Parents who did not bring up their children the “right way”
should be jailed, he said. After denouncing German politicians in general for
incompetence, he was removed from office, his electoral support collapsed, and
he fled to South America, where he was secretly filmed by a German tabloid
newspaper snorting cocaine.
Schill was not insane, he was merely incapable of following
the rules of German politics. Like other populists, he had gained support
because he promised not to play by the rules. But the rules are usually there
for good reason — for example, to prevent nepotism (appointing family members
as government officials and advisors), to stop corruption (using office for
private gain), or to ensure a reasonable measure of consistency and
responsibility in the formulation and announcement of policy. If a government
is run by someone who ignores these rules, it rapidly loses in coherence and
influence, both at home and abroad. It is inevitable in such situations that
others in the government will ask themselves what can be done to protect it.
The only formal and legal way of removing President Trump
and restoring strong and stable government is by impeachment. But as with many
other aspects of the 18th-century Constitution by which the United States is still
governed, this may prove a long, complicated, and difficult process. Republican
members of Congress are understandably reluctant to spend many months removing
a Republican president. And in the end, an attempt at impeachment may not
succeed.
If Trump rules through what is in effect the modern American
equivalent of a royal court, then perhaps it is the courtiers, as in so many
examples from history, together with his family, who might have to get together
and remove him, or at the very least, neutralize him.
But that still leaves other options. If Trump rules through
what is in effect the modern American equivalent of a royal court, then perhaps
it is the courtiers, as in so many examples from history, together with his
family, who might have to get together and remove him, or at the very least,
neutralize him. The incoherence and inconsistency of his tweets and his
speeches (unless they are written for him in advance and unless he sticks
rigidly to the text) has prompted speculation that this has happened already.
Only a few weeks into his presidency, Steve Bannon was being
described by many journalists as “President Bannon.” Now that he himself seems
to have been sidelined, it looks increasingly as if Trump’s family, with Jared
Kushner and Ivanka Trump alternating at the fore, is beginning to take over the
show. If Americans prove incapable of deposing their debilitated president,
they may soon earn the mild relief of one, or more, informally appointed
American regents.
Richard Evans is a British historian of 20th-century Europe
with a focus on Germany and World War II. His latest book is, “The Pursuit of
Power: Europe 1815-1914." (@richardevans36)
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