The key to getting free from the utterly insane world of Donald Trump, and those making lots of money from the lunacy, can be found in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Apr 29, 2026
(Jack Nicholson (l.) playing Randall Patrick McMurphy, and Will Sampson, as Chief Bromden, in the 1975 film version of Ken Kesey’s story “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”)
For years now, some of us have been asking how long the lunatic, chaotic, erratic, fanatical, pathological and dangerous behavior of Donald Trump can go on. Is he really this crazy, or just acting this way to keep others off balance and increase his power? What about the possibility that he is both: diabolically sane, and insane simultaneously, and the difference between the two behaviors is no longer distinguishable, even to him?
In Ken Kesey’s seminal work about insanity, control, compliance and rebellion within the world of a lunatic asylum, One Flew Over the CuKoo’s Nest, such dynamics are ever-present between Nurse Ratched who exercises authoritarian control over the Psych Ward, Randle Patrick McMurphy who wrestles her for power, control and dignity, and the narrator, Chief Bromden, a Native American , and the longest tenured resident of the ward.
Trump is the Nurse Ratched (Wretched?) of our nationwide asylum in which he has bullied and badgered all inhabitants into questioning their own sanity, not his, even though he may be more pathological and removed from reality than everyone else.
“You know it, and I know it,” Trump repeatedly bellows into the minds of people who neither know, nor believe he knows any such thing. It’s Trump’s hypnotic mantra of social control, implying that if you don’t know it, something is wrong with you, and since he knows it, and he’s famous and on television and a model of “American success,” it must be you who is wrong—or, as Nurse Ratched would phrase it, acutely insane.
Until recently—when Trump has gone utterly bonkers over sea shells in the sand; over the looks of Jim Comey and the laughter Jimmy Kimmel; over his gilded cage of a ballroom that keeps slip sliding away; over his Reich-like Renaissance Arch designed to cast a dark, demonic shadow over the graves of legitimate heroes of democracy; over a Pope who simply and faithfully preaches the Gospel of Jesus and exemplifies love over hate; over his waging of a daily war of terror against humans pursing a safe, peaceful life; over his transforming the US into an Apartheid state, like Israel, and, over the awful arming and executing a grotesque genocide against non-white populations in Gaza, Lebanon, and anywhere else around the world, I believed that much of his early insanity was calculated, and compared Trump’s behavior to that of one of his New York Mobster role-models, Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante.
New York Mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the power behind the Genovese Crime Family during the 1980’s and 1990’s, avoided prosecution for decades by pretending to be “crazy.”
Nicknamed “The Oddfather,” Gigante took rambling street strolls in pajamas, a terrycloth robe and slippers around Greenwich Village, where he lived in a small apartment with his mother, who, in a screeching Stephen Miller-like defense of her son, insisted the only thing he was “boss” of was the bathroom. Whatever worked to keep The Chin out of the clink.
The Chin’s “elaborate deception” — as Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson described Gigante’s behavior in declaring him mentally competent to stand trial in the 1990’s — kept him out of jail for years, and the wealthy & powerful Mob boss manufactured reams of purchased doctors’ notes attesting to his lunacy; hypocritical notes in violation of doctors’ Hippocratic Oaths, like the ones Trump paid for, to get doctors to see bone spurs, and continue the Trump family’s cowardly tradition of actively dodging military service, like his grandfather Frederich, stripped of his German citizenship for failure to serve his country. Instead, Trump’s family role-model fled to the US and Canada, during the Gold Rush, where he operated a gold-lame decorated brothel (Oval Office inspiration?), the earliest know version of Epstein’s Island.
Who’s crazy now?
“The Chin’s” phalanx of paid psychiatrists missed a few salient facts: Gigante’s slipping out at night, dressed in normal clothing, to be with his girlfriend on the Upper East Side; Gigante ordering a hit on John Gotti, head of the rival Gambino Crime Family because he felt Gotti broke the Mob’s rules with the “unsanctioned” murder of Paul Castellano; Gigante ordering his underlings never to mention his name in conversations, but simply point to their “chins” when referencing him; and Gigante gingerly extorting payoffs from vendors and pocketing money donated to a neighborhood church during New York’s Annual Feast of San Gennaro. It all sounds very Trump-like.
In a weird way, Trump’s life of duplicity, deceit and Drag, was far more poisonous, if not as graphically violent—as far as we know— as the life of “Vinnie the Chin.” The “Chin” concocted his entire charade to keep his competition and the cops off balance AND to stay out of jail. Instead of executing other Mobsters, Trump goals were far grander: to kill the truth, and erase facts, history and humanity; to enrich himself beyond his grandfather’s—and father’s—wildest dreams; to take control of the culture; to place himself outside of the law, of everyday life and of any accountability for his actions; to use racial hatred or phony patriotism, or Elmer Gantry-like religious con-jobbery and his own, perverse obsession with celebrity (and America’s) to create a whole new universe, which he alone ruled.
In short, Trump worked relentlessly to craft the world as his own Jabba the Hut’s throne room, with himself pulling the chains of women and young girls, and to turn the country into the kind of mental asylum, which Nurse Ratched ruled. And, like Nurse Ratched or “Vinnie The Chin,” Trump needed to eliminate any challenge to his absolute control, or anyone who stood in his way.
Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest (either the 1962 novel, the 1963 Broadway Play starring Kirk Douglas who immediately bought the movie rights, or the 1975 movie starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Milos Forman) is incredibly instructive here, during this heightened period of society-encompassing insanity.
Nurse Ratched (Trump) exercises diabolical control over the 18 men in her Psych Ward by belittling each, and constantly setting off each against the other. Perhaps the most insightful scene takes place during the first Group Therapy Session experienced by the story’s protagonist, Randle Patrick McMurphy, who compared what Ratched (Wretched) did to her subjects as her getting them to peck each other to death, like chickens:
“ The flock gets a sight of a spot of blood on some chicken, and they all go to pecking’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually, a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more get spots and get pecked to death, and more and more…”
And each time this occurs, it’s Nurse Ratched, who rules the roost with an iron fist, who draws the first drops of blood. She saves her fiercest venom—electric shock therapy and, eventually, lobotomization (in Trump’s case, he weaponizes the Justice Department, or unleashes vitriolic attacks on social media) for whom she (he) perceives to be the greatest threat to her continued reign of terror, or power. In the Psych Ward which the Wretched Ratched rules, that clear threat is McMurphy, a criminal con-man not insane at all, who sees right through her curtain of cruelty.
One of the key characters in Cuckoo’s Nest, Dale Harding, a closeted gay man who chose voluntary institutionalization over living in the real world (similar to Trump’s toadying Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) who constantly kowtows to Nurse Ratchet for fear of retribution, makes a key observation about the struggle for power and dominance:
“Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power; POWER. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become.”
What’s left hanging out there is the question of self-control: what happens when the insane “actor” stops acting for effect and advantage, and slips into being utterly uncorked every hour of every day? What happens when he, or she, can no longer tell the difference, nor control it?
How is Nurse Ratched, (Trump Wretched) sane when she (he) orders a lobotomy ( or its’ equivalent, criminal prosecution, incarceration, reputational destruction) on her (or his) perceived enemies? Who is acting more pathological? More insane?
Kesey leaves no doubt in Cuckoo’s Nest, that the only “sane” response to the Wretched Ratched’s “insane” world was the unrelenting rebellion of McMurphy’s or the profoundly powerful escape of Chief Bromden, the powerful Native American, incarcerated in a mental institution for the last 10 years, simply because he was different, and misunderstood.
If the insanity is called out , if it’s no longer pumped up for fun, obscene profit or the comfort of predictability, then the insane world is challenged and shattered—like the huge glass window of the asylum smashed to smithereens by Chief Bromdem. Only then, are peace and sanity able to return, as least for some of us.