Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“You know what November 5 was? It was the election of a president that loves you.”

– Donald Trump to applause and cheers from soldiers at Fort Bragg, June, 2025

President Richard Nixon told chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Nixon believed that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought an end to the Korean War, and Nixon suggested using nuclear weapons to bail out the French in Vietnam in 1954. Nixon defended the principle of threatening maximum force. He called it the “mad man theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe..I might do anything to stop the war.”

Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to stop the Vietnam War, introduced the theory in his lectures in 1959 to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar on the political use of irrational military threats. Ellsberg, a Cold Warrior in the 1950s, called the theory the “political uses of madness,” arguing that any extreme threat could be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived as being not fully rational. He believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool.

Speaking of mad men, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell gloated on June 11, 2025 that “There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq.”

A day earlier, Donald Trump told a military audience at Fort Bragg that Marines were needed in Los Angeles to deal........

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