The Day Trump Finally Lost All Boundaries

There are appearances where even seasoned observers are no longer sure whether they are following a political speech or watching the free fall of a man who has long since lost all contact with reality. The day of the Saudi Investment Forum in Washington was exactly such a moment. Trump stood on the stage between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, billionaires, CEOs and investors, and sank into a series of sentences that sounded as if he urgently needed someone to tell him where up and down are.

He began with a claim that you would not take seriously even in a comedy show. His pollsters had told him that even if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rose together from the grave and ran against him as president and vice president, he would beat them "by 25 points." No irony, no distance. He meant it exactly as he said it. For Trump, history is malleable, reality is a tool, and in the end it is only about how magnificent he believes himself to be.

He then moved on to the next excursion into his private fantasy world. He called the Department of Homeland Security "stupid" because hundreds of South Korean workers at a battery plant had been arrested there. And he told this episode as if he had personally given the heroic order to stop the chaos: "I said: Stop it. Don't be stupid." No facts, no context. Only a self-staging that filled the room like a warm air bubble.

But the day reached its most bizarre moment when he spoke about Susie Wiles, his chief of staff and one of the most influential people in his apparatus. Trump declared that she was "the most powerful woman in the world" and could "destroy a country with a single phone call." The sentence was a mixture of megalomania and involuntary revelation. Because it showed above all how Trump thinks about power: not as responsibility, but as a threat. Wiles, born in 1957, active in politics for decades, works in a sober, organized, strategic manner. But in Trump's mind she becomes a Bond figure who can break nations apart, a reflection of his own fantasy of absolute control.

In between, he made a brief attempt at modesty that immediately collapsed. "I always want to be as modest as I can," he said, only to declare in the next sentence that his first nine months in office had been "the best nine months any president has ever had." It was the same old rhythm: a hint of humility followed by an avalanche of self-praise.

And it continued. Speaking about Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, he said he would "love to fire his ass." Powell had to be "fired" because interest rates were too high. For Trump, the Federal Reserve is not an independent institution but an annoying adversary that does not satisfy his whims. And his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said Trump, made only one mistake: he had not gotten the Fed under control.

Then came the grand number magic. In front of the gathered business elites he declared that Joe Biden had brought less than one trillion in investments into the country in four years, while he himself had secured "eighteen trillion" in nine months. The room clapped politely, perhaps puzzled, perhaps amused. No one in the room could take that number seriously. Yet Trump presented it as a great triumph. By the end of the year, he said, it would be "over twenty trillion." In his world, prosperity arises through the power of a sentence.

Finally, he announced that the United States had officially designated Saudi Arabia as an "important major non-NATO ally." He repeated several times how "big" this decision was. It was his self-appointed conclusion to a day on which he seemed to drift further with every sentence.

What remains is the impression of a presence that does not lead but staggers. A president who inserts historical figures into his stories as if they were extras in his personal film. Who elevates his closest staff members to all-powerful shadow rulers. Who invents economic numbers as if he could conjure them into existence through sheer willpower. And who sees himself in a role that has long had nothing to do with what exists outside his stage. It was not a political appearance. It was the revelation of a mental state that is becoming harder and harder to overlook. A man who does not show strength before an international audience, but breakdown. And a moment that made clear that his self-staging has long since become a substitute for any form of reality.