The image cutting through transatlantic capitals this week is that of a 79-year-old president unravelling in the small hours. Viewed from Washington, the spectacle of Donald Trump posting 18 messages on Truth Social in a single three-hour stretch shortly after midnight — calling for the resignation of the Senate minority leader and assailing a litany of political foes — has reignited a charged conversation about his psychological capacity to govern. According to US media accounts, the flurry of grievance and invective is being read less as a strategic communication tactic and more as a sign of a leader buckling under the weight of accumulated political crises, his focus fragmenting as tensions mount. The language of the 25th Amendment, once confined to hushed Washington speculation, has returned to the foreground; former CIA director John Brennan recently declared that the amendment had been drafted with Trump in mind, describing him as “clearly unbalanced.” Yet the procedural threshold for removing a sitting president remains forbiddingly high, and the outburst is, for now, a source of deepening anxiety rather than constitutional action.

Across the Atlantic, the same raw material is being processed through very different lenses, producing a debate that reveals as much about Europe’s own fractures as it does about the occupant of the Oval Office. From Geneva, the focus has shifted from the president’s mental state to the silence of those who could act. The suggestion that Trump may suffer from a long-standing narcissistic personality disorder, with signs of senile dementia now plausible in a man nearing eighty, is treated there as a distraction. To label him mad, the analysis runs, is to exonerate him too easily; the real problem is the complicity of the political and institutional actors who see a democracy being hollowed out from within yet choose reticence over intervention. In this reading, the erosion of democratic norms is being met not by a robust defence of the rule of law but by a dangerous passivity, a paradox that Italian commentators frame in constitutional terms: when a democratically elected leader subordinates the principles of the democracy he is meant to uphold to his personal will, the system is betrayed from its very summit.

Yet a blunt counter-narrative is gathering force, particularly in Milan and across parts of the Italian right. In this view, the endless talk-show diagnosis of Trump as “crazy” is an illusion that serves a convenient purpose: it allows European élites to ignore a failure that is entirely their own. The White House, these critics note, has been executing an explicit, predictable “America First” agenda from the start, one laid out in black and white for anyone prepared to read it. While Brussels and major continental governments bemoaned Trump’s capriciousness, they systematically dismantled critical industrial capacities — from refining and integrated defence to artificial intelligence, chemicals and biotechnology — and rigidly clung to fiscal rules, such as the Stability Pact, that were already being shredded by successive global shocks. To blame the psychology of one man is to evade the uncomfortable truth that Europe’s vulnerability is largely self-inflicted.

What emerges is a transatlantic conversation in which the very interpretation of Trump’s late-night behaviour has become a proxy for deeper strategic anxieties. Washington obsesses over a president’s fitness at a moment when institutional guardrails look frail; parts of Europe diagnose a democratic pathology while others point the finger back at the continent’s own strategic impotence. The forward-looking question is not whether Trump’s erratic habits will trigger a constitutional crisis, but rather whether the allies who still rely on American security can afford to pour their energies into pathologising his leadership while deferring a reckoning with their own decline. The shouting in the early hours may prove to be a sideshow; the silence that follows from Europe’s capitals could carry a far more lasting cost.