This is the third in a series of posts about how we can draw parallels between stories and what we’re seeing play out in politics in the U.S.

Below, you’ll find a list of novels, film adaptations, and plays that show four types of mental decline in leaders—some fictional, some real—and it’s easy, I think, to make connections to the current administration.

Please watch my video on the subject, where I go into these four types more in depth, and also take a look at my Redemption canon and villain canon posts. Accompanying video links can be found in each.

THE PARANOID FORTRESS

• Macbeth — Shakespeare (play, 1606). The foundational text. Power obtained through violence generates a paranoia that becomes self-fulfilling. He starts purging. The purges confirm the threat. The loop closes.
• Richard III — Shakespeare (play, 1593). Paranoia as founding condition, not late development. He never trusted anyone; by the end he’s sleeping badly and seeing ghosts.
• The Death of Stalin — Armando Iannucci (film, 2017). Based on the French graphic novel. Extremely close to historical record. Stalin’s inner circle paralyzed by fear of naming his stroke because no one wanted to be the person who called it. The system of terror had eaten the system of governance.
• Downfall (Der Untergang) — Oliver Hirschbiegel (film, 2004). Hitler’s final days in the bunker. Based directly on the memoir of his secretary, Traudl Junge. Moving armies that no longer existed. Screaming at generals about phantom resources. The map room as pure psychosis.
• The Tin Drum — Günter Grass (novel, 1959). Oblique but devastating on how paranoid authoritarian systems produce and are produced by arrested development.
• Absolute Power — Fletcher Knebel (novel) / Clint Eastwood (film, 1997). A sitting U.S. president whose crimes are covered by the apparatus around him — the paranoia is institutional as much as personal.

THE GRANDIOSITY SPIRAL

• King Lear — Shakespeare (play, 1606). The supreme text on this. A man who has confused the performance of power with power itself, and only discovers the difference after he has given everything away. The tragedy is that he becomes most human — most real — at the moment he has nothing left.
• Moby Dick — Melville (novel, 1851). Ahab is running a ship of state. His grandiosity is theological — he has appointed himself the instrument of cosmic justice. Everyone else dies for it.
• The Last King of Scotland — Giles Foden (novel, 1998) / Kevin Macdonald (film, 2006). Idi Amin as grandiosity in its purest form. Based closely on historical record. Self-appointed Field Marshal, Conqueror of the British Empire, last King of Scotland. The titles metastasize as the governance collapses.
• Nixon — Oliver Stone (film, 1995). Highly fictionalized but grounded. The grandiosity-paranoia feedback loop. A man who believed he was history’s instrument and couldn’t survive the discovery that he wasn’t.
• Citizen Kane — Orson Welles (film, 1941). The grandiosity arc in its purest structural form. Xanadu as the physical manifestation of a self that has eaten everything around it and still isn’t full.
• There Will Be Blood — Paul Thomas Anderson (film, 2007). Plainview isn’t a political leader but he’s running a regime. The grandiosity spiral ends in a bowling alley. “I’m finished.” He means it as triumph. It reads as ruin.
• The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (novel, 1989). A quieter version — a man whose entire identity was built on serving a grandiose vision that turned out to be fascism. The decline is retrospective. He only sees it when it’s too late to matter.

THE SYCOPHANCY TRAP

• The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat — Ryszard Kapuściński (nonfiction narrative, 1978). Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Reported from interviews with former court members. One of the most precise documents ever written about how sycophancy becomes a closed information system. Nobody could tell the Emperor bad news. So he never received any. The country was starving and he was giving banquets.
• The Remains of the Day — (appears again here, for the sycophancy of the butler class enabling the grandiose master)
• Amadeus — Peter Shaffer (play, 1979) / Miloš Forman (film, 1984). Salieri sees clearly. The court doesn’t. Emperor Joseph II is surrounded by people whose jobs depend on his taste being correct. “Too many notes.” The sycophancy trap as cultural governance failure.
• The Crown — Peter Morgan (television, 2016–2023). Particularly seasons focused on late-reign Elizabeth and the Charles/Diana years. The institution as sycophancy machine. Truth filtered out at every level.
• All the King’s Men — Robert Penn Warren (novel, 1946) / Robert Rossen (film, 1949). Willie Stark rises on authenticity and is destroyed by the apparatus of power that replaces it with performance and flattery. Based on Huey Long.
• Roman Holiday / The Leopard — Visconti (film, 1963), based on Lampedusa’s novel. An aristocratic ruler who sees the decline clearly and accommodates it philosophically — “everything must change so everything can stay the same” — a different and more elegant sycophancy trap.
• Veep — Armando Iannucci (television, 2012–2019). The most precise American satire on this. Selina Meyer is not stupid — she’s been so thoroughly insulated from honest feedback that she has lost the capacity to receive it.

THE PERFORMANCE THAT ATE THE PERSON

• A Face in the Crowd — Elia Kazan (film, 1957). The most prophetic American film ever made about this. A drifter becomes a media personality becomes a political force. The performance of authenticity is the product. He has no self underneath it. Written by Budd Schulberg — worth reading the original story too.
• Being There — Jerzy Kosiński (novel, 1970) / Hal Ashby (film, 1979). Chance the gardener. A man with no interior life whatsoever is mistaken for profundity at every level of the political establishment. The performance isn’t even intentional — which is the joke, and the horror.
• Primary Colors — Anonymous/Joe Klein (novel, 1996) / Mike Nichols (film, 1998). A Clinton roman à clef, but the decline structure it maps is the performance consuming the politician. The authentic self — if there ever was one — becomes inaccessible even to the person performing.
• Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry (novel, 1985). Gus and Call as two sides of the same coin — one performs stoicism until it becomes indistinguishable from emptiness.
• Succession — Jesse Armstrong (television, 2018–2023). Logan Roy. The performance of strength so total and so long-running that by the end you genuinely cannot tell — and neither can he — what was real underneath it. The children can’t either. That’s the inheritance.
• Network — Paddy Chayefsky (film, 1976). Howard Beale’s breakdown becomes programming. The institution captures the deterioration and sells it. Which is arguably what American media did with Trump in 2015–2016 and has not stopped doing.

A few titles that cut across multiple categories:

• Caligula — Albert Camus (play, 1944). All four simultaneously. A ruler who sees through everything, including himself, and uses that clarity as a license for destruction.
• Apocalypse Now — Coppola (film, 1979), based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Kurtz is a leader in full cognitive and moral collapse who has built a theology around it.
• The Dictator’s Learning Curve — William J. Dobson (nonfiction, 2012). Not narrative, but useful background — how modern autocrats adapt and why the old models of decline don’t always apply cleanly.

This list was created with the help of AI.