Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump is suffering from a mental breakdown after launching, alongside Israel, the war in the Middle East. In his most recent public appearances, Ortega had kept a more measured tone about Trump following the war unleashed on February 28 by Israeli and U.S. attacks against Iran, which has left thousands dead, mainly in Iran and Lebanon.
“The war imposed in the way the current president of the United States is imposing it is typical of someone who has lost his mind and believes he can do anything, any kind of barbarity,” Ortega said. “It is a problem, we might say, of mental derangement, as we say here. He is not in his right mind,” he added during an event in Managua broadcast by pro-government media.
Ortega and co-president Rosario Murillo, his wife, held a rally in the capital “for Peace and Reconciliation” to mark the 2018 opposition protests, which they say were an attempted coup backed by Washington. The 80-year-old former guerrilla also criticized Trump for what he called the “terrorist policy” of war, despite Trump presenting himself as “a man of peace” and having “fought” to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
He also criticized an AI-generated image posted on Trump’s Truth Social account in which the president appears to portray himself as Jesus Christ. In the image, he is dressed in a white robe and red mantle and touches the forehead of a man who appears ill, radiating light over his head.
“He put out an image where he is dressed as Christ and is healing people. How many has he healed? The American people and the peoples of the world are going to hold him accountable to find out how many he has killed,” Ortega said. The Nicaraguan president, who has been in power since 2007 following elections questioned by the international community, also used the speech to reject recent U.S. sanctions against two of his sons over the extraction and commercialization of gold.
“They no longer know whom to sanction,” he said.
