When Donald Trump orders drone strikes, expands executive authority over civilian targeting, or signs orders that amount to collective punishment of vulnerable populations, the dominant register of Western media response is not outrage at state violence – it is clinical concern for the perpetrator: he is impulsive, cognitively declining, or an aberration from the norms of liberal democratic governance.This diagnostic framing is not neutral. It is a racialised technology of absolution, one that launders state violence through individual pathology and reserves the category of terrorism exclusively for brown and Muslim bodies.The architecture of this double standard has deep intellectual roots. Edward Said’s foundational analysis of Orientalism (1978) demonstrated how the West constructed the “Orient” not as a collection of individuals but as an undifferentiated and homogenous civilisational essence, one which is irrational, threatening, congenitally prone to violence. That epistemological infrastructure did not dissolve with formal decolonisation of administration. It was rerouted.Today, it governs the grammar of accountability: when a white Western leader commits acts that would, in another context meet the definitional threshold of state terror, the explanatory frame pivots inward to psychology, to neurology, to the exceptional failures of an individual mind. On the contrary, when a Muslim or brown leader commits equivalent or lesser acts, the frame pivots outward – to culture, religion, ideology, civilisational pathology, reproducing the stereotype.In this connection, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s canonical definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2007) applies with full force here. The asymmetry in how Western media frames political violence is not incidental: it systematically assigns full moral and legal personhood including the alibi of mental incapacity to white leaders while reserving collective guilt and civilisational diagnosis for racialised ones. This is not a media bias. It is a structural feature of the racial order that media reproduces.Also read: Trump And Modi Seem to be Borrowing from Each Other’s PlaybookConsider the comparative evidentiary record. Bashar al-Assad’s bombardment of Syrian civilians was universally narrated as ideological barbarism and the expression of an authoritarian regime’s fundamental character. Yemen’s Houthi leadership is framed, across virtually all Western outlets, as a terrorist infrastructure. Yet Trump’s “expansions” and his executive orders reinstating policies of collective punishment against civilian populations are absorbed into the same register: not terror, but disorder. Not ideology, but illness.George Lipsitz’s concept of the “possessive investment in whiteness” (2006), i.e., the accumulated material and symbolic advantages that white identity confers across institutions extends into the epistemology of political violence. Whiteness, in the Western media frame, confers what we might call interpretive sovereignty: the right to have one’s acts explained rather than condemned, contextualised rather than essentialised, individualised rather than racialised.In that spirit, Trump is an anomaly. He is not America. He is not Western civilisation. He is a bad brain in an otherwise sound body politic. The same courtesy is structurally unavailable to any leader of colour whose policy failures are immediately narrated as confirmations of deeper civilisational deficiency.Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (2003) the sovereign power to dictate who may live and who must die finds its media correlate here. Necropolitical decisions made by white Western leaders are metabolised as administrative error.The same decisions, or lesser ones, made by racialised leaders are metabolised as proof of their people’s incapacity for self-governance. The diagnostic frame applied to Trump (dementia, narcissistic personality disorder, cognitive decline) does not challenge power but immunises it. By locating the source of policy violence in an individual’s diseased mind, it forecloses the structural analysis that would implicate the institutions, the electoral coalitions, the military-industrial architecture, and the racial common sense that made those policies not only possible but popular.Madness, it turns out, is a privilege the Global South cannot afford.Arani Basu is a political sociologist based in Berlin. Amrita Datta is a Germany-based migration scholar.