Nothing against the mentally ill per se, you understand. Most of us suffer psychological problems at one time or another, if not permanently. In fact there’s a compelling case to be made for the proposition that in some ways the entire human race is insane.

Thus we have to be as tolerant and understanding of each others’ irrationalities, inanities and insanities as possible. But such tolerance also has to be kept within bounds.

And to me the most definite bounds are as far as possible from positions of power.

This is, of course, as readers with their wits about them will quickly realise, a somewhat paradoxical proposition, in light of the fact that power-seeking is itself often a symptom of monomania, megalomania, kleptomania or even full-blown messiahmania.

As evidenced most vividly by the madman that the loony-tunes minority in the US have visited on themselves, their fellow citizens and the rest of the world, Donald Trump.

To anyone in his her right mind, it was clearly evident throughout the election campaign that Trump was more psychiatric than presidential material.

And to judge by the way he’s been acting since those crazy enough to vote for him - not to mention those too dim-witted to vote at all - presidential power has predictably so gone to his head as to even further scramble his brains.

As evidenced by the fact that he’s progressed from perceiving himself as the man destined to ‘make America great again’ to some kind of messiah sent to bring peace to the whole wide world.

But far from achieving anything to restore the respectability or effectiveness of the already deeply suspect ‘Pax Americana’, he’s made it look even more like the ‘Pox Americana’.

Preaching peace on a visit to one of the main sponsors of muddle in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, and simultaneously crowing about selling multi-billions of dollars worth of armaments to these crooked theocratic crazies, then proceeding to cozy-up to the allegedly "chosen people" of Israel and then to Rome to suck-up to the Pope.

In the process achieving nothing to bring the alleged "great religions" or any other of the world’s eternally-warring sects to join hands in amity.

In fact this self-styled messiah clearly couldn’t even make peace with his token 'Virgin Mary' or rather 'Mary Magdalene', Melania, who repeatedly and very publicly refused to take his proffered hand.

But to Trump’s disordered mind such rejections would surely constitute the kind of martyrdom that every messiah must suffer, and only serve to confirm his deluded declaration that "no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly".

If he thinks he’s experienced as martyrdom as possible already, however, this American messiah has another think coming. Because when his peace mission comes to an end back in Washington DC, he’s facing more persecution, possible prosecution and political crucifixion for allegedly colluding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin regime for the purpose of getting himself the messiah gig in the first place.

If only a fate of such biblical proportions was in store for some of the myriad other maniacal self-styled messiahs around the world currently devoted to making messes of the lives of their misguided masses.

Mad, not to mention bad messiahs like North Korea’s notorious head-case Kim Jong-un, still hell-bent on his crusade against apparently any and every other country on earth for some clearly psychotic purpose.

And like Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, admittedly apparently more homicidal maniac than messiah, given his insane lust for the blood of those who meet with his highly-selective disapproval.

Small-time players in the illicit drugs trade that he knows as well as you and I do is run by untouchably rich and powerful politicians and their cronies; and now Islamic militants whose operations have been enabled by the corruption and ineptitude of Philippines police forces and armed forces.

Declaring martial law across the southern region of Mindanao after a rash of atrocities there recently, Duterte typically warned those suspected of such crimes that "if I think you should die, you will die. If there’s open defiance you will die, and if it means many people dying, so be it."

What a pity that Duterte isn’t less morbidly and madly obsessed with death and dying, and more messianically concerned with freeing his country from the killing levels of political gangsterism, corruption and exploitation that have for decades kept most of its people so desperately disadvantaged.

But some semblance of sanity, let alone good sense, would be far too much to expect from leaders, or rather bleeders, of a such a madly messianic bent.

An observation that brings us to Malaysia, which seems to be infested with more would-be messiahs than the rest of the world’s nations put together.

Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, for a start, who at the age of 90-something threatens to stage a kind of second coming to lead the nation out of the wilderness that he himself created in his 22 years as its alleged saviour.

But actually destroyer, in that he so devastated Malaysia’s formerly independent judiciary, police force, news media and other civil and 'religious' institutions as to render the people helpless in the face of his Umno/BN coalition’s rampant corruption and criminality.

And now, the current head of this mess, the allegedly massively corrupt Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, is trying desperately to fend-off the threat from born-again messiah Mahathir by pretending to be the true messiah to lead the nation out of the predicament that Mahathir created and Najib himself has since made far worse.

But there is some method in Najib’s messianic madness, as the "transformation" he claims to be leading is not due until 2050, by which time Najib and most if not all his accomplices in the current Umno/BN regime will have escaped into heaven or wherever, and thus evaded prosecution and punishment here on earth.

Punishment here on earth being the particular goal of yet another of the mad would-be messiahs currently infesting Malaysia, some Hadi or another who heads the fundamentalist Islamic PAS party, with its platform of whippings and amputations for what it perceives as wrong-doers.

And then, of course, there’s that long-time Malaysian messiah in waiting, Anwar Ibrahim, who is still very much out of the running due to his jailing first by former and perhaps future messiah Mahathir and then again by saviour-of-Malaysia-33-years-from-now Najib.

Given such a mess of mad messiahs as this, it’s time for those of us with our wits about us to start doing everything in our individual and collective power to get rid of them.

And, while we’re at it, to ensure that we abandon any lingering infantile fantasies of salvation by such self-serving rabble-rousers before any more of them emerge to take an even deadlier ethical, economic, physical, mental and emotional toll on us all than past and present ones have.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.