When we say (as everyone says) “Trump is nuts,” we don’t mean in that cartoonish, gibbering-drooling-loon-in-a-straitjacket way. (Although we may get to that soon enough.) He doesn’t claim to be the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. (Although he does often refer to himself as the third greatest president, behind Washington and Lincoln.) And let’s be fair: Trump is able to dress himself. And even if he’s not (how would we know?), you have to give him this: He doesn’t take his clothes off in public and run around screaming “Gee, Ma, it’s a Wurlitzer!” And even if he does, he’s successfully managed to cover that up. He answers questions. He speaks in coherent sentences. Well, mostly coherent sentences. OK, sometimes coherent sentences.
Well, what he speaks in can often be punctuated as sentences by a professional punctuator. And the sentences seem at least vaguely relevant to the questions they’re intended to answer or the issue he seems poised to address. In what, then, one is tempted to inquire, does his nutsiness consist?
How much time do you have?
IT’S NATIONAL CERTIFIED NURSING ASSISTANTS WEEK. IT’S ALSO NATIONAL MEN’S HEALTH WEEK. MERE COINCIDENCE?
This will help you make sense of it all.
One aspect of his craziness is the incoherence, not necessarily of a given statement, but of the wacko picture created by multiple, contradictory statements concerning what is supposedly a single, coherent reality. Take, for example, Trump’s various assertions, about the war in Iran, delivered over last weekend and after Monday’s NBA finals game. As summarized by the exemplary Mary Geddry, we got this:
…the incoherence is total. On Sunday, the deal was “one or two days” away. On the [Lindsay] Graham tele-rally, it was “total victory” in two weeks. To the BBC, it was already too late, the missiles already “on their way.” And now, post-game, it is two or three days again, except he also said, in the same gaggle, that the United States could “spend another two or three weeks bombing” if it chose, and that a signed deal would somehow be stronger than the bombing he was still threatening.
Within a single news cycle, the same war is two days from peace, two weeks from total victory, already past the point of control, and one bombing campaign away from resolution. It is narrated by a man who, the night before, could not decide whether his own blockade was sealing Iran off completely or letting enough oil flow to keep prices down.
The timeline is not a forecast. It is whatever the sentence needs it to be while it is being spoken. Peace is always two or three days away precisely because “two or three days” is not a measurement of anything. It is a verbal tic that means the subject is now closed.
Her last point is something we’ve been thinking about. Until recently, Trump’s answers to questions were geared to accomplish one thing: self-promotion. Yes, they were all (all) lies. But they were lies in the service of bragging, preening, and soliciting applause. They were concocted to assert how great he was, both in and of himself and in comparison to his (weak, sleepy, failing, little, crooked, low-IQ, etc.) opponents.
That has changed. Now the purpose of each reply is not to answer (however dishonestly) a question, but to neutralize it. “It is a verbal tic that means the subject is now closed.” It doesn’t matter, to Trump, if, from one answer to another, nothing makes sense. It never occurs to him to try to be consistent, if only consistent in his mendacity. What matters is, he’s successfully whack-a-mole’d one question into submission and is thus prepared to whack the next. The sub-text to each answer is, “There. You got a response. Happy? Now shut up.”
Is that “crazy”? Not necessarily. It can be argued that it’s strategic, a way of evading inquiry and shutting down your journalistic enemies. What’s crazy is thinking that it will work, that no one will notice. To be fair, up until around the last five months, it has worked—not because no one except idiots believed him, but because almost no one challenged him. No reporter, when given a blatantly false answer, had the temerity (or the professional self-respect, or self-preservation instinct) to say, “That’s not true.” To the mainstream media and the prestige press, the assignment has been, “Ask the question, and report what he says.” (They did the same with George W. Bush, with catastrophic results.)
What’s different now is that the answers have degraded. Trump has always been essentially a salesman. For seventy-nine years he has lied, bragged, and postured with one goal in mind: to make the sale. Of his buildings, his steaks, his “university,” his own personal super-duper greatness.
Now, though, he doesn’t care. He’s too tired. He’s the opposite of Michael Palin’s lumberjack—he works posts all night and he sleeps all day.
He now consistently seems either oblivious of or indifferent to the fact that the things he says don’t make sense. Querying the President of the United States about the status of a war in Iran or an alarming rise in inflation is now like asking someone what time it is, and having them look at their watch and say, “It’s twelve-fifteen, but it’s also nine-thirty, and in about half an hour it will be next week.”
This is bad, yes. Over at The Contrarian, in “The President is Bonkers,” Jen Rubin notes:
Certainly, Trump’s mental and physical disintegration has been on display for many years. However, it is easy to lose track of the velocity of Trump’s decompensation.
As a group of 36 mental health professionals recently explained in a stinging written statement, Trump’s outbursts are not “momentary lapses nor political theater”; they instead “reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline.” And this was before Trump’s explosion on Meet the Press, among the most cringeworthy presidential media appearances ever.
Recall, if you dare, how, on Meet the Press last Sunday, Trump reacted when Kristen Welker (a doormat no longer!) asked him for evidence that the L.A. mayoral and California gubernatorial elections were rigged. Trump’s reply? “All you have to do is look.” When Welker pointed out that “that’s not evidence,” Trump launched into a diatribe we’re filing under Great Moments in Presidential Discourse. (Hat tip to Jeff Tiedrich’s sober, coolly-reasoned analysis, “Colicky Piss-Baby Melts Down, Stumbles Off the Set of Meet the Press”.)
Donny: “They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.”
Welker: “To be fair, sir, I’m not crooked.”
Donny: “Really? Well, you play right into their hands. You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. You know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.”
Welker: “You’ve never presented evidence that it was rigged.”
Donny: “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided, crooked networks. Okay, let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling.”
(Errata: 1) In fact, according to top scientists and knowers-of-things, it is Trump who is crooked and stupid. 2) Trump’s 2024 election win was not so much a landslide as a brief, silent collapse of ground coffee in a Melitta filter during a four-cup pour-over. 3) “Your elections” is silly. Welker doesn’t have elections. 4) Trump’s denunciation of those networks surely left executives at PBS asking, “What are we—chopped liver?” 5) Tiedrich omitted Trump’s final words, which were as loony as anything else: “Have a good time.”)
It’s hilarious, although of course it’s not funny. What is to be done? Rubin has ideas. (Itemization ours, not hers.)
…Demand a robust debate in public, in Congress, and on the midterm campaign trail about the gravity of leaving a patently unfit, raving lunatic in the Oval Office.
…Pro-democracy forces must educate the public, compel legacy media to cover his breakdown as vigorously and consistently as they did Joe Biden’s health after his 2024 debate, and pressure Republicans to remove or at least restrain him.
We pause, and openly guffaw at the idea that any Republicans in Congress (let alone on the wretched Supreme Court) have the will and guts to remove or restrain him. Okay, we needed that. Go on, Jen.
A serious, sober subcommittee (perhaps drawn from both the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee) with professional staff should conduct methodical public hearings and assemble a comprehensive report documenting Trump’s deterioration.
At the end of the process, Democrats (and any patriotic Republicans inclined to prevent grave harm to the country) should present a series of specific, feasible recommendations, including legislation to compel the release of all presidential medical records and to require independent medical evaluation of presidents and vice-presidents.
(Democrats) should make clear that once they have subpoena power after the midterms, they will supplement findings by calling witnesses to testify under oath as to his observable behavior. If Republicans defend his indefensible conduct and block common-sense measures, they will take on full responsibility for the wreckage that ensues from sheltering an unhinged, unwell president.
Here we must intercede and ask the reader to join us as we greet the notion of Republicans taking “full responsibility” for the wreckage that ensues with the derisive snorts and armpit farts it so richly deserves.
Republican House and Senate candidates need to be put on the spot in every public encounter: Do they think the president is of sound mind? What do they intend to do to, for example, protect nuclear codes? Why shouldn’t the public have full visibility into the health of a president whose conduct has been so obviously aberrant? Democrats should pound away at the issue in floor speeches, media spots, op-eds, and public forums.
Fuck yes, provided that “in every public encounter” means not just in press gaggles shuffling down House corridors or clustered in front of their offices, but every-goddamn-where. These clowns, traitors, and fascists should be confronted at the theater, when they get into and out of cabs, and over their Dry-Aged NY Strip au Poivre with Courvoisier Cream ($76) at the Capital Grille.
Because, no matter how insane Trump is, no matter how lunatic his babbling (“I love the inflation,” he said this week, following it with a non-sequitur about oil), no matter how obnoxious his treatment of others (“Quiet, piggy”), Republicans are every bit as much the problem. Any horrible thing he does from now until the end of time is due as much to their complicity as to his dysfunction.
In fact, we’re prepared to argue that their behavior has been worse. Trump has always been a monster. Now that he’s demented, he’s a demented monster. While he should be held accountable for his crimes, misdemeanors, and atrocities, no one expects him to know better or to behave decently. But, while there are indeed many Republicans in Congress who are irredeemably stupid, religiously insane, or hopelessly bigoted, there are some who do know better. And they’ve all gone along with this nightmare, both for the first term and now for the second.
Trump, in his madness, should be examined, exposed, and removed from office. Those in every branch of government who defend him, or who impede that process, or who try to change the subject to Biden (or Obama, or FDR, or __your name here__), should be identified and made to justify a bill of particulars as long as the mighty Mississippi, or even the nearly infinitely tall Reflecting Pool. Starting yesterday.
Until then, the Splitsville we all inhabit (i.e., a single geo-political entity—let’s call it “the United States of America”—which consists of two or more distinct “nations”) will be one in which the population of one of those nations knows its head of state is destructive, greedy, pathologically mendacious, and certifiably fucking insane, while the other nation consists of people who, for whatever reason (greed, stupidity, fear, self-interest) look the other way and pretend this is normal.
WE GUARANTEE YOU’LL LIKE THE SCENE IN WHICH LORINDA AND STIMPY TAKE THE RAPTURE RIDE.
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