“By the end of the day, Trump had been condemned by Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, to which he responded by going after a different Theresa May on Twitter, dragging an obscure woman who at the time had six followers into the limelight. In another tweet, he insinuated that the TV host Joe Scarborough killed an intern in 2001, when he was a congressman. This came after news reports informed us that Trump is still a birther and that he no longer admits that the voice on the infamous Access Hollywood tape is his own.
“He seems to be cracking up.”
This is only one of a slew of columns on op-ed pages last week in which writers — in this case, Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times — bluntly discuss Rump’s state of mind using any number of synonyms for crazy. “Delusional.” “Unhinged.” “Mad.” “Mentally ill.”
PERSPECTIVE: Media Circus
As Goldberg puts it, “On CNN, Senator Lindsey Graham chided the press for treating Trump like ‘some kind of kook not fit to be president,’ which is some serious gaslighting from a man who previously called Trump ‘crazy,’ a ‘kook,’ and ‘unfit for office.’”
And that’s just from Goldberg. Over at Project Syndicate (“the world’s opinion page”), Elizabeth Drew wrote: “Much of America’s capital has entered a state of near-panic. In recent days, President Donald Trump has been acting more bizarrely than ever, and the question raised in the mind of politicians and civilians alike, though rarely spoken aloud, has been: What can be done with this man?” Drew goes on: “The question of timing has become increasingly urgent, given the heightened danger that the US will deliberately or accidentally end up in a war with North Korea. That risk, coupled with Trump’s increasingly peculiar behavior, has made Washington more tense than I’ve ever known it to be, and that includes the dark days of Watergate. To put it bluntly: the worry is that a mentally deranged president might lead the US into a nuclear war.
“In just the past week, evidence of Trump’s instability has piled up. During an Oval Office ceremony to honor Native-American heroes of World War II, he offended them” by recycling “Pocahontas,” his never-funny nickname for Senator Elizabeth Warren, as though these World War II heroes would find an Indian joke funny.
Drew added, “He picked an unprecedented and unnecessary fight with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, supposedly America’s closest ally, by retweeting a British neo-fascist group’s anti-Muslim posts. In an effort to win a Democratic senator’s vote for his pending tax-cut bill, he traveled to her state and told lies about her record… And he continued to bait North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who seems equally unstable.”
Drew also cites Rump’s resuscitation of birtherism as evidence of Rump’s “instability.”
About the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he boasts about his ability to “grab ‘em by the pussy,” his rather-too-late-in-the-game denial is such a magnificent lie that Billy Bush — the former Access Hollywood host to whom the ever-bragging Rump told of his charming way of treating women — wrote a Times op-ed piece titled, “Yes, Donald Trump, You Said That.”
And as Drew points out, “The fact that Trump appears to have some mental disorder, or disorders, has created a dilemma for psychiatrists, politicians, and journalists alike. The American Psychiatric Association has a rule that its members may not offer diagnoses of people they have not examined. But, given what some psychiatrists see as a national emergency, many have broken the rule and spoken or written publicly about their professional assessments of Trump’s mental state.”
Drew concludes with these remarkable observations: “After his latest spasm of deranged tweets, only those completely under his spell can deny what growing numbers of Americans have long suspected: the President of the United States is profoundly unstable. He is mad. He is, by any honest layman’s definition, mentally unwell and viciously lashing out. Scarborough told viewers that several Republican figures close to Mr. Trump had told him they believed the president was demonstrating signs of dementia.”
Face it, folks. The president is a wack job, and we could all die as a result.
Here’s Jon Perr writing for Daily Kos: “Donald Trump and his Republican allies have two definitions of the term ‘golden showers.’ The first concerns a notorious — and as-yet unsubstantiated — claim from the so-called Russian dossier: Decorum prohibits elaborating further here. The second meaning of the term, however, describes any public policy — usually involving taxes — which overwhelmingly delivers its benefits to the very richest people in America. The plutocratic pleasure from this right-wing fetish is all the more ecstatic if raining cash on the gilded-class can be sold under the guise of winnings for workers.”
Decorum? What’s that? Perr is, of course, referring to the long-rumored tape in which Rump either pisses on a bed in which Barack and Michelle Obama slept while in Russia or pisses on Russian whores. Or maybe they piss on him. What does it matter? I can’t wait to see it for myself.
Funny that “golden showers” has these particular double meanings, since our lying scumbag of a president is so obviously eager to shower his golden waste not on the obscenely rich but on the middle and working classes. As many, many people have noted, the tax bill is really a tax scam, with Rump pissing on the very people who voted for him. He must be mad.
