Category: The Presidency

TRUMP RULE OF MENTAL HEALTH: IF HE LOOKS, ACTS & GOVERNS CRAZY, HE’S CRAZY

There is an intense and amusing battle raging in the psychiatric community over whether the president is nuts. Specifically the controversy is focused on whether it is ethical for a shrink to declare Donald Trump insane without having examined him. There is a growing plethora of practicing therapists who have publicly diagnosed The Donald as bonkers, albeit in more elegant and clinical prose. And they have all incurred the wrath of the American Psychiatric Association whose rules prohibit members from publicly diagnosing political figures unless they have examined them and obtained their permission to release the findings.

This is known as the “Goldwater Rule”, and it evolved from a controversial psychiatric survey taken during the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. A magazine polled more than 2,000 psychiatrists and a majority said the Republican senator from Arizona lacked the mental stability to be president. After losing the election, Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won. Years later, the psychiatric association adopted the rule now being invoked, without much success, to keep its members from commenting on Trump’s mental state.

Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Duke University School of Medicine and an author of the standard manual on psychiatric disorders, wrote a letter to the New York Times defending the president against the insanity label lobbed at him by some of the doctor’s colleagues. He said the commander in chief lacks the “distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental illness.” Trump might have tweeted the good doctor’s endorsement, if not for the sentence that followed: “Nevertheless,” Frances wrote, “he can and should be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

Thankfully, bloggers are not covered by the Goldwater Rule. That means I can go out on a limb and say publicly what most world leaders have to be thinking: President Donald J. Trump is batshit crazy.

Let’s count the ways:

• Turned the Nuclear Codes into a Facebook Moment. Since the start of the arms race, a military attaché, clutching a briefcase that can be used to launch nuclear missiles, has always been in close proximity to the commander in chief. All previous presidents have treated this sobering arrangement with well-deserved discretion. Not The Donald. He invited fellow diners at his Mar-a-Largo resort to pose with the “nuclear football” and its carrier for cute social media fodder.

• Thinks Frederick Douglas is Still Alive. Trump kicked off Black History Month with a lengthy monologue about how the “dishonest media” incorrectly reported that Martin Luther King’s bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Then, trying to think of other black people to mention, he gave a shout out to Douglas, saying the abolitionist who died 122 years ago “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job.”

• Called for the Destruction of a Court that Ruled Against Him. Trump went to Nashville this week to deliver a carefully scripted speech in support of the Republican health insurance bill. Minutes before taking the stage, the president learned that his second attempt at an anti-immigration order had been blocked by a federal judge. So he jettisoned the insurance pitch and ranted about how he’d like to “break up” the Ninth Circuit.

• He Sees Some Holocausts as Better than Others. Asked what he learned in his first intelligence briefing, Trump said, a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

• Declared Unconditional Love for Himself. In an interview with an ABC reporter, Trump said, “I don’t want to change . . . I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that.”

• Repeatedly Sticks his Foot in his Mouth. As his lawyers draft briefs supporting his second travel ban order on the basis that it substantially resolved legal objections in the original document, Trump grabs a microphone and says the new order is “just a watered down version” of the first one.

• Thinks he is the Least Racist Person Ever. Seconds after making that declaration during a news conference, Trump asked a black reporter if she could set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus since they must be her friends.

• Comes out of his Own Little World Just Long Enough to Create International Incidents. The Obama-wiretapped-me fantasy now seems destined to have a longer life than the Iraq War. By now, Trump’s belief that the former president electronically surveilled him has been repudiated by every major Republican leader in Congress and the head of the FBI. But being The Donald means never having to say you’re sorry, or wrong. He doubled down this week and suggested that British spies planted the bugs for Obama. The Brits were enraged, but Trump wouldn’t back off, insisting he heard it on Fox News so it must be right. Fox News quickly said there was no truth to the story, but Trump kept right on mumbling about it, and even tried to drag a mystified German Chancellor Angela Merkel into the fracas late last week.

And on and on the list grows. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted yesterday, the insanity of the Trump administration can be measured by the fact that the new secretary of the interior rode to work on a horse named Tonto, and nobody paid much attention. Somewhere, in some afterlife, a bemused, and oh-so-very sane, Barry Goldwater is shaking his head and muttering, “And they called me crazy!”

THE TRAGEDY OF TRUMP: WINNING AN ELECTION DOESN’T CREATE AN ABILITY TO SERVE

This country’s 45th presidency is unfolding like a Shakespearian tragedy. The protagonist, King Donald, is so consumed with proving the legitimacy of his throne that he unleashes one stunt after another, each more bizarre than the last, all designed to prove himself worthy of his title. The dramatic irony, of course, is that the more the king does to create the illusion of legitimacy, the less legitimate he appears.

This diabolical storyline developed its rich texture from the backstory of the prequel, last year’s general election. Remember the third and final presidential debate when The Donald, then behind in the polls, declared that he might not accept the election results? The rarely stunned New York Times called Trump’s position “a remarkable statement that seemed to cast doubt on American democracy.” In a classic plot twist, Trump won, but his self-sowed seeds of doubt over the vote tally invaded his own psyche, haunting him like a Dickensian ghost. Hilary Clinton conceded to Trump. The Electoral College certified his election. The chief justice of the Supreme Court administered his oath of office. Throughout all of those rituals, King Donald remained angry and on edge. He was holding an “illegitimate election” card that he never had to play. His unshakable dread was that it would now be played against himself.

Nearly two months into his presidency, Trump remains paralyzed over his fear of not being seen as legitimate, despite the absence of any serious and credible challenge to the election results. He spent the first 48 hours in the White House telling foolish lies about the size of his inaugural audience. Then, out of the blue and without a scintilla of evidence, he insisted that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for rampant election fraud. And then came the Russian stuff. Intelligence agencies said there was evidence that Russian spies interfered with the election in an effort to help Trump win. While the rest of the country saw that as a serious threat to our democracy, the new president imploded over the notion that he didn’t win the election on his own merit. Tragically, this president’s neurotic obsession about looking like a winner has made him the biggest loser in White House history.

The fact that Donald Trump’s presidency is lacking legitimacy has nothing to do with vote counts or Russian espionage. A legitimate president doesn’t:

• Accuse his predecessor of wiretapping him, without a shred of evidence.
• Preach “America First” and then allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built with foreign steel.
• Criticize Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings at the National Prayer Breakfast.
• Place a hold on what he considers an urgent national security program (Travel Ban 2.0) in order to bask in the afterglow of the only speech he has given without looking completely unhinged.
• Call the news media the “enemy of the American people.”
• Boast about the magnitude of his Electoral College win in a phone conversation with the Australian prime minister.
• Call people names like “neurotic dope”, “clueless incompetent”, “dumb as a rock”, “sick loser”, “obnoxious”, “dumb mouthpiece”, and “total disaster”. (Recipients of presidential wrath, in order of appearance: the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, the National Review’s Rich Lowry, CNN’s Don Lemon, George W. Bush’s political strategist Karl Rove, Sen. John McCain’s daughter Meghan, Sen. Lindsey Graham and former defense secretary Robert Gates.)

Now, add to that abbreviated list of highly un-presidential behavior, two recent episodes:

The Washington Post ran a compelling and amusing piece earlier this week that cataloged Trump’s history of staging outrageous stunts in order to divert media attention from his various messes. The article’s point was that the president’s wiretap tweet bomb was a calculated move designed to deflect attention from the Russians’ election tampering investigation and the attorney general’s recusal. As it turned out, the ruse had the design and execution of a fifth grader forging a parent’s signature on a permission slip. It produced four days of media speculation over whether the FBI might have persuaded an international court to authorize wiretaps on Trump associates based on evidence of collusion with a foreign government. It was a Keystone Cops diversion that ended up with an even deeper plunge into the Russian scandal it was created to deflect.

And then there is Trumpcare, or the lack thereof. The president spent the campaign ranting about the evils of the Affordable Care Act and how he would replace it immediately with “something wonderful”. Four days before he was inaugurated, Trump said there would soon be “insurance for everybody,” at much lower costs. House Republicans, who repealed Obamacare 725,000 times when it didn’t count, were chomping at the bit to see the new president’s plan. Turns out he didn’t have one. A week ago, The Donald had this to say on the subject: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” The Republican Congress , abandoning all hope of presidential leadership on this issue, put out its own miserly health care plan, one that would leave millions without coverage. Trump immediately tweeted his support. Yet, as soon as the bill took shots from all directions, he told people not to worry because everything is negotiable. The next day he backtracked after House GOP leaders told him they had very little room to move. The president is now prepared to go back on the rally circuit to churn up populist demand for a bill he clearly doesn’t understand.

In every way that counts, Donald J. Trump has failed to conduct himself with the honor, integrity, decency, empathy and intellectual vigor that form the soul of the presidency and give it legitimacy. It’s not about the popular vote or the Russian hacks. It’s about the human qualities this man lacks.