It was the cringiest of times. It was the craziest of times.
Welcome to a moment in which one of the most consequential debates
Americans (and people the world across) are having is about whether the
President of the United States is just a national embarrassment or has
full-on blown a gasket. Is Donald Trump just three fries short of a happy
meal, or is he full-on howling-at-the-moon mad?
One senior official in the last Trump Administration told The Daily Beast
of presidential appearances in the past few days that Trump “has
definitely lost a step.”
With respect to one of those appearances, Trump’s meeting with
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell
offered a similar observation, arguing that the president is “clearly off his
game.” Like leaders in other recent presidential meetings, Carney “both
humbled and humiliated Trump at the same time without Donald Trump
having the slightest idea it was happening,” O’Donnell said, labeling
Trump’s oft-repeated proposal that the U.S. annex Canada as
“demented.”
That’s a sentiment that many others have also suggested in response to
presidential initiatives—from seizing the Panama Canal to watching a TV
movie about Alcatraz and hours later suggesting the decrepit prison
facility, which has been shut down for more than half a century, should
be reopened.
Each day we are forced to ask anew, and with more urgency, whether
Trump is just an ignorant buffoon not up to the job or whether he is what
they might have in the old days called catawampus, past-it, mentally
unwell or even broken. How would you categorize the assertion that he
doesn’t know whether he is obligated to uphold the Constitution? Has he
gone completely Mad King?
Do his top advisors slather him with praise in ways that would make Kim
Jong Un blush because Trump is just an egomaniac who needs to be
surrounded by fluffers? Or is it something worse than that? Is he so
fragile they fear the consequences if they don’t slide on the knee pads
and polish his balls until they shine like the rest of his cheeseball throne
room?
And what do the choices he has made about his team of top advisors say
about him? Some have clearly been chosen simply because they will
follow him blindly. It’s why Marco Rubio gets an additional job every
week. Recent performances in front of Congressional committees reveal
that others really are just the emptiest of vessels—see for example Kristi
Noem (who was this week fileted like a haddock by Senator Chris Murphy
over her mismanagement at DHS) or Secretary of Transportation Sean
Duffy, who has been more out of touch than the radio silence-paralyzed
air traffic controllers who work for him. Putting a wrestling executive who
doesn’t know the difference between artificial intelligence and a steak
sauce in charge of the future of education in America is just demented.
But other choices Trump has made represent something much worse—
something warped and dangerous. They seem to have been made with
the intent of actively doing damage to the United States. HHS Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tops that list. (In a particularly dark irony given the
subject of this article, among the areas where Kennedy is embracing the
looniest ideas and doing the most damage is mental health, as Norm
Ornstein and I discussed on our “Words Matter” podcast this week.) He’s
nuts. Picking him was nuts.
But crazy begets crazy, and this week we have seen how it is
compounded atop our government in many ways. One such example
comes courtesy of RFK, Jr., whose first choice for surgeon general,
Janette Nesheiwat, flamed out because she may have misrepresented
her credentials. Nasheiwat was immediately replaced by a new nominee
who doesn’t actually have a license to practice medicine and is rather an
anti-vaxx peddler of meshuggah medical theories.
Then consider Trump’s right-wing extremist choice to be the U.S.
attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, whose nomination
crashed and burned because of crumbling GOP support. Trump decided
the right person to replace him was Fox News legal commentator Jeanine
Pirro, a woman whose own producer at Fox called her “nuts” too.
Not only this, but Trump must think Americans are “nuts” too, and not
just because his policies are driving us so. How else to interpret his
demonstrating that he has no idea how global trade works? How else to
explain the threats to invade Greenland or the recent decision to shift
intelligence assets to back up his bonkers threats?
It is an insult to the collective intelligence of the planet if he decides to
call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America; if he appoints, as he just did,
a former Real Housewife of New Jersey to the Holocaust Museum board;
or if he suggest that everything’s hunky-dory with his wife when she has
only shown up for work 14 days so far since inauguration.
Sure, it’s hardly important whether the woman at his side is the real first
lady or an inflatable HOV lane dummy. But when it’s someone deranged
like Laura Loomer or a sociopath like Stephen Miller who plays along with
the president’s own batshit impulses to advance their own dangerous
interests, it matters. Because sane or not (and he’s definitely not), when
Miller says they’re “looking at” suspending habeas corpus, it is a gravely
serious matter.
And working tirelessly to destroy our environment, our economy, our
system of justice, our national defenses, and our democracy? Working to
do it each and every day? Working to do it regardless of the law or the
consequences for future generations of Americans? That’s not just a guy
who’s off his feed.
We can, of course, further debate which is crazier: Trump’s behavior or
electing a guy like him in the first place. In fact, the problems began with
his election and will not end until he is stopped by time or by checks and
balances in our system or by the electorate.
But there is also a more chilling possibility that we should not rule out. It
is also possible that every bad hire, every profoundly destructive policy
initiative, every toxic choice made by Trump is not in fact due to mental
defect but, on the contrary, is intentional. That it is consciously thought
out and well-executed, part of a plan with the clear intent of destroying
our systems as we have known them and further empowering our
enemies at home and abroad.
That’s not as funny as the late-night comedian jokes about our slumped,
spray-tanned, reality TV windbag president. But it—the possibility that
Trump is just the goofy, greedy, generally reprehensible superannuated
hand puppet of others whose agenda he is being used to advance—is
also, of all the possibilities we may consider for the off-the-rails
performance of this government, by far the most likely.
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