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Some of America’s most distinguished statesmen believe President Donald Trump’s behavior rises to the level of a Constitutional crisis. Others disagree. Over the weekend, I talked to one very distinguished federal judge who told me that no, this wasn’t a constitutional crisis.
But he then paused and said, “but Trump is meshuga,” the Yiddish term for crazy.
Exactly.
Some of this is splitting hairs. If a freak weather event flattens a house and kills everyone inside, do you think those who loved them would care whether it was a tornado or a hurricane?
We are, clearly, in a profound crisis. Whatever your politics, whatever your ideology, it should be apparent that Donald Trump does not have the knowledge or temperament to be President of the United States. Most disturbingly, he doesn’t seem to have a clue what that job entails – and even worse, doesn’t seem to care. We have a unique situation in this country, in that the President is both the head of government and the official head of state.
Great Britain, by contrast, has elected leaders, but a hereditary monarchy. What that means is a lot of obsessing over the private lives of the Royals, who have little real power, but are symbols of their nation and its glorious history.
Meanwhile, the politicians are mainly judged on how they run the government. I doubt if the average Brit knows, or cares, much about the private life of Prime Minister Theresa May.
Our Presidents, however, have to be both symbol and substance. They have both to govern and embody the power and mystery and majesty of that office. Many previous presidents have had human failings, and a few have behaved disgracefully.
But all of them seemed to have clearly understood that the Presidency was about more than just themselves. That’s always been true — until now.
The presidency is the symbol of this nation. The White House is where Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, where Franklin D. Roosevelt rallied the country to overcome the Great Depression and then led it through the world’s worst war.
John F. Kennedy faced down the Soviet Union over Cuba here, and Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights bill. This is sacred territory. But the man holding that office now appears to understand none of that, and to respect neither the institution, nor what it stands for.
What’s happening now is frightening on many levels. But possibly worst of all is what this does to our sense of ourselves as a people with a common heritage destiny. Novelists for years have imagined bad presidents, Darth Vader-like power-mad villains. Nobody imagined an emotionally stunted adolescent in the Oval Office, tweeting insults in the wee hours.
Nobody imagined a President whose character was so low that he would not be welcome at the funeral of a war hero and a statesman who was a member of his own party.
But it is important to note that Donald Trump is not solely responsible for this state of affairs. We, as a nation, have been losing sight of who we are and what really matters for years.
Somehow, nearly sixty-three million of us thought it was all right to vote for a man who dodged the draft himself, and then said John McCain was not a war hero because he was captured, a man who made fun of the disabled and treated women with contempt.
That this happened shows that there’s something radically wrong and some kind of massive disconnect between we, the people, and our government.
Fixing that may just be the most urgent thing we have to do.
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