I am not a psychologist. I have been a respected mainstream journalist for many years. I don’t write sensationalist tabloid copy, and I recognize that it is irresponsible, if not dangerous, to throw around clinical psychological terms like “paranoid,” or “schizo” and “insane.”
Nevertheless, as they say, if something has a yellow bill, oily feathers and swims on a pond, you don’t have to be a zoologist to know it’s not a hamster.
So let’s face the truth about Donald J. Trump, the current President of the United States. His behavior, his actions and obsessions are so far removed from anything resembling healthy that it doesn’t matter what the clinical name for his condition may be.
He is clearly not right in the head.
And that is dangerous, to put it mildly, in an executive who theoretically has the power, if his orders were to be obeyed, to destroy the entire world. Dangerous, and entirely unacceptable.
We are also in grave danger of being so desensitized to his bizarre behavior that we think of it as the new normal. Let’s take a couple examples, just from the last day.
Trump once again attacked John McCain, the longtime U.S. Senator, war hero, and presidential candidate, who died last August. “I was never a fan,” of McCain’s, he said, “and I never will be.” He went on to falsely accuse McCain of sharing information with the FBI before the election about the Trump campaign’s dealing with Russia. He also incorrectly said McCain was last in his class at the Naval Academy. I can recall nobody in American political history who went out of his way to attack a dead hero, much less one from his own party.
The ancient Romans could certainly be cruel, but even they had the motto: De Mortuis nil nisi bonum — which literally means say nothing but good about the dead.
Donald Trump clearly didn’t get the memo.
If that weren’t bad enough, this morning he went off on another man, this time a living one, calling him a “stone cold loser and husband from hell.”
That’s almost mild for this President, who called his own first Secretary of State “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell,” after he fired him. But what was notable about Trump’s latest target is that the man is George Conway the 3rd, the husband of Kellyanne Conway, his top aide.
Conway is no liberal, and voted for Trump. Now, however, he feels “a little bit of guilt,” for having helped elect him. He calls the President a “malignant narcissist.” He told the New York Times yesterday that “I had assumed and hoped that the gravity of the office would lead him to something greater,” and that “respect for the office, respect for history and the desire to leave a legacy would lead him to see there is something beyond himself.”
But, Conway went on to say that from the day Trump took office, “it was clear almost instantaneously that he’s not capable of it.”
Okay. Consider this. These are just two examples from a single day of how our President is treating two fellow Republicans, one a dead war hero.
This is the man who is supposed to be both the top leader and symbol of our country. What’s wrong with this picture? Everything. I haven’t even touched on what is really far more frightening; his bizarre moves in foreign policy or on trade.
We simply cannot accept this as the new normal. Everyone, from the members of the cabinet to the Speaker of the House to the man at the drugstore cash register, needs to consider whether the nation can endure this insanity for twenty-two more months.
Do we want to risk letting our nation and our democracy be so easily destroyed?
