The mainstream media are finally beginning to say out loud what so many of them have recognized since before the election: that Donald Trump is a sick puppy.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein tweeted last week that “important Republicans” and higher ups in the intelligence and military communities had been “increasingly saying in private that @realDonaldTrump is unfit to be president.”
That was on Tuesday. By Thursday, GOP Sen. Bob Corker, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, questioned Donald Trump’s fitness aloud with a quote that ricocheted around Washington at lighting speed.
The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence, that he needs to demonstrate in order for him to be successful…
By Sunday, CNN’s Brian Stelter devoted an entire segment to mounting questions about Trump’s mental suitability to function as leader of our nation.
“Is the president of the United States a racist? Is he suffering from some kind of illness? Is he fit for office? “And if he is unfit, then what?” Stelter asked on the program Reliable Sources. Bernstein appeared on the segment, providing more details about the chatter he mentioned earlier in the week.
via Daily Kos
Of course you heard it here first. Well, you might not have heard it here first, but you heard it here before you heard it on CNN. Still, better late than never, though one must wonder whether this ever would have come to the surface had Trump not equated Nazis with people opposed to Nazis.
I thought this picture, which appeared in the post to which I’ve linked, was interesting.
We are all familiar with the trope that the presidency ages people quickly. We’ve seen the before and after pictures, which sometimes seem to show dramatic changes over the course of a comparatively few years. This picture, I’d submit, shows a Trump that has changed in only a few months. In the case of other presidents it’s the stress of handling the responsibilities of the job. In the case of Trump, that probably has little to do with it. In his case, he’s having trouble handling the fact that he is not getting the adulation that he believes is his due. He appears to have believed that if he were elected president the world, or at least the country, would worship him. Why he would believe such a thing, particularly after the way he treated Obama, is a mystery to anyone who thinks rationally, but Trump does not think rationally. Narcissist that he is, he really believed he was different. He’s finding that it’s not easy to be a total fraud, as he has been all his life, when the spotlight is always on you. When he was a loud mouthed real estate developer he was merely an amusing sideshow. Even his criminal behavior, at its base no different than the criminal behavior of his less loudmouthed ilk, went uninvestigated. (Why spend resources going after white collar crime when its easier and cheaper to go after the wretched of the earth?)All that has now changed, and he can’t cope, nor can he control his behavior so as to mitigate the revulsion people feel for him. Never have we had a president so widely loathed nor have we had a president whose very sanity was openly questioned (and rightly so) in the major media. He can call it fake news all he likes, but it’s eating away at him. It is literally impossible for him to control himself, so he will provoke even more disgust as time goes on. Only Trump, given his present situation, would let it be known that he’s even considering pardoning Joe Arpaio. Only Trump, given his present situation, would actually do it. But I’m guessing he will, and that will be just one more milestone on the way to the inevitable wholesale breakdown.
We constantly hear that Trump’s base will never desert him, which is probably true for a large portion of that base. But there’s a portion of the right that can’t abide a politician that exposes it for what it is. How else explain that even graduates of the loathsome Liberty University are returning their diplomas to protest Jerry Falwell Jr.’s support for Trumps defense of Nazis. There are some things you’re simply not supposed to say out loud. But Trump can’t help himself, and as the pressure mounts, he’s more than likely to become even more unhinged.
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