President's Mental Health Questioned Amid a Sea of Stupidity
Coo-Coo Kajub, I am the eggman, I am the walrus...
The President of the United States sat down for a history making interview with NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker that was broadcast over the weekend, and the not-very-kind reviews are in.
Donald Trump’s answers amounted to a sustained soliloquy bouncing back and forth between denial, deception, and delusion. The man doesn’t have an opinion on whether or not the leader of the country has an obligation to uphold the Constitution. He thinks everything bad about the economy is Joe Biden’s fault and everything good is his doing. And a TV movie inspired him to announce a project to rebuild the prison at Alcatraz.
Trump’s demeanor and delivery has prompted open speculation about his mental state from observers ranging from Karl Rove to Mehdi Hasan. However, when asked potentially damaging legal questions during the interview he constantly deferred to his attorneys, which tells me the president isn’t completely delusional.
I would be thrilled if the mental health of our politicians was just an aspect of their being. The people we give power to by virtue of the office they hold are victims; of the tradition of associating mental tribulations with evil, of the perception that illness is associated with weakness, and of the fears associated with admitting ones’ problems.
In the case of our elderly politicians, mental illness can be associated or confused with cognitive decline. The symptoms are often mostly harmless; forgetfulness, a cranky persona, an obsession with the past. I’ve seen this with my parents aging into their eighties and nineties, a half century ago with my dad’s father bellowing out requests for things already at his fingertips, and I sometimes worry what awaits on my path into the ozone.
I’ve had professional mental health care over the past few decades, including therapy and successive generations of medications, and on a day-to-day basis, I feel good about my existence, the end result of choices I’ve made, and the people I care about.
At the same time I have a past that’s included various levels of self medication, episodes of depression and unrestrained exultation, and always the false pride serving as a wall to hide insecurities and emotions. I tried too hard to be cool. I was convinced of my intellectual superiority as a means of defending against a nagging sense of low physical esteem.
In short, I’ve had good periods and bad periods, and while I see them more clearly now, I can’t help but wonder about the residual damage I don’t recall and/or suppress. I have cringe alerts attached to too many memories and still shudder when recalling people and places.
I wish, I wish, I wish, that mental health issues were considered normal within a spectrum. Our tendency as a nation to ignore the obvious for the sake of not embarrassing anyone enabled to a degree the situation we find ourselves in.
Former President Biden had good days and bad days when it came to memory, and coupled with a lifelong stuttering problem, this allowed people with bad intentions to shape an image of incompetence. A half century into the future I doubt his presidency will be thought of as unremarkable. He got stuff done and was perceived as a decent man, even as his past limited the possibilities, and forces of darkness prepared to strike.
Now we have an unstable man as president, who has rarely been held to the consequences of his actions. From what I can tell by his actions, he’s delusional and preferred to be isolated from anything not providing gratification. His persona invites sadism by those around him because his ego feasts on it.
The problem with Donald Trump isn’t that he’s crossed a line into a conjured up reality, it’s that the people who have grifted (yes, it’s deliberate) in his direction are using his anger and victimhood as an accessory to their visions of a future built around the idea of wealth as a means of spiritual attainment.
Lately it’s been harder to ignore episodes of psychosis. The President of the United States believes that his will should be law, no matter what the circumstances. A proclamation about establishing tariffs on movies is bonkers, both in the assumptions engendering the sense of urgency and in the broader implications of taxing intellectual property. And then there’s the matter of how tariffs could be levied and their impact on the commercial viability of the genre.
What was intended to be a bold move on the world stage has failed thus far. Consumers in the European Union countries are now using an app that tells them the country of origin of merchandise and are avoiding US-made items.
China, even though factories are closing and layoffs are widespread, is not backing down in the face of threats alternating with false promises of negotiations coming from Trump.
Christmas orders should already be underway, but because of the tariffs, they are not. Trump has taken to arguing that girls need fewer dolls. Representative David Joyce (R-OH) acknowledged this morning on CNN that Christmas trade is already slowing down, but added: “I think American people will understand that because American people understand shared sacrifice.”
Americans who didn’t realize they were going to be asked to sacrifice—Trump promised that foreign countries would pay for tariffs, after all—have been pushing back against the tariffs. Apparently angry at being asked how trade negotiations are going, Trump last night told reporters on Air Force One: “At the end of this, I'll set my own deals because I set the deal. They don't set the deal. I set the deal. They've been ripping us off for years. I set the deal.... I'm going to be setting the deal. I'll be setting the tariff.”
Last night, in a social media post, Trump announced that foreign-made films are a national security threat and said he would institute “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Today the White House walked the announcement back.
Reopening Alcatraz as a prison may be the result of a movie he watched recently:
“I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders,” he continued. “We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
A Bluesky user provided some more details on this seemingly random announcement.
“I may have context for this! Last night WPBT in Palm Beach broadcast the 1979 Clint Eastwood film ‘Escape from Alcatraz,’” they wrote. Trump was in Palm Beach on the night in question.
Whatever the trigger, the impulse is pure sadism. He wants a prison that will make other autocrats jealous, complete with an environment designed to induce eternal suffering.
In the coming days and weeks we’ll begin to see economic stressors resulting from the always bouncing ball of tariff probabilities, and that’s when we’ll see the president’s next act. He is averse to bad news, and given his power and proclivities, things may get wild.
In any case, people can call Donald Trump crazy and nothing will happen. He’s always been truthful about one thing, and that is the nature of his being. However, the triumph of his vision and that of the billionaires abetting his destructive actions is not assured.
After this weekend people are asking if this is the moment where the fever dream of Trumpian disorder breaks, and I say nope, there’s more to come.
The good news in all this is that the “shock and awe” part of this administration is no longer having the impact it once did. And people looking around at what other countries threatened with authoritarian regimes have done say we’re reaching the point where a dedicated and consistent resistance begins to have an impact.
Here’s Joyce Vance:
This week and every week the lesson is clear: Do not give into the bully. You can’t win if you cave. Trump has not won in court on a single one of his executive orders trying to bring the law firms to heel. Every firm that has pushed back has won. Trump lost another one Friday evening. Judge Beryl Howell in the District of Columbia told the Supreme Court to step aside while she wrote an opinion that truly is for the ages, including this footnote: “If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.” Although the opinion is 102 pages, you may want to skim it.
At dinner this weekend, a friend told me that one of the most encouraging conversations she’d had recently involved a look at how other countries that have been through a democratic backsliding process, like Hungary and Poland, did. It turns out that the temporary paralysis that came with the first 100 days of this administration is fairly normal for countries in this position, especially for the opposition. Then, everyone gathers themselves together and moves forward.
The timing of our conversation was perfect, because as I’ve been doing a lot of research about how other countries have worked through attempts by would-be dictators to take over, as I continue to work on my book. I had reached the same conclusion—that giving ourselves a little grace for the shock of dealing with a president who wants to dismantle democracy is appropriate. But it’s also important to remind ourselves that just like Americans saved the country during the Civil War, during the Civil Rights era, during Watergate, we can do it again.