He's Obviously Not Mentally Fit-- What Do We Do?

Friday Arnold Schwarzenegger told Empire he won't be signing on for another season of Celebrity Apprentice because the show is drowning in Trump's stench, although he put it more politely. "I learned a lot, I had a great time, it was a really great opportunity. But under the circumstances I don't want to do it again... [The loss of advertisers] is not about the show, because everyone I ran into came up to me and said 'I love the show... but I turned it off because as soon as I read Trump's name I'm outta there!'... When people found out that Trump was still involved as executive producer and was still receiving money from the show, then half the people [started] boycotting it... With Trump being involved in the show people have a bad taste and don't want to participate as a spectator or as a sponsor or in any other way support the show. It's a very divisive period now and I think this show got caught up in all that division."

Early this morning, strung out on Adderall, the psychopath in the White House tweeted "Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show."

Trump was up at 5AM tweeting his bizarre attacks on President Obama, but he grabbed a minute to babble his nonsense about Schwarzenegger. People should be wondering why Paul Ryan has bottled up Ted Lieu's legislation requiring that a psychiatrist be available at the White House. After all, Lieu told Amy Goodman last week that "in 1928, Congress passed a law requiring that doctors be at the White House, because Congress concluded that presidents are human beings, and like all human beings, we have our own frailties. Because of how people viewed mental health at the time, there was no psychiatrist or psychologist that was required. In the 21st century, we know that mental health is just as important as physical health, so it seemed to make sense that the White House should also have a psychiatrist or a psychologist available. I am not the first to bring this up. Republican Chairman Jason Chaffetz told the Washington Post earlier this year that he thought the president should have an independent mental health exam. And I also know that in 2015 the National Defense Authorization Act, which was supported by over 300 members of Congress on a bipartisan basis, required incoming military recruits to get a mental health exam. Keep in mind, the president is also the commander-in-chief of our armed forces, and he can launch 4,000 nuclear weapons in a matter of minutes. So that’s what we’re looking at... [T]he demands of the presidency have increased significantly, especially since the advent of nuclear weapons, and the president should have the best treatment available. In terms of this bill, we’re trying to see if this is the best way to go about it. Clearly, to me, when you have a president that lies pathologically, that believes in alternative facts, it suggests to me there is a problem. I don’t know the extent of that problem. I don’t know what the best solution is. But I do think that this issue should be raised. And so I raised the issue. It is a bipartisan issue. And we’re trying to get more information and to see what’s a good next step."

A few days later David Cay Johnson was on Democracy Now too, saying that Trump lies as easily as you and I breathe. He is, by becoming president of the United States, the number one con artist in the history of the world. He has spent his entire adult life deeply in the embrace of violent felons, Russian mobsters, American mobsters, assorted swindlers and crooks. He has cheated his own workers out of their pay. He has cheated small business people out of their fees. He has swindled investors in properties that were branded with the Trump name. And so, it’s absolutely critical to understand that you can’t rely on anything that Donald Trump says as president of the United States, but especially when he knows that he’s got stuff in his closet to hide."

In this morning's NY Times, Maggie Haberman tried getting into what hiding all that stuff-- less and less successfully-- is doing to Trump's psyche.

President Trump was still upbeat Wednesday night, as he settled into dinner in the White House residence with his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, some 24 hours after giving the most consequential speech of his brief presidency.

But not long afterward, the glow from Mr. Trump’s best day in office began to fade with the breaking news that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had met with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 campaign. Mr. Sessions failed to mention those conversations in his Senate confirmation hearing, or, according to presidential advisers, to tell Mr. Trump at all.

The story overshadowed Mr. Trump’s visit the next day to the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, a classic presidential opportunity to highlight his role as commander in chief. And by the time he got back to the White House on Thursday night, the president let his frustration show.

In a statement repeating a familiar critique that Democrats were on a “witch hunt” over the administration’s ties with Russia, Mr. Trump offered a passing but pointed public jab at how Mr. Sessions had handled the matter. “He could have stated his response more accurately,” Mr. Trump said.

For Mr. Trump, it was the latest unforeseen obstacle preventing him from gaining traction after a historically bumpy first month in office that has been marked by massive national protests, the dismissal of his national security adviser, and historically low approval ratings.

The president was irritated that Mr. Sessions did not more carefully answer the questions he was asked under oath, according to people who spoke with him. His larger frustration, however, was not with Mr. Sessions, but with whoever revealed the meetings to reporters for the Washington Post.

Mr. Trump, according to his advisers inside and outside of the White House, has felt besieged by what he regards as a mostly hostile bureaucracy, consisting in part of Democrats and people who opposed his election who are now undermining his presidency with leaks. He believes that they are behind the stories about confusion and dysfunction in his administration and, most of all, that they have made his relationship with Russia a recurring issue.

“That is the real story,” said Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, when asked for comment on how the White House views the constant string of stories based on what they have called leaks. Several of those stories have raised questions about ties between the president’s 2016 campaign and Russian officials.

Allies of Mr. Trump say his sense of being surrounded by hostile forces will be relieved once his own appointments fill the thousands of political jobs that have not yet been filled. But people close to Mr. Trump concede that the White House’s sluggish hiring process, in which insufficient work was done to tap people for key deputy roles at major agencies during the transition process, is a large part of the problem.

...Trump is not one to spare the blame when he has hit difficult patches in the past, and his rebuke of Mr. Sessions reflected that. So did his public jab at his press secretary, Sean Spicer, for his attempt to trace leaks from his communications staff members by examining their cellphones. Mr. Trump told Fox News that he personally would have done that type of search “differently.”

But the stories related to Russia are of a different order of magnitude.

During the transition he publicly called out the intelligence community for being behind the leaks and at one point, he compared them to smears conducted by the Nazis in the 1940s. More recently, he has blamed Democrats bitter over the defeat of Hillary Clinton.

But while Mr. Trump puts the blame on leakers for his administration’s rough start, it has not helped that the White House has been distracted by internecine skirmishes, partly dictated by lingering tensions between long-serving advisers and aides to the Republican National Committee, who came to work for the president after he tapped the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, as his chief of staff.

In the midst of it, Mr. Trump, who has a famously short attention span, has at times had trouble staying on course. He is pondering a broader response to the Russia issue, people close to him say, but he is so far stymied by opponents he can’t see, but who have clearly knocked him off track.

On Friday, Mr. Trump tried to go back on the offensive with two Twitter messages, one about Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and the other about Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, and their meetings with Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Instead of the intemperate messages that Mr. Trump has often deployed, he had help from the White House social media team in crafting the Twitter posts. But in doing it, he ended the week by breathing more oxygen into the Russia issue.

Such daily skirmishes might satisfy the need to fight back, but Republicans who want him to succeed caution that Mr. Trump’s fate as president will lie in his actual accomplishments.

“If they get some legislative successes, they’ll be fine,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, “and if they don’t, that’s when the real trouble begins.”

So what now? Is there any way to get out from under this without triggering a constitutional crisis on the level not seen since the Civil War? Is the Deep State trying to undermine Trump for their own reasons? Can the country muddle through this for 4 years?