The Consequences Can Be Very Dire When A President Loses His Mind

Never Waste A Serious Crisis by Nancy Ohanian

Former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) couldn't stand Trump-- and retired from the Senate because of him-- but was always a die-hard, full-bore conservative and never any kind of moderate. He'll do something many conservative Republicans plan to do: voted for a conservative Democrat for the first time in their lives. On core issues, he has no real problems with Biden. Besides, he told the Washington Post's K.K. Otteson a few days ago, the best thing for the future of the Republican party would be "a sound defeat" for Señor Trumpanzee in November. "No doubt. Long term for the Republican Party, you bet. And for conservatism as well."

Nor is Flake the only strange source of negativity aimed in Trump's direction.Kevin Rudd was the prime minister of Australia twice-- once when George W. Bush was president and again when Obama was president. On Wednesday, Foreign Affairs published a piece he penned, The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy. "[D]espite the best efforts of ideological warriors in Beijing and Washington," he wrote, "the uncomfortable truth is that China and the United States are both likely to emerge from this crisis significantly diminished. Neither a new Pax Sinica nor a renewed Pax Americana will rise from the ruins. Rather, both powers will be weakened, at home and abroad. And the result will be a continued slow but steady drift toward international anarchy across everything from international security to trade to pandemic management. With nobody directing traffic, various forms of rampant nationalism are taking the place of order and cooperation. The chaotic nature of national and global responses to the pandemic thus stands as a warning of what could come on an even broader scale."

Heady stuff to grapple with for a man who George Conway noted this week is burdened with narcissism that "deadens any ability he might otherwise have had to carry out the duties of a president in the manner the Constitution requires. He’s so self-obsessed, he can only act for himself, not for the nation. It’s why he was impeached, and why he should have been removed from office... Trump’s lying, his self-regard, his self-soothing, his lack of empathy, his narcissistic rage, his contempt for norms, rules, laws, facts and simple truths-- have all come home to roost. Now he sees his poll numbers fall accordingly, and lashes out with ever-increasing anger. For deep in his psyche he knows the truth. Because he fears being revealed as a fake or deranged, he’ll call others fake or deranged. Because he fears losing, he’ll call them losers instead. And while Trump’s mind roils in rage, too many Americans are losing their lives. That’s the losing that matters, to everyone but him.

Rudd recognizes the problem and it was reflected in his essay. "[T]he United States’ power, the Trump administration’s chaotic management has left an indelible impression around the world of a country incapable of handling its own crises, let alone anybody else’s. More important, the United States seems set to emerge from this period as a more divided polity rather than a more united one, as would normally be the case following a national crisis of this magnitude; this continued fracturing of the American political establishment adds a further constraint on U.S. global leadership... The world has watched in horror as an American president acts not as the leader of the free world but as a quack apothecary recommending unproven 'treatments.' It has seen what 'America First' means in practice: don’t look to the United States for help in a genuine global crisis, because it can’t even look after itself. Once there was the United States of the Berlin airlift. Now there is the image of the USS Theodore Roosevelt crippled by the virus, reports of the administration trying to take exclusive control of a vaccine being developed in Germany, and federal intervention to stop the commercial sale of personal protective equipment to Canada. The world has been turned on its head."

"The President Is Unraveling," wrote conservative Republican Peter Wehner, who previously worked for the Reagan administration as well as for both Bush administrations, as well as for rightist icons Jack Kemp and Keane Kirkpatrick. His Atlantic essay this week warned that the country is witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of Donald Trump.

"In case there was any doubt," he wrote, "the past dozen days have proved we’re at the point in his presidency where Donald Trump has become his own caricature, a figure impossible to parody, a man whose words and actions are indistinguishable from an Alec Baldwin skit on Saturday Night Live." He noted that the Trumpanzee "pièce de résistance came during a late April coronavirus task-force briefing, when he floated using 'just very powerful light' inside the body as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and then, for good measure, contemplated injecting disinfectant as a way to combat the effects of the virus 'because you see it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on them, so it’d be interesting to check that.' But the burlesque show just keeps rolling on."

Trump savaged Bush for his participation in the non-partisan Call to Unite live stream benefiting COVID-19 relief. Bush expressed "gratitude to health-care workers, encouraged Americans to abide by social-distancing rules, and reminded his fellow Americans that we have faced trying times before." he never referred to Trump, but did say "In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants; we are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise."

Wehner reckoned that was too much for Trump, who tweeted "[Bush] was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!"

So think about that for a minute. George W. Bush made a moving, eloquent plea for empathy and national unity, which enraged Donald Trump enough that he felt the need to go on the attack.

But there’s more. On the same weekend that he attacked Bush for making an appeal to national unity, Trump said this about Kim Jong Un, one of the most brutal leaders in the world: “I, for one, am glad to see he is back, and well!”

Then, Sunday night, sitting at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for a town-hall interview with Fox News, Trump complained that he is “treated worse” than President Abraham Lincoln. “I am greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump said.

By Monday morning, the president was peddling a cruel and bizarre conspiracy theory aimed at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a Trump critic, with Trump suggesting in his tweet that a “cold case” be opened to look into the death of an intern in 2001.

I could have picked a dozen other examples over the past 10 days, but these five will suffice. They illustrate some of the essential traits of Donald Trump: the shocking ignorance, ineptitude, and misinformation; his constant need to divide Americans and attack those who are trying to promote social solidarity; his narcissism, deep insecurity, utter lack of empathy, and desperate need to be loved; his feelings of victimization and grievance; his affinity for ruthless leaders; and his fondness for conspiracy theories.

...[T]hose traits are defining his presidency, producing a kind of creeping paralysis. We are witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of an American president. It’s something the Trump White House cannot hide-- indeed, it doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. There is not even the slightest hint of normalcy.

This will have ongoing ramifications for the remainder of Trump’s first term and for his reelection strategy. More than ever, Trump will try to convince Americans that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” to quote his own words in 2018.

That won’t be easy in a pandemic, as the death toll mounts and the economy collapses and the failures of the president multiply. But that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. It’s all he has left, so Americans have to prepare for it.

Trump and his apparatchiks will not only step up their propaganda; they will increase their efforts to exhaust our critical thinking and to annihilate truth, in the words of the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. We will see even more “alternative facts.” We will see even more brazen attempts to rewrite history. We will hear even more crazy conspiracy theories. We will witness even more lashing out at reporters, more rage, and more lies.

“The real opposition is the media,” Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, once told the journalist Michael Lewis. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

We will see more extreme appeals to the fringe base of Trump’s party, including right-wing militias. For example, after hundreds of protesters, many of them carrying guns, descended on the capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, Trump, summoning the ghosts of Charlottesville, described the protesters as “very good people.” Some of these “very good people” carried signs saying tyrants get the rope and tyrant bitch and comparing the governor to Hitler.

We will see a more prominent role played by One America News, a pro-Trump network that the president has praised dozens of times. And we will see the right-wing media complex go to even more bizarre places—not just people such as InfoWar’s Alex Jones, who literally threatened to eat his own neighbors if the lockdown continued, but more mainstream figures such as Salem Radio Network’s Dennis Prager, who declared the other day that the lockdown was “the greatest mistake in the history of humanity.”

Watching formerly serious individuals on the right, including the Christian right, become Trump courtiers has been a painful and dispiriting thing for many of us to witness. In the process, they have reconfigured their own character, intellect, and moral sensibilities to align with the disordered mind and deformed ethical world of Donald Trump.

And we will see, as we have for the entire Trump presidency, the national Republican Party fall in line. Many are speaking out in defense of Trump while other timid souls who know better have gone sotto voce out of fear and cowardice that they have justified to themselves, and tried less successfully to justify to others.

What this means is that Americans are facing not just a conventional presidential election in 2020 but also, and most important, a referendum on reality and epistemology. Donald Trump is asking us to enter even further into his house of mirrors. He is asking us to live within a lie, to live within his lie, for four more years. The duty of citizenship in America today is to refuse to live within that lie.

“The simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions,” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said in his mesmerizing 1970 Nobel lecture. “Let that enter the world, let it even reign in the world-- but not with my help.”

Solzhenitsyn went on to say that writers and artists can achieve more; they can conquer falsehoods. “Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art,” he said.

But art, as powerful as it is, is not the only instrument with which to fight falsehoods. There are also the daily acts of integrity of common men and women who will not believe the lies or spread the lies, who will not allow the foundation of truth-- factual truth, moral truth-- to be destroyed, and who, in standing for truth, will help heal this broken land.