Trump Returns To The Scene Of The Crime
“I said three years ago, right after the Capitol was attacked, that I will support our nominee regardless of who it was, including him. I said earlier this year I supported him. He’s earned the nomination by the voters all across the country. Of course I’ll be in the meeting tomorrow.” Did Miss McConnell sound defensive much?
That was a reference to Trump’s meeting with Republican legislators at the Capitol Hill Club yesterday, where Trump whined about his grievances and boasted about his high polling numbers in blue states. It was his first return to Capitol Hill since his failed J-6 coup attempt in 2021 and subsequent second impeachment. He also babbled a bunch of nonsense about replacing the income tax with tariffs, an incredibly reactionary approach to taxation much beloved of the billionaire class that has reason to believe it owns him. If I remember correctly, the last time a Republican administration tried that, it heralded the Great Depression.
Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman found someone to tell them what went on during the closed door meeting with House members and reported that Señor T was there “supposedly to discuss his agenda for a second term with House Republicans. Instead, Trump treated his meeting as an opportunity to deliver a behind-closed-doors, stream-of-consciousness rant where Trump tried to settle scores in the House GOP, trashed the city of Milwaukee and took a shot at Nancy Pelosi’s ‘wacko’ daughter. As one source in the room put it, Trump was ‘rambling. Like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion,’ this source said… He also brought up Taylor Swift, asking the room why the pop singer would ‘endorse this dope,’ referring to Biden, according to a member in the room. Regarding his own platform, Trump touched on perhaps the thorniest subject facing the GOP: abortion. He warned that Republicans are ‘afraid of the issue’ and that it cost them ’40 seats.’ Trump suggested abortion only became a ‘complex issue’ 10 years ago.”
Before the meeting, Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell reported that the two meetings with GOP legislators would “spotlight the split between the Republicans who have endorsed his campaign and those who have not.” It looks like 5 House Republicans in districts Biden won still haven’t endorsed him yet— David Valadao (CA), who voted to impeach him after the insurrection, Young Kim (CA), Michelle Steel (CA), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) and Phoenix-area MAGAt David Schweikert (AZ), who has admitted he plans to endorse Trump as soon as he’s officially the nominee.
“Other vulnerable House Republicans,” wrote Caldwell and Meyer, “have been more nuanced. ‘I’ve said I’m going to support our nominee,’ Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who represents a Biden district and is planning to go to House Republicans’ meeting with Trump today. But Bacon said he understands not everyone in his district feels the same way. ‘Vote your conscience,’ he said. ‘Everybody has the right to vote [the way] they want. Some people are going to focus on the court conviction. I get that. That’s everybody’s right.’ …Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY) represents a Long Island district that Biden carried by 15 points in 2020— a bigger margin than in any other Republican-held district— but it hasn’t stopped him from backing Trump’s campaign enthusiastically. ‘I think Donald Trump is the leader that this country needs right now,’ he said. D’Esposito is relying on his voting record to distinguish himself from the rest of his party. ‘People that are going to be critical [of the endorsement] probably were never voting for me or Trump,’ D’Esposito said. ‘People know and see how hard I work for the district, how I’ve taken votes against my party to make sure I represent the people of the 4th Congressional District.’” D’Esposito probably feels safe because the DCCC is determined to lose the district again by renominating Laura Gillen the pointless, hapless moderate who lost to him last time.
Four of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial for his role in instigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are still in office: Mitt Romney (UT), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Susan Collins (ME) and Bill Cassidy (LA). “Only Cassidy is expected to go to lunch with Trump at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, our colleague Paul Kane writes. ‘The polls say he’s going to be our next president, so you got to work with him,’ Cassidy told reporters.”
I doubt many will but if congressional Republicans were smart, they’d read Tom Nichols’ latest column about Trump’s steadily deteriorating mental state before they tie their careers too firmly to his. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people— and the American media— to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events. For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit— and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird.”
Trump for years has fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in the national consciousness. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.
Why hasn’t there been more sustained and serious attention paid to Trump’s emotional state?
First, Trump’s target audience is used to him. Watch the silence that descends over the crowds at such moments; when Trump wanders off into the recesses of his own mind, they chit-chat or check their phones or look around, waiting for him to come back and offer them an applause line. For them, it’s all just part of the show.
Second, Trump’s staff tries to put just enough policy fiber into Trump’s nutty verbal soufflés that they can always sell a talking point later, as if his off-ramps from reality are merely tiny bumps in otherwise sensible speeches. Trump himself occasionally seems surprised when these policy nuggets pop up in a speech; when reading the teleprompter, he sometimes adds comments such as “so true, so true,” perhaps because he’s encountering someone else’s words for the first time and agreeing with them. Thus, they will later claim that questions about sharks or long-dead uncles are just bad-faith distractions from substance. (These are the same Republicans who claim that every verbal stumble from Joe Biden indicates full-blown dementia.)
Third, and perhaps most concerning in terms of public discussion, many people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media— and even the Democratic Party— has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist, the kind of thing that could only occur to Beltway mandarins who don’t understand how the candidate talks to normal people.
Such objections are mendacious nonsense and represent a massive double standard. As Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post wrote today: “It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality.” Biden’s mush-mouthed moments fall well within the range of normal gaffes. Had he or any other American politician said anything even remotely like one of Trump’s bizarre digressions, we’d be flooded with front-page stories about it. Pundits would be solemnly calling for a Much Needed National Conversation about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
It is long past time for anyone who isn’t in the Trump base to admit, and to keep talking about, something that has been obvious for years: Donald Trump is unstable. Some of these problems were evident when he first ran, and we now know from revelations by many of his former staff that his problems processing information and staying tethered to reality are not part of some hammy act.
Worse, the people who once managed Trump’s cognitive and emotional issues are gone, never to return. A second Trump White House will be staffed with the bottom of the barrel— the opportunists and hangers-on willing to work for a reprehensible man. His Oval Office will be empty of responsible and experienced public servants if the day comes when someone has to explain to him why war might be about to erupt on the Korean peninsula or why the Russian or Chinese nuclear forces have gone on alert, and he starts talking about frying sharks with boat batteries.
The 45th president is deeply unwell. It is long past time for Americans, including those in public life, to recognize his inability to serve as the 47th.
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