An Inoperable Tumor
How to remove a madman from the White House?
By HAL CROWTHER
It’s time to face this central fact, while facts still matter. The president of the United States is mentally ill, and not mildly ill either. He’s a hollow shell of diseased self-regard who’s been stuffed with alt-right ideology by some of the most loathsome opportunists in the political ecosystem — if you don’t recognize Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway as the kind of bottom-feeding creatures who breed in solid-waste lagoons, you really aren’t paying attention.
Some of us have been saying since 2015 that Donald Trump was better qualified for the madhouse than the White House. Post-inaugural events have advanced this argument beyond debate or objective denial. Thomas L. Friedman, the least excitable of anti-Trump columnists, warns us in this morning’s Times, “His lack of respect for institutions and truth pours out so fast, you start to forget how crazy this behavior is for any adult, let alone a president …” Note the word “crazy.” Carl Bernstein, whose reporting on Watergate helped to rid us of the last president whose mental health was precarious, can be heard on CNN declaring this a far worse case than Nixon’s paranoia, a genuine psychiatric crisis that has some of Bernstein’s best sources in the Republican Party sharing dark fears of chaos and breakdown. According to one of my best sources in Washington, the psychiatric department at Georgetown’s medical school is unanimous in its verdict that the president is not and has never been playing with a full deck.
Glenn Beck, of all people, calls him “dangerously unhinged.” Historians will argue about similar displays of instability by previous presidents. But Trump is our curse and our burden at this critical moment, as he and his eerie team of belligerent generals, reactionary billionaires and white nationalists dismantle a federal government that reflected, at times, the values and aspirations of progressive Americans. In order to replace it, apparently, with a banana-republic plutocracy that brings words like “oligarchy” and “junta” to mind, and wire-service photos of beribboned dictators with pencil-thin mustaches. This is not fanciful, or alarmist in the least. The overwhelming question facing us, of course, is “What the hell can we do?”
If I could tell you, in so many words, what to do with a legally elected mad president, I’d be the logical nominee for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Anyone who has attempted to commit a seriously deranged family member knows just how legally exhausting and emotionally wrenching it can be. A delicate business at best. Even Uncle Leo, who streaks high-school football games in a Speedo, has his rights, and his feelings. And Trump, an orange-crested lunatic who sits up there in the Lincoln Bedroom in his bathrobe tweeting hate mail at journalists and imaginary antagonists, is currently commander-in-chief of the most powerful military machine in the history of this sweet planet.
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