His Truth Social posts show he's better suited in a mental institution than at a negotiating table.
This past weekend, Trump’s social media feed was a wellspring of lunacy. He posted more than 50 times on Saturday alone, hurling personal attacks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rosie O’Donnell — one of whom was never actually president.
He
shared an absurd AI-generated image of himself as a New York Knicks player
dunking on Gov. Kathy Hochul. He boasted about defeating “disloyal” Republicans
in their primaries. He continued picking fights with the Pope. He attacked the
judge who ruled that he couldn’t illegally deface the Kennedy Center with his
name.
After even half of Milli Vanilli refused to perform at his America 250 event, Trump posted this gaping wound of narcissistic injury:
I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President.
Until an appearance before cameras yesterday in which he
seemed extremely tired and nearly comatose,
Trump hadn’t been seen in public since May 27 — the day after his most recent
trip to Walter Reed — so while these posts were technically “proof of life,”
they were hardly a reassuring statement of mental stability.
Yet Trump’s unhinged posts last weekend weren’t the stuff of
front-page coverage at the New York Times or Washington Post, even though
there’s a direct line between them and the administration’s ongoing disaster in
Iran. After all, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to determine, based on the
president’s online crash out, that the Trump administration is no closer to a
resolution of the war.
White House officials keep insisting that they’re just a “couple days” away from a deal with Iran. It’s almost become like the running joke in the 1986 Tom Hanks film, “The Money Pit,” where corrupt contractors keep telling Hanks’ character that repairs will just take another “two weeks.”
Nonetheless, mainstream media outlets dutifully report the administration’s claims of an impending deal. Their continued credulity is especially unwarranted considering that the person ultimately in charge of any resolution, the actual commander in chief, is the same man who gloated over the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” with an AI-generated post depicting Trump hurling Colbert into a dumpster and dancing gleefully.
The rate of Trump’s manic posting on social media accelerated in
May, just as Iran became more of a no-spin scenario for the president. Unable
to dig himself out of his deepening hole, he spent most of Memorial Day weekend
mentally unraveling online. He resumed his
unprecedented threats against a US ally with two Truth Social posts that
depicted his massive face looming sinisterly over Greenland. He posted an AI
image of Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in a sheep costume with vampire teeth,
writing, “A Dumocrat! Don’t allow this lying sleazebag on FoxNews!”
Anyone who saw these posts could reasonably conclude Trump is better suited in a mental institution and not at a negotiating table.
The breakdowns aren’t a ‘distraction’
Legacy media might wish to avoid taking the apparently bold
moral position that the US president shouldn’t behave like a crazy person, but
in the process they’re ignoring the bombshell story that the sitting one is
deranged.
The social media screeds and public meltdowns don’t simply
demonstrate Trump’s low character. They show a president who’s mentally and
morally incapable of effective leadership. In a sane world, every manic posting
spree would generate wall-to-wall coverage demanding his resignation or forced
removal from office.
Yet, instead, the press seemingly covers the president as though he’s two distinct personas — the petty, bigoted shitposter and an otherwise normal if slightly unconventional commander in chief. But the sad reality is that the unstable shitposter is the only Trump, and unfortunately, that’s the one who’s in the room where the “dealmaking” happens.
If Nixon’s irrational paranoia destroyed his presidency,
Trump’s presidency, especially during his second term when he’s surrounded
himself with nothing but sycophants, exists only to further his personal
grievances and vendettas. Nothing matters more to him than callow displays of
dominance.
Even if we buy the media-enabled GOP narrative that Trump is
merely a fun-having jerk who enjoys “trolling” his opponents, it clearly gets
in the way of business. Trump’s gross behavior isn’t a wily strategy. It comes
off like a psychotic compulsion.
Consider that Trump spent the first year and a half of his
second reign of terror alienating America’s allies. He launched vindictive,
petty global trade wars. He threatened both Greenland and Canada with
annexation — churlishly calling Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “future
Governor of Canada.” (Last week, Trump shared an
article about Canada’s economic challenges with the words “51st State!”) Trump
has minimized the contribution our NATO allies have made to the global order.
He gutted critical foreign aid and abandoned US soft power.
Other leaders of the actual free world have expressed doubt that America is still on their side. To the extent you could call isolating America from the free world an actual strategy, it all blew up in Trump’s face after he started a war of choice in Iran and desperately needed our allies’ support.
It’s not just that Trump’s incompetent — because he very much is — he’s fundamentally incapable of restraining his worst impulses. So he replaces complex diplomacy with thuggish rants on social media. When US allies weren’t rushing to bail him out of his self-inflicted Iran disaster, Trump whined in March:
"Because of the fact we have had such Military Success, we no longer 'need,' or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of US, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!"
That last all-caps sentence in particular reads like a
clarion cry for help.
Peter Baker at the New York Times wrote in
April that Trump’s “erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and
weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that
has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” But what’s
“crazy” is that the Times would even frame this as a debate.
Trump is not “crazy like a fox,” unless the specific fox is
also mentally unwell. Both the economy and Trump’s approval rating are in free
fall. There is obviously no method to his unchecked madness. Last week, Trump
casually threatened the Middle East nation of Oman, one of America’s staunchest
allies in the region, if it didn’t bend to his shambolic will: “Oman will
behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.”
It’s frightening how much the public Trump sounds like his
most bonkers social media rant.
After noting that Trump obsessively posts “disjointed,
hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements” that threaten war crimes
against Iran or personally attack the Pope as “WEAK
on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Baker made this bizarre
comparison: “While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under
question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged
demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability
of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with such
profound consequences.”
This is maddening, as Trump and Biden simply don’t belong in
the same conversation about a president’s deteriorating mental state. As amply
covered in the press, Biden was in fact old and thus experienced age-related
decline, but the worst-case scenario with him at the wheel was not a potential
nuclear holocaust. Even when Special Counsel Robert Hur gratuitously described
Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur conceded that Biden otherwise
presented as “sympathetic“ and “well-meaning.“
Biden on his worst day was emotionally stable. Trump, on
every day, is outright sadistic, and his resulting behavior is increasingly
reckless. Biden’s diplomacy united allies against Russia after Putin invaded
Ukraine. He successfully negotiated bipartisan bills in Congress. But Trump has
blown up longstanding alliances while purging dissenters and weaponizing
government against his foes.
During Trump’s first term, Republicans would often say they
wished he would post on social media less and govern more. This promoted the
myth that Trump was actually competent, the dysfunction limited to his
smartphone. Now, Republicans don’t even bother. They accept Trump’s madness,
but that’s no reason we should ever ignore it.
Trump’s increasingly obvious unfiltered mental instability
is the true original sin that should headline every news article until he’s
finally out of office.
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