Our Deranged President

Our Deranged President

June 11, 2020

 

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, is deranged. I’m not a medical doctor, and I don’t intend that statement as a medical diagnosis. From my layman’s perspective, however, Trump seems completely deranged. There are lots and lots of examples of Trump’s behavior that seems erratic at best and psychotic at worst. Here are two recent such examples, the photo op in front of St. John’s Church and his reaction to a public opinion poll that CNN recently aired.

There were massive protests of the police murder of George Floyd, of police brutality against Black people generally, and of America’s intrinsic institutional racism. There were hundreds or perhaps thousands of people peaceably protesting near the White House. Trump decided he wanted to have his picture taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church located a short distance from the White House. Trump however couldn’t walk to St. John’s with all those protesters there. They were peaceful, just exercising their constitutional rights of free assembly and free speech. For Trump to have his photo op at St. John’s however they had to be cleared away. So someone in the Trump administration, perhaps Attorney General Barr or perhaps Trump himself, ordered Park Service police and National Guard troops to get them out of Trump’s way. Those forces attacked the peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets. The only thing that keeps this action from being totally fascist is that no one shot live rounds at the unarmed, peaceful people they were ordered to attack. At least we had no repeat of Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg in 1917 when tsarist forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrators.

So Trump, our Idiot-in Chief, walked across the street to St. John’s trailing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Attorney General with him. The church building was all boarded up. There hadn’t been worship services there for a long time because of the coronavirus pandemic. Individual-1, as the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York called him when that office named him as in effect an unindicted criminal coconspirator in the Michael Cohen case, stood awkwardly in front of the church. He held a Bible as awkwardly as he stood. Some official photographer took his picture. It is truly a bizarre photograph of an obviously uncomfortable Trump looking as awkward as he ever does standing in front of a boarded up church holding a Bible. We can only hope that that photo plays a role in him losing next November’s presidential election.

No president who was in touch with his oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States would ever use tear gas and rubber bullets against peaceful demonstrators. Trump obviously cares not one whit about Americans’ constitutional rights, but that is more of a political problem than a mental health one. Still, Trump’s use of grossly excessive force against peaceful protesters just so he could have a photo op suggests a megalomania that is hardly healthy. Beyond that, only someone out of touch with reality would think that getting a hopelessly awkward picture of himself clumsily brandishing a Bible we know he never reads and knows nothing about would do him any political good at all. That he used force to get that picture pretty clearly suggest that he has some sort of mental health issue.

More recently Trump came totally unglued because CNN broadcast the results of a nation-wide public opinion poll that showed former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president this year, leading Trump by fourteen percentage points. Trump went nuts. He has demanded that CNN air a retraction of its story on the poll and that it keep all records relating to the decision to broadcast the poll, suggesting that he or his reelection organization may sue them. He has said that pollsters generally are conspiring against his reelection.

Trump’s attack on CNN airing the results of a poll he doesn’t like seems downright paranoid. Yes, the poll in question shows Trump farther behind Biden that most polls do, but so what? Both print and broadcast media print and air things presidents don’t like all the time. Moreover, a mentally stable person would just brush this poll off as an outlier that will have no effect on the outcome of the November election whatsoever. Not so Trump. He throws a paranoid tantrum and threatens legal action he would have absolutely no chance of winning. Federal and state court judges, even utterly unqualified federal judges Trump has nominated and the rubber stamp Republicans in the Senate have confirmed, know that there is in this country something called the First Amendment to the US Constitution. They know that it guarantees freedom of the press including broadcast media. Most courts would throw any action Trump brought against CNN for airing the results of that poll on summary judgment.

I once lived for a year in a place where there was no freedom of the press, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I got to know a young man there who was a journalism student at Moscow State University. He once said to me that he was allowed to write only about what was good but everything he saw was bad. In the Soviet Union journalists were free (or even required) to write paeans to the Communist Party and the Soviet government. With the exception of a very few areas such as the shoddy construction of so many new apartment buildings they were prohibited from depicting anything negative in their reporting. The Soviet press was not free. The Communist Party and the organs of government controlled it so that served not the truth but the interests of the Party and the Soviet state.

That’s the kind of press Trump wants. He’s an American fascist, and that’s the only kind of press fascists can tolerate. Yet with Trump it’s not just that he thinks free media outlets are a bad thing because they say bad things about him. When he sees things in the media that he takes as negative he gets paranoid. Again, that’s not a medical diagnosis; but what he does sure seems paranoid to this lay observer. People inside his administration say he throws temper tantrums. He threatens utterly untenable legal action. He accuses people of conspiring against him when there is no evidence whatsoever of any conspiracy. My layman’s understanding of paranoia sure explains much of his behavior better than any other explanation I’ve heard.

So here we are, stuck with a deranged president until at least January 20, 2021. We don’t know what sort of irrational actions he’ll take before then. We just hope they don’t involve the nuclear weapons he has the power to unleash. We don’t know what paranoid temper tantrums he’ll throw between now and then or what their consequences will be. We just know he’ll throw temper tantrums. We just know he’ll be paranoid, all of which means we can’t be rid of him soon enough.