It’s something of a rare day when two major papers run columns questioning not the policy of a presidential candidate, but his sanity. First, up, the Washington Post.
One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality. We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.
And then the Toronto Star.
There is an elephant in the election.
It was tiptoed around for a full year by Republicans and Democrats and the media alike. ...
It’s a delicate thing to ask, but the fate of humankind is at stake. Is Donald Trump … OK?
Practically every Republican leader in the nation had a microphone shoved in their face yesterday providing them a golden opportunity: Would you like to detach from the Trump train now that he’s A) attacking Gold Star families, B) declaring that he does/does not know Vladimir Putin personally, C) advocating for the invasion of the Ukraine?
Unfortunately something like 99.9 percent of Republicans decided that “I support the nominee of the party” is still the driving force even when the nominee is attempting to drown the party in raw sewage. And now they get to keep him.
So, having written a new chapter in Profiles in Cowardice, Republicans will find it ever more difficult to detach themselves from this guy.
Why denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq? And why keep it going for four days? Why assail the record of a decorated general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan? Why make fun of the stature of a popular former mayor of New York? Surely Trump must know that at any convention, including his own, people get up and criticize the opposition party’s nominee. They get their shots in, just as your party got its shots in. And then you move on to the next phase of the campaign. You don’t take a crack at every single person who criticized you. And you especially don’t pick fights that you can’t possibly win, such as against a grieving Gold Star mother or a general. It’s simply not in your interest to do so
What’s wrong with Trump? Many people have cataloged the possibilities.
“Donald Trump is not of sound mind,” conservative Stephen Hayes wrote two weeks ago in the Weekly Standard.
“Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?” liberal Ezra Klein wrote last week on Vox.
He “appears haunted by multiple personality disorders,” conservative David Brooks wrote last week in the New York Times.
“We can gloss over it, laugh about it, analyze it, but Donald Trump is not a well man,” Stuart Stevens, chief strategist to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote last week on Twitter.
Stevens, the most prominent political figure to persistently broach the subject, conceded that he is “no doctor or psychiatrist.” But he said in an interview that the available evidence leads to two possible conclusions: either Trump has a substance abuse problem, which appears unlikely, or “there is something definitely off about him.”
“At best, this is a very damaged person,” Stevens said. “And there’s probably something more serious going on.”
But there’s one central issue that has certainly been the most visible through the campaign.
The fact that Trump could not help himself, that he clearly did, as he said, want to “hit” everyone who spoke against him at the Democratic convention, suggests that there really is something wrong with the man. It is not just that he is incapable of empathy. It is not just that he feels he must respond to every criticism he receives by attacking and denigrating the critic, no matter how small or inconsequential. …
He cannot hold back even when it is manifestly in his interest to do so.
But still, all of this is very unofficial diagnosis, and it does have a risk of its own.
“Trump is crazy. And you can’t fix crazy,” Kevin Sheekey, a Bloomberg adviser, told The New York Times on Thursday.
The armchair pathologizing, and breezy use of the C-word, has upset disabled people and their advocates. David Perry, a disability rights journalist, said that “the casual association of behavior we find objectionable or erratic with mental illness spreads stigma.”
“He’s a liar, he’s a bigot, he makes bad decisions, he’s erratic and unpredictable. That’s what we need to know. Do we need to then extend a diagnosis to go along with that, to make it really objectionable?” Perry said.
Which is a very good point. Trump doesn’t have to be crazy. But listing all the things that are definitely wrong with him each time, does make it seem like a very handy term.
And oh yeah. Guys who didn’t get off the train when the door was open?
In all likelihood, his defects will destroy him before he reaches the White House. He will bring himself down, and he will bring the Republican Party and its leaders down with him. This would be a tragedy were it not that the party and its leaders, who chose him as their nominee and who now cover and shill for this troubled man, so richly deserve their fate.
Enjoy the rest of the trip. It’s starting to seem like it’s going to be a short one.