We have made a habit, these past months, of cataloging Donald J. Trump's weekend Twitter pronouncements. This is because Trump reliably and predictably uses his weekends to say ridiculous and asinine things on the internet, which is not presidential; he likely does this because during the weekends fewer members of his staff are around to keep his worst instincts in check.
This weekend was dominated by a roiling political debate over whether the President of the United States is mentally unfit for office, punctuated by more genteel-minded wags holding forth on whether or not merely having that conversation is itself untoward. Into this debate tumbles the great unfit idiot himself, because of course he would. His announcements no longer require explanation; they are now widely understood to be impetuous, rage-filled tantrums based almost entirely on whatever it is he last saw on his television set. So let's catalog, as usual. And keep in mind as we do this that the White House has affirmed that Donald Trump's bizarre Twitter rants do indeed count as official statements from a sitting president.
And he is demonstrably out of his gourd.
An aside: Donald Trump briefly ran for president on the Reform Party ticket in 2000. You could be forgiven for not remembering that, but it is considerably more alarming that Donald himself doesn't seem to remember that.
This is not a presidential-caliber statement, no matter what one might think about, ahem, "Sloppy Steve." Neither is this.
Trump’s most consistent feature, during his tenure, has been his efforts to discredit any member of the press who reports anything Donald Trump does not want reported. It is not mere “pushback”, but an ongoing, systemic effort to undermine the very notion of a free press. It is authoritarian, whether Donald himself knows what “authoritarian” means or not. It is anti-democratic, and anti-American, and poses a danger to the very fabric of our democracy. His flagrant, continual lying and propagandizing should itself result in summary impeachment, and that it does not is a sign only of how contemptuous of the norms of democracy his party has become.
True to form, however, Donald continues. And towards this effort, Donald has some sad news for his followers: His "Fake News Awards" will not be going forward tomorrow as promised. It's being delayed.
Trump originally said it would be happening tomorrow at 5:00, in a tweet just after another in which he bragged about the size of his "Nuclear Button." The delay now is almost certainly because Donald invented the notion of a "Fake News Awards" on a whim and did not bother to tell even a single staffer about it before announcing to the public, and even the entire political apparatus of the White House could not muster up a fake awards ceremony in the span of a week. They will need ten more days.
I presume we no longer need explain why these various tweets demonstrate the man to be both unfit for office and a clear danger to the republic. That is now, thanks to a book revealing nothing that we did not already know, the subject of national debate.