Remember when MAGA Republicans said that anyone so hateful as to blame Charlie Kirk for his own murder should be out of a job? Firefighters, teachers, and active-duty military personnel were fired as a result.
If the principle behind that outrage still holds, does it also apply to Donald Trump, who immediately responded to the news that Rob and Michelle Reiner had been brutally murdered by blaming them? Many on the right did criticize him for posting that the Reiners were dead because of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But this is not a one-time departure from otherwise rational behavior.
When asked about his post later, even after the heartbreaking news that the Reiners’ own long-struggling son was in custody, the president stood by what he’d said: Reiner “was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned,” Trump told reporters. “The Russia hoax – he was one of the people behind it. … I thought he was very bad for our country.”
When everything is a hoax, including the word “affordability,” how is this not a sign of paranoia? In seeing even the murder of a movie director as all about him, don’t we have to ask whether this always-impulsive person is no longer in full possession of his faculties, or else simply too devoid of decency to do the job?
Either way, if the president’s supporters won’t look seriously at his lack of self-control, how is that different from Joe Biden’s supporters refusing to see that he was no longer up to the demands of the presidency?
Of the horrific shooting of students at Brown University, Trump said this: “Things can happen.”
It isn’t, of course, that he’s without affect or emotion.
In a series of recorded interviews with Vanity Fair, Trump’s own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said that she knows from experience that although the president doesn’t drink, he has what she sees as “an alcoholic’s personality” in that he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
If that doesn’t scare you, it should, because unlimited power and crumbling internal and external guardrails are not a reassuring combo.
Wiles called the article a hit piece, but Trump himself did not take offense, and instead defended what she said about him: “I’ve said that many times about myself. I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that – what’s the word? Not possessive – possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before.” That’s what the man said about himself.
Just one year ago, Republicans agreed that a president losing a step or two was a very dangerous thing. They could correctly point to Biden’s problems with word retrieval and clips of him attempting to exit the stage in the wrong direction. Sleepy Joe, ha.
With us blowing up boats and the White House East Wing and long-standing alliances, what’s happening now is not so funny. It’s one thing for Trump to nod off while poor Marco Rubio was heaping praise on him, as all cabinet members are now weirdly expected to do.
But would a president with even a little self-awareness be staying up all night posting about his many grievances and enemies? When he said, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, that he “hates” his political opponents, he also said that he couldn’t help himself, and I’m afraid that is true. Don’t his allies also wonder why he doesn’t seem to be able to help himself, or more importantly, us? I also wonder whether he’s incapable of consistency.
When he writes all Somalis off as “garbage,” there are real-world consequences, including the arrest of a U.S. citizen ICE agents reportedly tackled and took into custody for simply looking like he might be Somali.
When he answers the legitimate questions of female reporters by saying things like, “quiet, piggy,” others could get the idea that it’s fine to speak disrespectfully to women, or anybody, really. This was never okay, but when will his supporters tell him to stop?
As was the case with Joe Biden, Trump’s history of verbal strolls off into the woods go back so far that it’s made it easier for the willing to dismiss his lapses.
In 2019, Trump praised the Continental Army for “taking over the airports” in 1775. He’s said that whales are killed by windmills, that he beat Obama rather than Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that he won all 50 states in 2020. “Never fight uphill, me boys,” he said at Gettysburg, quoting Robert E. Lee, who, as far as anybody else knows, never said any such thing.
In the summer of ’24, he falsely claimed that boat manufacturers were being forced to use electric engines, and nattered nonsensically about shark attacks versus electrocution. “You know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.” Thank goodness.
Since taking office, he’s repeatedly confused Albania and Armenia, and India with Iran. Trump supporters, can you really say that if this were Biden, this wouldn’t bother you? And isn’t it getting worse?
In September, Trump seemed not to be able to place House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries: “Chuck Schumer, who was here yesterday, along with – the, a very nice gentleman I didn’t really know. You know who I’m talking about.” (Yes, we do, because it’s the same man you had just mocked with an AI-generated video of him in a sombrero and mustache.)
In October, the commander in chief posted the AI video of himself as a bomber pilot gleefully dumping diarrhea on protesters. Is this someone you’d choose as a role model for your child? Because unfortunately, he is that.
On Monday, Trump didn’t seem to be able to remember the full name of Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted of tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election. Instead, while offering his rationale for pardoning her, he elliptically criticized “a governor that won’t allow our wonderful Tina to come out of a jail, a high-intensity jail, because she caught people cheating on an election and they said she was cheating.”
Is dementia why we are bombing alleged drug dealers, headed not to the United States at all, but to Latin America? It would explain how he could do this and then turn around and pardon an actual narco-terrorist, ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
Why pardon all kinds of other criminals, including Democratic former U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, while his administration arrests and deports gardeners and abuelas in the school pickup line with no criminal history?
All of us might like to think that anyone who would criticize us must be deranged. But most of us beyond adolescence see that no, that isn’t the case. Our country is beyond its adolescence now. And should be able to see and say like a grown-up what’s happening here.
