Dear America, Donald Trump is completely insane

By Mark Sumner  

Thursday Mar 23, 2017 · 6:45 AM PDT

Daily Kos 

That may seem like hyperbole. The use of the word “insane” is something that many people feel strongly about, rightly concerned that turning the word into a casual alternative for “jackass” is a slight to people with genuine mental illness. But no. I don’t mean that Donald Trump is a jackass … or rather, it’s not that he’s only  a jackass. He’s also nuts, unglued, screwy, crazed, cracked, and potty. Open up the thesaurus and select a term. Not an exaggeration.
Because, America … here’s Trumpy:

TIME: Do you want me to give you a quick overview [of the story]?
TRUMP: Yeah, it’s a cool story. I mean it’s, the concept is right. I predicted a lot of things, Michael. Some things that came to you a little bit later. But, you know, we just rolled out a list. Sweden. I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems. Huma [Abedin] and Anthony [Weiner], you know, what I tweeted about that whole deal, and then it turned out he had it, all of Hillary’s email on his thing. NATO, obsolete, because it doesn’t cover terrorism. They fixed that, and I said that the allies must pay. Nobody knew that they weren’t paying. I did. I figured it. Brexit, I was totally right about that. You were over there I think, when I predicted that, right, the day before. Brussels, I said, Brussels is not Brussels. I mean many other things, the election’s rigged against Bernie Sanders. We have a lot of things.

There is neither sense nor sensibility anywhere in this train of WTF. And it’s far from the only block of Crazytown included in Trump’s interview.

Trump: Now remember this. When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know today it is different than wire tapping. It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes. What I’m talking about is surveillance. And today, [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Devin Nunes just had a news conference. Now probably got obliterated by what’s happened in London. But just had a news conference, and here it is one of those things. The other one, election, I said we are going to win, we won. And many other things. And I think this is going to be very interesting.

Throughout the interview, Trump defends every claim he ever made—including the claim that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the attacks on 9/11—with a combination of word salad and word … stew? Mush? Let’s just say a mixture of flat-out lies and jaw-dropping delusions. Reminded, repeatedly, in ways both subtle and subtle as a load of bricks that everyone else in the world doesn’t just disagree with him in the sense of “blueberries are better on cereal than bananas,” but knows he is wrong as in “blueberries are not larger than elephants,” Trump eventually comes to the Ultimate Comeback.

TIME: But isn’t there, it strikes me there is still an issue of credibility. If the intelligence community came out and said, we have determined that so and so is the leaker here, but you are saying to me now, that you don’t believe the intelligence community when they say your tweet was wrong.
TRUMP: I’m not saying—no, I’m not blaming. First of all, I put Mike Pompeo in. I put Senator Dan Coats in. These are great people. I think they are great people and they are going to, I have a lot of confidence in them. So hopefully things will straighten out. But I inherited a mess, I inherited a mess in so many ways. I inherited a mess in the Middle East, and a mess with North Korea, I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, ok. And I inherited a mess on trade. I mean we have many, you can go up and down the ladder. But that’s the story. Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not. You know. Say hello to everybody OK?

“I’m president, and you’re not.” Great. That’s just … great.

Thursday morning, following the general jaw-dropping nature of the information that slipped out on FBI investigations of Russia-related activity, Trump is back on the air.

Oddly enough, his tweets now sound comfortingly, merely jackass-ish. Perhaps 144 characters at a time really is the best way to experience Trump, because anything long is scary as hell.