Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images/AFP)
16 April 17
I haven't felt this shaky about the world in half a century.
have resisted the temptation to speculate on the mental state of our
president* because I've always been leery of long-distance psychiatric
diagnoses, and because I am not Charles Krauthammer, who regularly has used his professional credentials
to define any politics to the left of a drillbit as some sort of
cognitive deficiency.
However, the events of the last week have required
me to rethink this policy.
Years ago, Fletcher Knebel wrote a novel called Night At Camp David
about a president who'd gone mad. The evidence for that was that the
bughouse president was lost in grandiose delusions about his place in
the world. Knebel, you may recall, also was the co-author of the rather
more famous Seven Days in May, which concerned a military plot
to take over the government. Lately, I've come to see these two books as
being parts of the same whole, like the Lord of the Rings saga, or Dune.
I
have come to the conclusion that the president* has slipped his gears
and that his control over the military—and over foreign policy—is as
tenuous as his hold on rationality is. I have not felt this shaky about
the state of the world since October of 1962.
For example, there's his interview with Maria Bartiomo
of the Fox Business Channel.
(This is the one that will go down in
history as The Wonderful Chocolate Cake Interview, and that's scary
enough.) The FBC is the safest possible media venue for this president*.
The FBC makes the Fox News Channel look like Nick, Jr. Bartiromo
certainly wasn't out to ambush the president*. He managed to ambush
himself and to do so in such a way as to appear to be groping his way
toward plain English in a truly unnerving way. For example:
TRUMP: Well, I'm going to let you figure that one out. But it's so obvious. When you look at Susan Rice and what's going on, and so many people are coming up to me and apologizing now. They're saying you know, you were right when you said that. Perhaps I didn't know how right I was, because nobody knew the extent of it. (INAUDIBLE)...
BARTIROMO: When you sent that...
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: — what they did...
BARTIROMO: — was that what you were referring to, the Susan Rice?
TRUMP: Oh, sure. We're talking about surveillance. It was wiretapped in quotes. "The New York Times" said the word wiretapped in the headline of the first edition. Then they took it out of there fast when they realized. But I put wiretapped in quotes, meaning, because, look, wiretapping is an old-fashioned... (CROSSTALK) there are too many wires anymore, right? You don't have a lot of wires. Look at this room. This room used to have a lot of wires. Now it doesn't have so many wires.
Leave aside the obvious untruths—about the
surveillance and Susan Rice and what he tweeted and (probably) all those
great people who are congratulating him for being so right about
everything. Look just at the language. He is talking in circles,
gingerly stepping toward the familiar like a man crossing a frozen river
on ice he doesn't trust. "Wires," he says, over and over again. I don't
think that's because he doesn't know what he's talking about. I think
that's because "wires" is a word he can remember.
And then there's this:
TRUMP: — and you see these beautiful kids that are dead in their father's arms, or you see kids gasping for life and you know they're — it's over. It's over for them. They're hosing them down, hundreds of them. When you see that, I immediately called General Mattis. I said, what can we do? And they came back with a number of different alternatives. And we hit them very hard. Now, are we going to get involved with Syria? No. But if I see them using gas and using things that — I mean even some of the worst tyrants in the world didn't use the kind of gases that they used. And some of the gases are unbelievably potent. So when I saw that, I said we have to do something.
Again, the language never strays far from what he's said before, even as the policy may or may not be reversing itself.
Which brings us to the second part of the Knebel
Paradox. It's becoming very clear that the president* has farmed out his
responsibilities as commander-in-chief—and most of his foreign
policy—to the generals and ex-generals with whom he has surrounded
himself. Here he is talking about using a carrier group to poke at the
North Koreans.
TRUMP: And in the meantime, they get ready and like you've never seen — look, they're still fighting. Mosul was supposed to last for a week and now they've been fighting it for many months and so many more people died. I don't want to talk about it. We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you.And we have the best military people on Earth. And I will say this. He is doing the wrong thing. He is doing the wrong thing.
BARTIROMO: Do you...
TRUMP: He's making a big mistake.
BARTIROMO: — do you think he's mentally fit?
TRUMP: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know him. But he's doing the wrong thing. I have a very, very good meeting with President Xi of China. I really liked him. We had a great chemistry, I think. I mean at least I had a great chemistry — maybe he didn't like me, but I think he liked me.
He is talking as if to children. I think he's talking to himself.
Things got worse the other day, when the U.S. dropped the mightiest non-nuclear weapon it has
on a bunch of rocks and caves in Afghanistan. The president* explained
this event by stating categorically that the generals are in charge.
From Military Times:
"What I do is I authorize my military," in response to a press question about the use of a massive bomb in an assault on Islamic State group positions in Afghanistan. "We have the greatest military in the world, and they've done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and that's what they're doing. Frankly, that's why they've been so successful lately. If you look at what's happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what has happened over the last eight years, you'll see there is a tremendous difference."
Those are not the words you want to hear from the guy
on whom—theoretically, at least—the national command authority rests.
Those are the words of a guy who's terrified of the awesome
responsibilities of his job because he knows he's not up to them, and I
think he's not up to them because he knows something's wrong with him.
And, come to think of it, "my" military is pretty frightening, too.
There now are several crisis points in the world that
are hanging by a thread. At the same time, the civilian control of the
military also is hanging by a thread, because nobody's sure whether or
not the commander-in-chief can keep himself together.
(This column,
in which the author assures us that the president* is being "saved" by
the military minds around him, is meant to be reassuring, but damned
well isn't.)
At the end of Fletcher Knebel's novels, the bughouse
president resigns and the coup is foiled. In real life, who knows if it
ends that way. I don't want a president* who knows he's not up to the
job and I don't want a military establishment that thinks it knows what
to do about it. That way, we all go crazy.
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