Rim Country Gazette: "He's Deteriorating in Plain Sight"

Sunday, September 8, 2019

"He's Deteriorating in Plain Sight"

(With thanks to modesttraveller ) (Photo credit to @TrumpDraws - thanks to Kishik for pointing this out)

That is a direct quote from a Republican strategist as reported two hours ago by Business Insider:

"He's deteriorating in plain sight," one Republican strategist who's in frequent contact with the White House told Insider on Friday.

Some of the new concern is related to Trump’s continuing insistence on saying he was right that Dorian could hit Alabama, which several diaries here are currently discussing.

But what people are telling Business Insider reveals the degree to which those who are seeing him up close are concerned he is totally cracking up:

Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, "you should ask a psychiatrist about that; I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment."

One person who was close to Trump's legal team during the Russia investigation told Insider his public statements were "nothing compared to what he's like behind closed doors.”

"He's like a bull seeing red," this person added. "There's just no getting through to him, and you can kiss your plans for the day goodbye because you're basically stuck looking after a 4-year-old now."

"No one knows what to expect from him anymore," one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations about the president, told Insider. "His mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window because he's losing his s---."

Here’s a bit from Susan Glasser’s story in the New Yorker on Sept. 3rd:

I counted more than forty tweets mentioning China last month. They veered wildly, almost day to day and hour to hour, on whether a deal or a whole new round of tariffs was imminent.

He cancels a trip to Denmark because they won’t sell him Greenland. He cancels a trip to Poland (whom he then congratulates for getting invaded by the Nazis 80 years ago) saying he has to monitor Hurricane Dorian, then goes golfing for much of the weekend. When he did travel abroad, to the G7 in Biarritz, he made so many outlandish claims that even those leaders who thought they had figured out how to put up with him were reduced to stunned silence.