SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
President Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.
A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his “a whole civilisation will die tonight” threat to wipe Iran off the map last week and his recent head-spinning attack on the “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” Pope have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.
The White House rejected such assessments, saying that Trump is sharp and keeping his opponents on edge. But the president’s eruptions have raised questions about America’s leadership in a time of war.
While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joe Biden as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated – and with such profound consequences.
Democrats who have long challenged Trump’s psychological fitness have issued a fresh chorus of calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from power for disability.
But it is not just a concern voiced by partisans on the left, late-night comics or mental health professionals making long-distance diagnoses. It can be heard now among retired generals, diplomats and foreign officials. And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among one-time allies of the president.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who recently broke with Trump, advocated using the 25th Amendment, telling CNN that threatening to destroy Iran’s civilisation was “not tough rhetoric; it’s insanity”. Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster, called him “a genocidal lunatic”. Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, said Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot”.
Some of the questions about Trump’s soundness come from people who once worked with him and have since become critics. Even before the civilisation post, Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, told journalist Jim Acosta that the president is “a man who is clearly insane” and that his recent string of belligerent, middle-of-the-night social media posts “highlights the level of his insanity.” Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary for Trump, wrote online last week that “he’s clearly not well”.
Trump fired back in a long, angry social media post that did not exactly radiate calm stability. “They have one thing in common, Low IQs,” he wrote of Owens, Jones, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” He threw the crazy charge back at them. “They’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”
The dissent on the right has not extended to Congress, where Republican lawmakers remain publicly loyal to the president, nor has it reached the Cabinet, which would have to approve any invocation of the 25th Amendment, rendering that idea moot. But it reflects growing unease among Americans who in recent surveys have increasingly questioned the fitness of Trump, already the oldest president ever inaugurated, as he approaches his 80th birthday.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found that 61 per cent of Americans think Trump has become more erratic with age and just 45 per cent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” – down from 54 per cent in 2023. Roughly half of Americans deemed Trump too old to be president when asked in a YouGov poll in September, up from 34 per cent in February 2024, while just 39 per cent said he was not too old.
Democrats have pressed the point in recent days. Trump is “an extremely sick person” (Senator Chuck Schumer of New York), “unhinged” and “out of control” (Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York) or, more bluntly, “batshit crazy” (Representative Ted Lieu of California). Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote the White House physician requesting an evaluation, noting “signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” and “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged and threatening” tantrums.
The president’s defenders pushed back. What critics call psychosis, they call strategy.
“Trump knows exactly what he is doing,” wrote Liz Peek, a columnist for The Hill and a Fox News contributor. “Trump will continue to use maximalist (and sometimes outrageous) military and diplomatic pressure in his campaign to rid the Middle East of Iran’s near 50-year campaign of terror.”
Trump, who in his first term described himself as “a very stable genius” and has regularly boasted of passing cognitive tests meant to detect dementia, dismissed the criticism of his mental state when asked by a reporter last week.
“I haven’t heard that,” he said. “But if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people like me because our country was being ripped off on trade, on everything, for many years until I came along. So if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people.”
Asked for elaboration, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said in an email: “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the past four years.” He argued that Biden had declined physically and mentally in that time and that The New York Times and other media had covered it up. (The Times covered Biden’s health and age extensively in multiple stories, as did this masthead.)
Trump’s stability has been a recurring issue since he first sought the presidency in 2016. Numerous psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have weighed in with their own opinions even without the opportunity to evaluate him. John F. Kelly, his longest serving White House chief of staff in the first term, even bought a book by 27 of those specialists called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in an effort to understand his boss and came to the conclusion that he was mentally ill.
This is not the first time a president’s mental fitness has been called into doubt. John Adams, Andrew Jackson and both Roosevelts were from time to time accused of being unbalanced by political foes.
Abraham Lincoln struggled with depression. Woodrow Wilson was never the same after a stroke. Lyndon B. Johnson veered between manic energy and bouts of gloominess. Ronald Reagan seemed to slip late in his presidency, and many wondered whether the Alzheimer’s disease announced years later might have already begun affecting him.
Some Trump admirers have compared him to Richard Nixon, who espoused what he reportedly called “the madman theory”, instructing Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser leading Vietnam peace talks, to tell negotiators that the president was unstable and unpredictable as a bargaining tool to secure a better agreement. But privately some of Nixon’s own advisers did not think it was all an act.
Trump has at times tried to leverage his madman reputation. “Make them think I’m crazy,” he told Nikki Haley, his first-term ambassador to the United Nations, referring to the North Koreans. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he once asked William Barr, then his attorney general. “Just the right amount of crazy.”
Yet Trump told The New York Post last week that this time, at least, he was not pretending. “I was willing to do it,” he said of his threat to destroy Iran’s civilisation.
The public focus on Trump’s state of mind goes further than with almost any past president. “Other than Nixon, there has never been this level of concern over time,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton historian and editor of a book on Trump’s first term.
Indeed, the situation today eclipses even Nixon. Unlike in the 1970s, “so much of this is playing out in public”, especially with social media and cable television, Zelizer said. And, he added, “as a president who naturally disregards any guardrails or sense of decorum, Trump feels much freer, even than Nixon, to unleash his inner rage and to act on impulse”.
In his second term, Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx in New York. He repeats an invented story about his uncle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, telling him about teaching the terrorist known as the Unabomber.
He wanders off into odd tangents – an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a Cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by more than 6000 kilometres. (He evidently means Armenia and Azerbaijan).
Even before lashing out at Pope Leo XIV on the weekend, and then posting an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure before deleting it, Trump had shocked many with his outbursts at critics. He accuses those who anger him of sedition, a crime punishable by death. He claimed bizarrely that Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was allegedly stabbed to death by his son, was killed “due to the anger he caused” by opposing Trump. When Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and special counsel, died, Trump said, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead”.
In recent days, he declared that “Iran’s New Regime President” was “much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors”. Except that Iran’s new president is the same as the old president. There has been no change in presidents. Trump may have meant the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, but he is considered even more hard-line than his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war.
One difference from the first term is that there are few if any advisers such as Kelly who consider it their responsibility to keep Trump from going too far. “When he does what he does, everyone around him keeps their eyes to the floor and says nothing,” Zelizer said. “Unlike the first term, they don’t even seem to manoeuvre behind the scenes to stop him.”
But there may be political latitude for it with his base. “There is an element of American politics in the age of polarisation, particularly within the GOP, that likes this style of leadership,” Zelizer said. “What can be more anti-establishment than someone who is willing to be out of control?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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