Trump Was Warned Early and Often

Trump apologists continue to try to use lies and media spin to absolve Donald Trump from massive malfeasance in office in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  Although warned in January of what was coming, Trump dithered and labeled the warnings as misinformation put out by the mythical "Deep State." A lengthy piece in the New York Times reviews the many early and frequent warns that Trump refused to take seriously, being more concerned with maintaining highs on the stock market and engaging in his non-stop narcissism.  Hopefully, history will be very ruthless in it assessment of Trump and, in the nearer term, one can only hope that voters come to realize how massive Trump's failure was and punish him by not re-electing him in November.  The Times piece is long but a must read.  Here are some highlights:

WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

[Trump] The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.

Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.

[D]ozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

·         The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

·         Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

·         The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. [Trump] The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

·         Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

·         By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by [Trump] the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

There had already been an alarming spike in new cases around the world and the virus was spreading across the Middle East. It was becoming apparent that the administration had botched the rollout of testing to track the virus at home, and a smaller-scale surveillance program intended to piggyback on a federal flu tracking system had also been stillborn.

In Washington, [Trump] the president was not worried, predicting that by April, “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him. He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.

Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.

But Dr. Messonnier had jumped the gun. They had not told the president yet, much less gotten his consent.

On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily.

The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office. It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.

Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226.

The Nightmare in the White House

While the nation goes into lock down and the economy heads towards a collapse, the malignant narcissist in the White House does what he always does: lies nonstop and throws out boasts to inflate his insatiable ego.  When not lying outright, Trump attacks those in the media trying to get out the truth and accurate information and throws governors - including Republican governors who have previously prostituted themselves to Trump - to their own devices in protecting their citizens. Frank Rich has a column in New York Magazine looks at the ongoing lack of honesty and glaring failed leadership in the White House even as Trump sycophants try to change the subject from the failure of the Trump regime to prepare for the pandemic. Here are column excerpts:

As the coronavirus-related layoffs and medical needs pile up, experts are concluding that a strong federal response is needed. Is the Trump administration capable of rising to the occasion?

The president who is leading this country into battle cares about no one but himself, continues to lie to Americans daily about the most basic imperatives of a public-health catastrophe, and presides over an administration staffed with incompetent, third-tier bootlickers and grifters. And I am not just talking about Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and Wilbur Ross. There are now three college seniors serving in White House positions, thanks to a new purge of ostensibly disloyal staffers being conducted by Trump’s former body man, the 29-year-old John McEntee, recently installed as director of the Presidential Personnel Office. Trump calls himself a “wartime president,” but his only previous wartime experience was partying during Vietnam, when he was spared military service because of “bone spurs.” Those bone spurs long ago migrated to his brain. If America rises to the occasion, it will be despite him, not because of him. We’re at the point where even if Trump were to start telling the truth, no one except the most mad-dog MAGA-ites would believe him.

Right now the country is waiting for a bomb to drop: that much-predicted turning point when the metastasis of illness and mass death in the U.S. could match the curve we’ve seen in Italy. Trump’s nonstop lies — and those of toadies like Pence — are not just intended to cover up the many failures to prepare for the looming apocalypse (“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”), or to blame those failures on China and Obama, or to luxuriate in unearned self-congratulation (“I’d rate it a 10”). What the lies are doing now is throwing gasoline on the gathering fire.

Why does a president cite the Defense Protection Act, which allows him to commandeer industry to produce emergency supplies, while simultaneously telling the states to find much-needed ventilators on their own?

Trump’s answer to that last question was that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” He seemed not to understand that it’s ventilators that the nation’s hospitals urgently need, not the postal service. Such is his minimal comprehension of the urgent tasks at hand that Trump’s level of competence doesn’t rise to that of the skipper of the Titanic. The Titanic’s captain may have hit an iceberg, but at least he recognized the scientific reality that icebergs exist.

Up until now Trump’s motives for lying have been to (1) cover up what may prove the most catastrophic failure in the history of the American presidency; (2) to distract the country from the continuing failure in the effort to keep his reelection campaign afloat; (3) to boost the stock market. But another motive is emerging that’s entirely in keeping with the history to date of Trump’s kleptocratic White House: rewarding his family and cronies financially.

Based on his [Jared Kushner] and his father-in-law’s past behavior, we have every reason to believe that entrepreneurs in the Mar-a-Lago circuit, assuming they are not killed off by the virus, will benefit from any bailouts crafted by the White House and Republicans in Congress, starting perhaps with casino entrepreneurs like Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

This is in keeping with a president who remains passive as athletes and celebrities mysteriously cut the long line to be tested for the coronavirus. It is in keeping with a Vichy Republican Party where the senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler were dumping stocks pre-crash, seemingly exploiting inside information about the coming fiasco for huge personal profit while keeping their own voters in the dark about it. Today Tucker Carlson is receiving some applause for being a rare truth-teller on Fox News because last night he called out Burr in no uncertain terms: “There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis.”

By now, a number of promises Donald Trump has made directly to the press — universal access to testing, a nationwide medical-screening website, the deployment of hospital ships — have failed to pan out after initially receiving breathless headlines. Should the press change the way it covers Trump’s promises?

The challenge to the press remains what it’s been from the start: How do you challenge a lying president on the facts in real time when he is lying as fast as he can speak? The difference now is that more than ever lives are dependent on Americans getting the truth.

Change is needed, and it will require collaboration of the best brains in the news business to reinvent practices and formats. Even hours after Trump had floated bogus miracle drugs before the public yesterday, at least one network evening news broadcast was teasing the story with a hopeful headline before disemboweling it.

Is Something Neurologically Wrong With Donald Trump?

Trump and Wilson: mentally incapacitated occupants of the White House?

Many mental health professionals believe Donald Trump suffers from mental illness - e.g., malignant narcissism disorder - including Virginia's governor who is a neurologist by profession.  A recent post , in fact, set out the attributes of this mental disorder all of which appear to apply to Trump in every detail.  But a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic suggests that Trump may have other mental health impairments and looks at the USA's shocking lack of any mandatory system to evaluate the mental health of a sitting occupant of the White House, something that is important in any would be application of the 25th Amendment as a means to protect the nation.  The issue is one of long standing and goes back 100 years to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a serious stroke which left he largely incapacitated and caused many to believe that his wife Edith came to function as almost de facto president.  A century later, we still have no method to determine a president's mental competence and Trump has brought the need for such a system back front and center.  Here are lengthy higligts from the article (read the entire piece): 

Donald Trump’s decision to brag in a tweet about the size of his “nuclear button” compared with North Korea’s was widely condemned as bellicose and reckless. The comments are also part of a larger pattern of odd and often alarming behavior for a person in the nation’s highest office.

Trump’s grandiosity and impulsivity have made him a constant subject of speculation among those concerned with his mental health. But after more than a year of talking to doctors and researchers about whether and how the cognitive sciences could offer a lens to explain Trump’s behavior, I’ve come to believe there should be a role for professional evaluation beyond speculating from afar.

I’m not alone. Viewers of Trump’s recent speeches have begun noticing minor abnormalities in his movements. In November, he used his free hand to steady a small Fiji bottle as he brought it to his mouth. Onlookers described the movement as “awkward” and made jokes about hand size.

Then, in December, speaking about his national-security plan in Washington, D.C., Trump reached under his podium and grabbed a glass with both hands. This time he kept them on the glass the entire time he drank, and as he put down the glass. This drew even more attention. The gesture was like that of an extremely cold person cradling a mug of cocoa. Some viewers likened Trump to a child just learning to handle a cup.

Then there was an incident of slurred speech. Announcing the relocation of the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a dramatic foreign-policy move—Trump became difficult to understand at a phonetic level, which did little to reassure many observers of the soundness of his decision.

The neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta described it as “clearly some abnormalities of his speech.” This sort of slurring could result from anything from a dry mouth to a displaced denture to an acute stroke.

Though these moments could be inconsequential, they call attention to the alarming absence of a system to evaluate elected officials’ fitness for office—to reassure concerned citizens that the “leader of the free world” is not cognitively impaired, and on a path of continuous decline.

Proposals for such a system have been made in the past, but never implemented. The job of the presidency is not what it used to be. For most of America’s history, it was not possible for the commander in chief to unilaterally destroy a continent, or the entire planet, with one quick decision.

Today even the country’s missileers—whose job is to sit in bunkers and await a signal—are tested three times per month on their ability to execute protocols. They are required to score at least 90 percent. Testing is not required for their commander in chief to be able to execute a protocol, much less testing to execute the sort of high-level decision that would set this process in motion.

The lack of a system to evaluate presidential fitness only stands to become more consequential as the average age of leaders increases. The Constitution sets finite lower limits on age but gives no hint of an upper limit.

After age 40, the brain decreases in volume by about 5 percent every decade. The most noticeable loss is in the frontal lobes. These control motor functioning of the sort that would direct a hand to a cup and a cup to the mouth in one fluid motion—in most cases, without even looking at the cup. These lobes also control much more important processes, from language to judgment to impulsivity.

An annual presidential physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center is customary, and Trump’s is set for January 12. But the utility of a standard physical exam—knowing a president’s blood pressure and weight and the like—is meager compared with the value of comprehensive neurological, psychological, and psychiatric evaluations. These are not part of a standard physical.

Even if they were voluntarily undertaken, there would be no requirement to disclose the results. A president could be actively hallucinating, threatening to launch a nuclear attack based on intelligence he had just obtained from David Bowie, and the medical community could be relegated to speculation from afar.

With declining support for fact-based discourse and trust in expert assessments, would there be any way of convincing Americans that these doctors weren’t simply lying, treasonous “liberals”—globalist snowflakes who got triggered?

The downplaying of a president’s compromised neurological status would not be without precedent. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously disguised his paralysis from polio to avoid appearing “weak or helpless.” He staged public appearances to give the impression that he could walk . . . .

Unfortunately, the public medical record available to assuage global concerns about the current president’s neurological status is the attestation of Harold Bornstein, America’s most famous Upper Manhattan gastroenterologist, whose initial doctor’s note described the 71-year-old Trump as “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”  The phrasing was so peculiar for a medical record that some suggested that Trump had written or dictated the letter himself.

The frontal lobes also control speech, and over the years, Donald Trump’s fluency has regressed, and his vocabulary contracted. In May of last year, the journalist Sharon Begley at Stat analyzed changes in his speech patterns during interviews over the years. . . . He also more frequently finished sentences and thoughts.

Ben Michaelis, a psychologist who analyzes speech as part of cognitive assessments in court cases, told Begley that although some decline in cognitive functioning would be expected, Trump has exhibited a “clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time” with “simpler word choices and sentence structure.”

[T]hough it is not possible to diagnose a person with dementia based on speech patterns alone, these are the sorts of changes that appear in early stages of Alzheimer’s. Trump has likened himself to Ronald Reagan, and the changes in Trump’s speech evoke those seen in the late president. Reagan announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994, but there was evidence of linguistic change over the course of his presidency that experts have argued was indicative of early decline.

[A]fter Reagan’s diagnosis, former President Jimmy Carter sounded an alarm over the lack of a system to detect this sort of cognitive impairment earlier on. “Many people have called to my attention the continuing danger to our nation from the possibility of a U.S. president becoming disabled, particularly by a neurologic illness,” Carter wrote in 1994 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The great weakness of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is its provision for determining disability in the event that the president is unable or unwilling to certify to impairment or disability.” 

[I]t generally assumed that the president would be willing to undergo diagnostic testing and be forthcoming about any limitations.  This might not happen with a person who has come to be known for denying any hint of weakness or inability. Nor would it happen if a president had a psychiatric disorder that impaired judgment—especially if it was one defined by grandiosity, obsession with status, and intense aversion to being perceived as weak.

It was for these reasons that in 1994, Carter called for a system that could independently evaluate a president’s health and capacity to serve. At many companies, even where no missiles are involved, entry-level jobs require a physical exam. A president, it would follow, should be more rigorously cleared. Carter called on “the medical community” to take leadership in creating an objective, minimally biased process—to “awaken the public and political leaders of our nation to the importance of this problem.”

[Q]uestions and concern around Trump’s psychiatric status have spurred proposals anew. In December, also in the Journal of the American Medical Association, mental-health professionals proposed a seven-member expert panel “to evaluate presidential fitness.” Last April, Representative Jamie Raskin introduced a bill that would create an 11-member “presidential capacity” commission.

The real-world application of one of these systems is complicated by the fact that the frontal lobes also control things like judgment, problem-solving, and impulse control. These metrics, which fall under the purview of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, can be dismissed as opinion. In a hospital or doctor’s office, a neurologist may describe a patient with Parkinson’s disease as having “impaired impulse control.” The National Institute on Aging lists among the symptoms of Alzheimer’s “poor judgment leading to bad decisions.”

[T]housands of mental-health professionals have mobilized and signed petitions attesting to Trump’s unfitness to hold office. Some believe Trump should carry a label of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or both. The largest such petition has more than 68,000 signatures—though there is no vetting of the signatories’ credentials. Its author, the psychologist John Gartner, told me last year that in his 35 years of practicing and teaching, “this is absolutely the worst case of malignant narcissism I’ve ever seen.”

A presidential-fitness committee—of the sort that Carter and others propose, consisting of nonpartisan medical and psychological experts—could exist in a capacity similar to the Congressional Budget Office. It could regularly assess the president’s neurological status and give a battery of cognitive tests to assess judgment, recall, decision making, attention—the sorts of tests that might help a school system assess whether a child is suited to a particular grade level or classroom—and make the results available.

That math and polling can be ignored or disputed, or the CBO can be attacked as a secretly subversive entity, but at least some attempt at a transparent analysis is made. The same cannot be said of the president’s cognitive processes. We are left only with the shouts of experts from the sidelines, demeaning the profession and the presidency.

Trump: Give Me a Wall or I’ll Engineer a Recession

Malignant narcissism is defined as asyndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial features, paranoid traits, and egosyntonic aggression, with symptoms including an absence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and a sense of importance (grandiosity).  While Donald Trump has not been diagnosed by a physician, the traits and symptoms of malignant narcissism are constantly on display for anyone taking even a small amount of time to pay attention and inventory his behavior (both before and after the 2016 presidential election).  Consider Trump's threat that he will engineer a recession if he doesn't get his "Wall"  - which utterly ignores the many years required for condemnation lawsuits that would be needed to acquire land for the wall.  New York Magazine looks at this sick threat which ignores the harm a recession would mean for many Americans and underscores that for Trump, it's all about him and his ego.  Here are article excerpts:

Trump declared himself qualified for the world’s highest office in 2016, on the grounds that his exceptional deal-making acumen and economic expertise more than compensated for his lack of conventional credentials.

On Friday morning, [Trump] the president tweeted that if Democrats refuse to fund his wall, he will engineer a massive recession (that would all-but ensure Democratic victory in 2020) – because he is under the impression that the United States would “profit” by closing its southern border to all commerce, since the U.S. runs trade deficit with Mexico: We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall . . . .

This is not the first time Trump has threatened to “close the border” if Congress defies his will. But until now, what the president meant by that phrase has been ambiguous. His latest tweets confirm that he has, in fact, been threatening to end (virtually) all commerce between the U.S. and Mexico, our nation’s third-largest trading partner. Upward of $30 billion worth of goods are shipped across the U.S. southern border on a monthly basis; interrupting that flow of goods for any significant period of time would paralyze major corporate supply chains, drive countless small businesses into insolvency, and terrorize global markets with the specter of American autarky.

Such a scheme would be so economically devastating — and politically suicidal — it is safe to assume that Trump’s threat is entirely empty. Or, at least, that is what investors appear to believe; hours after the president’s tweetstorm, the Dow and S&P 500 were both up in early trading.

And yet, “Trump would never do X because that would be stupid and politically counterproductive” isn’t the world’s most reliable heuristic. After all, the current (partial) government shutdown is itself the product of the president deciding that he could secure leverage over congressional Democrats by doing something stupid and politically counterproductive.

[Trump] sabotaged the basic functioning of his own administration to draw attention to the fact that the Democratic Party does not support an extremely unpopular immigration policy, out of the ostensible belief that doing this would force Chuck Schumer to do his bidding immediately (instead of, say, waiting for Nancy Pelosi to collect the Speaker’s gavel next week).

This plan proved to be less than airtight. Recent polling shows that a large plurality of Americans blame Trump for the shutdown, and oppose his border wall. Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating in Morning Consult’s polling just dipped below 40 percent for the first time since he defended the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017.

Trump’s threat to “close the border” appears to be a desperate attempt to secure some kind of leverage over negotiating partners who show no signs of caving.

[Trump] is the kind of demented nihilist who threatens to use his national security powers to inflict suffering on the American people, for the sake of narrow legislative gains — not the kind who would actually do so! Or, probably not, anyway!

And that is apparently enough to persuade congressional Republicans that they have no responsibility to remove a demented nihilist from the Oval Office.

Trump Could be a Huge Asset for Democrats This Fall

Donald Trump's defining characteristic - even more than his pathological lying - is his malignant narcissism.  Everything is ALWAYS about him and he simply cannot accept anything or anyone that doesn't support his "Sun King" vision of himself.  The good news is that this characteristic may help Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives - and with luck, the U.S. Senate.  Trump forgets that a huge number of voters failed to vote in the 2016 presidential election and that his win traces to only about 27% of voters and a 70,000 vote spread across three states.  If those who stayed home (or those who feel they made a huge mistake) turn out in disgust with Trump and/or the GOP's reverse Robin Hood policies, things could be brutal for Republicans.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at how Trump may further wound the GOP.  Here are highlights:

One of President Trump’s most bedrock character traits is his refusal to truly reckon with any piece of information that reflects poorly on him. This self-aggrandizing, reality-denying flavor of egotism has defined Trump for decades, through his roller-coaster business career and into political life. In recent months, it has sometimes veered into the straight-up delusional, as when he reportedly claimed last year that it wasn’t actually his voice on the Access Hollywood tape.

Trump’s insistence that everything is going great was validated in unprecedented fashion when he won the presidency despite some of the strongest headwinds imaginable, shocking almost everyone — possibly including, on some deep level, himself.

But now, finally, [Trump's] the president’s unwavering confidence may finally be about to take a serious electoral toll.  The New York Times reported on Saturday that in the runup to the midterm elections this fall, President Trump is simply not listening to advisers and lawmakers who tell him what anyone can plainly see: Republicans are in deep trouble:

Congressional and party leaders and even some Trump aides are concerned that [Trump's] the president’s boundless self-assurance about politics will cause him to ignore or undermine their midterm strategy. In battleground states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada, Mr. Trump’s proclivity to be a loose cannon could endanger the Republican incumbents and challengers who are already facing ferocious Democratic headwinds. In election after election over the last year and a half, Democrats have vastly over performed their expected vote share, largely thanks to animus toward the president. They have triumphed in a Pennsylvania Congressional district where Trump won by more than 20 points, picked up a Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama, dominated state races in Virginia, and made close several contests that almost certainly would have been Republican landslides in previous years. . . . Republicans have been sounding the alarm for months.

Trump’s reaction to all this: everything will be just fine.

The Times piece also reports that, as his fellow Republicans fret, Brad Parscale, [Trump's] the president’s pollster, is feeding him inaccurate, Trump-friendly poll numbers, which [Trump] the president is more than happy to parade on Twitter.

Why does this matter? Most presidents, even if they claim not to be obsessed with polls the way Trump is, have a pretty good idea of their own political currency, and adjust their alignment with their parties accordingly.

Something different is going on this time around. President Trump remains enormously popular within the Republican Party; most Republican members of Congress have made the calculation that even if Trump is underwater in their state, defying Trump the president would be a political loser, since it leave them without any reliable constituency.

The problem is not only that Trump refuses to believe that Republicans will lose, but that, even if he were sufficiently worried, he doesn’t care enough about his own party to bother helping.

Establishment Republicans reportedly want Trump to flog the GOP’s unpopular tax law on the campaign trail. [Trump] The president is pushing back on this directive — which he is right to do, since the unpopular law probably isn’t galvanizing anyone to vote.

But [Trump's] the president’s own, predictably unpredictable routine is unlikely to work much better. He might attack vulnerable Republican Senators he disagrees with; he might serve more as a distraction than a cheerleader, . . . This routine won’t turn off voters who already love [Trump] the president. But it’s more likely to spark another Trump news cycle than rally much-needed enthusiasm for Republican candidates.

The GOP’s best hope may be to invent reasons that red-state Democrats are hurting Trump personally, then watch him go wild on Twitter and the campaign trail.

Republicans seem to have grasped the lesson that Trump needs to be personally invested in their election results. They are trying to make the stakes of the election startlingly personal, reportedly telling Trump that if he doesn’t help them out this fall, they may not have his back if and when Democrats initiate impeachment proceedings next year. That stark warning may perk Trump’s ears up, but it’s just as likely to be perceived as an unacceptable intramural threat, not as motivation to work for the party.

[Trump] will continue living in a bubble of his own making. Because Trump was right to dismiss the concerns of the many, many people who insisted he couldn’t win in 2016, he can now perennially point to that shocking election result as proof that his instincts, not some politico egghead’s, are always correct. And if Republicans lose big this year, he’ll just say they didn’t stick by him closely enough.

It’s a dishonest, solipsitic approach to life. But it’s one that has worked shockingly well for Donald Trump.

Trump Ignores Intelligence, Courts Putin, and Leaves America Vulnerable to Attacks

The Washington Post has a very long article on Donald Trump's maniacal rejection of the findings of America's intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Frighteningly, the article also looks at Trump's efforts to block meaningful actions to protect America from future Russian attacks. The article relied on interviews with 50 past and present White House and intelligence personnel.  The question raised by the article obviously becomes one of why?  Some point to Trump's narcissism that prevents him from any admission that his election to the White House may have been due to anything other than his own magnificence.  The more sinister explanation is, of course, is that the Trump/Pence campaign did collude with Russia and was fully aware of the extent of subversive efforts of Vladimir Putin's henchmen.  This latter explanation seems all the more likely given Trump's efforts to leave America vulnerable to future Russian attacks.  Here are article highlights (read the entire piece):

In the final days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his inner circle pleaded with him to acknowledge publicly what U.S. intelligence agencies had already concluded — that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was real.

Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6. . . . they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma. . . . . Admitting that the Kremlin had hacked Democratic Party emails, he said, was a “trap.”

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.

The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.

Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account.

His administration has moved to undo at least some of the sanctions the previous administration imposed on Russia for its election interference . . . Although the issue has been discussed at lower levels at the National Security Council, one former high-ranking Trump administration official said there is an unspoken understanding within the NSC that to raise the matter is to acknowledge its validity, which the president would see as an affront.

His position has alienated close American allies and often undercut members of his Cabinet — all against the backdrop of a criminal probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

This account of the Trump administration’s reaction to Russia’s interference and policies toward Moscow is based on interviews with more than 50 current and former U.S. officials, many of whom had senior roles in the Trump campaign and transition team or have been in high-level positions at the White House or at national security agencies. Most agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

Michael V. Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, has described the Russian interference as the political equivalent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, an event that exposed a previously unimagined vulnerability and required a unified American response.

“What the president has to say is, ‘We know the Russians did it, they know they did it, I know they did it, and we will not rest until we learn everything there is to know about how and do everything possible to prevent it from happening again,’ ” Hayden said in an interview. Trump “has never said anything close to that and will never say anything close to that.”

The feeble American response has registered with the Kremlin.  U.S. officials said that a stream of intelligence from sources inside the Russian government indicates that Putin and his lieutenants regard the 2016 “active measures” campaign — as the Russians describe such covert propaganda operations — as a resounding, if incomplete, success.

But overall, U.S. officials said, the Kremlin believes it got a staggering return on an operation that by some estimates cost less than $500,000 to execute and was organized around two main objectives — destabilizing U.S. democracy and preventing Hillary Clinton, who is despised by Putin, from reaching the White House.

The bottom line for Putin, said one U.S. official briefed on the stream of post-election intelligence, is that the operation was “more than worth the effort.”

The Russian operation seemed intended to aggravate political polarization and racial tensions and to diminish U.S. influence abroad. The United States’ closest alliances are frayed, and the Oval Office is occupied by a disruptive politician who frequently praises his counterpart in Russia.

“Putin has to believe this was the most successful intelligence operation in the history of Russian or Soviet intelligence,” said Andrew Weiss, a former adviser on Russia in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It has driven the American political system into a crisis that will last years.”

U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

The CIA continues to stand by its conclusions about the election, for example, even as the agency’s director, Mike Pompeo, frequently makes comments that seem to diminish or distort those findings.

In October, Pompeo declared the intelligence community had concluded that Russia’s meddling “did not affect the outcome of the election.” In fact, spy agencies intentionally steered clear of addressing that question.

The president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, moved to undermine support for NATO within weeks of arriving at the White House.  . . . . Bannon and his allies also maneuvered to sabotage displays of unity with the alliance. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg arrived for an April visit at the White House, McMaster’s team prepared remarks for Trump that included an endorsement of Article 5 — the core NATO provision calling for members to come to one another’s defense.  But the language was stripped out at the last minute by NATO critics inside the administration

On sensitive matters related to Russia, senior advisers have at times adopted what one official described as a policy of “don’t walk that last 5½feet” — meaning to avoid entering the Oval Office and giving Trump a chance to erupt or overrule on issues that can be resolved by subordinates.

“Look at our actions,” a senior administration official said in an interview. “We’re pushing back against the Russians.”  Senior Trump officials have struggled to explain how. In congressional testimony in October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was pressed on whether the administration had done enough to prevent Russian interference in the future. “Probably not,” Sessions said. “And the matter is so complex that for most of us we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”

Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America?

I suspect that future historians will long ponder what level of insanity prompted Americans - thanks to an Electoral College that lacked the courage to fulfill the Founder's design to protect the country - to put Donald Trump in the White House (I refuse to utter his title before his name because dishonors the office). At the same times, those future historians will likely ponder the precise form of Trump's serious mental disorders that put the both America and the world at risk).  The Washington Post reviews some new books by mental health experts that collectively conclude that Trump is dangerous and either mentally ill or at best a very horrible person.   As for Trump's supporters, sadly in my view, they fall into that latter category, if not the first.  Here are highlights from the review:

Gone are the days when euphemisms about President Trump’s mental health insulated the man like so many padded walls. 

Erratic. Unpredictable. Unstable. Unmoored. Temperamentally unfit. This was what politicians and commentators said when they wished to question Trump’s state of mind but feared the consequences of a more colloquial assessment. Yet the deeper we plunge into this presidency, the more willing people become to call it like they see and hear it.

Now, some psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals are shedding long-held norms to argue that Trump’s condition presents risks to the nation and the world. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” features more than two dozen essays breaking down the president’s perceived traits, which the contributors find consistent with symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy and other maladies. “Collectively with our coauthors, we warn that anyone as mentally unstable as Mr. Trump simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency,” Judith Lewis Herman of Harvard Medical School and Bandy X. Lee of the Yale School of Medicine write in the book’s prologue.

If so, what should we make of the nation that entrusted him with precisely such powers? In his new book, “Twilight of American Sanity,” psychiatrist Allen Frances asserts that Trump is not mentally ill — we are. “Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society,” he writes. “We can’t expect to change Trump, but we must work to undo the societal delusions that created him.”

[D]epending on which of these books you trust — and their persuasive powers vary considerably — you might conclude that Trump is of unsound mind, or that we’re the deranged ones for electing him, or that America has always been disturbed, with Trump’s presidency just the latest manifestation.  And here’s the really crazy thing: These options are not mutually exclusive.

[C]ontributors argue that Trump’s behavior — his political statements and actions as well as his interviews, books and social-media activity — suggest more ominous possibilities.

Trump displays signs of “extreme present hedonism,” the tendency to live in the moment without considering consequences, seeking to bolster one’s self-esteem no matter the risk. Or he exhibits “narcissistic personality disorder,” which includes believing you’re better than others, exaggerating your achievements and expecting constant praise. Combine hedonism, narcissism and bullying, and you get “an impulsive, immature, incompetent person who, when in the position of ultimate power, easily slides into the role of the tyrant,” Philip Zimbardo (of the famous Stanford prison experiment) and Rosemary Sword write. Others suggest that Trump shows indications of sociopathy, including lack of empathy, absence of guilt and intentional ma­nipu­la­tion. Put it all together and you have “malignant narcissism,” which includes antisocial behavior, paranoid traits, even sadism.

Over time these characteristics will only become worse, either because Mr. Trump will succeed in gaining more power and more grandiosity with less grasp on reality, or because he will engender more criticism producing more paranoia, more lies, and more enraged destruction.” And when the president stands before the U.N. General Assembly and threatens to “totally destroy” an enemy country of 25 million people, enraged destruction seems on point.

The volume’s contributors take solace in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, a 1976 casein which the California Supreme Court held that mental-health experts have a responsibility to speak out when they determine that someone poses a physical danger to others. 

In the final chapter, psychiatrists Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher call for an independent panel to evaluate Trump’s fitness for office, and they urge Congress to pass legislation ensuring that future presidential and vice-presidential candidates undergo evaluations. I would not want Tansey, for one, serving on that body. Wouldn’t dream of it.

We are living in very frightening times to say the least.  We can only hope that Mueller does his work quickly and can not only take down Trump but Pence as well.

It’s Time to Talk About Trump’s Mental Health

Watching Der Trumpenführer deliver his address last night was difficult. for several reasons.  First, the man spoke at largely a grade school level - perhaps for the sake of his ignorance embracing base - and came across as anything but presidential.  Second, I had the feeling that I was watching a modern day Emperor Nero who seemed oblivious to the manner in which he is tearing the social fabric of the country apart.  Trump has never been a good speaker.  What was amazing was that he was able to ploddingly read the teleprompter without veering off course into impromptu batshitery and/or a pro-white supremacist rant.  Anyone who has seriously observed Trump for some time should see that the man is mentally unstable - even some of his past acquaintances have observed his mental decline.  All of this makes the fact that he occupies the White House frightening as a column in the Washington Post observes.  Here are excerpts:  

How unstable and divorced from reality is President Trump? We’ve reached the point where the nation has the right and the need to know.

We’re not accustomed to asking such questions about our presidents. We don’t know how to even begin inquiring into a president’s mental health, so we rationalize aberrant behavior as being part of some subtle strategy. We say that Trump is cleverly playing to his base, or employing the “madman theory” of foreign relations, or simply being unpredictable to gain an advantage by keeping everyone off balance.

But if Trump were really playing three-dimensional chess, presumably he’d be getting things done. His approval ratings would be rising rather than falling. Allies in Congress would be expressing admiration rather than increasing dismay.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) hit a nerve Thursday when he saidthat Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” needed in a president. . . . . . Corker said he feared that “our nation is going to go through great peril” and called for “radical change” at the White House. Democrats have been slightly more plain-spoken. Rep. Adam B. Schiff told CNN on Sunday that “I certainly think that there’s an issue with the president’s capability.” And fellow California Rep. Jackie Speier tweeted last week that Trump “is showing signs of erratic behavior and mental instability that place the country in grave danger.” Trump’s performance last week following the Charlottesville incident was indeed alarming, the problem being not just what he said but how he said it. . . . . Trump went back to blaming “both sides” in what can only be called an angry, red-faced rant. Anyone can have a bad day. But according to many published reports, Trump often erupts into rage — especially when he sees something he doesn’t like on the cable news shows he is said to watch compulsively. I have spoken with people who have known Trump for decades and who say he has changed. He exhibits less self-awareness, these longtime acquaintances say, and less capacity for sustained focus. Indeed, it is instructive to compare television interviews of Trump recorded years ago with those conducted now. To this layman’s eyes and ears, there seems to have been deterioration. The stakes are so high, however, that the officials who work alongside Trump and observe him closely bear a tremendous responsibility. There is a huge difference between sounding as unhinged as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and actually being that unstable. It is uncomfortable to talk about the president’s mental health. But at this point it is irresponsible not to.