Never Trump Ex-Republican: Why I Will Vote for Any 2020 Democratic Nominee

While driving between my law firm's offices today, I heard Thomas Nichols as a guest on the POTUS - Politics of the United States - channel on satellite radio.  The topic was his column last week in USA Today as to why he would vote for almost any Democrat nominee (other than Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson) in the 2020 presidential election.  Nichols is a former Republican, a Never Trumper, and is an academic specialist on international affairs, currently a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School. He's no intellectual slouch and knows much about the U.S. Constitution and foreign affairs. His work deals with issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.  His radio remarks were so strong that I found the USA Today piece which ought to be required reading for every voter in America since it makes it clear (i) why people MUST get to the polls in 2020, and (ii) why virtually anyone other than Trump would put the nation on a safer course.  Here are column excerpts:

I don’t care if Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal. She could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as underpants and I’ll vote for her. I don’t care if Sen. Kamala Harris is an opportunistic California prosecutor who wants to relitigate busing. She could tell me that I have to drive to work in a go-cart covered with Barbie decals and I’ll vote for her. I don’t care if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a muddle-headed socialist from a rural class-warfare state (where I once lived as one of his constituents). He could tell me he’s going to tax used kitty litter and I’ll vote for him.

All of the policy “what about” hypotheticals from my conservative friends are diversions. They’re trying to move the argument to policy to blind us to the reality that President Donald Trump is both unstable and compromised.

As I have argued for well over two years, there is plenty of evidence that the president is compromised by our most dedicated enemy. Even before the Mueller report laid bare the degree to which the Trump campaign welcomed Russian help, it was obvious that Trump feared Russian President Vladimir Putin — not only because Putin knew how much Trump had lied to the American people during the campaign about his dealings with Russia, but also likely because Moscow holds Trump’s closest financial secrets after years of shady dealings with Russian oligarchs.

Compulsive lying, fantastic and easily refuted claims, base insults and bizarre public meltdowns, however, are indeed signs of serious emotional problems. Trump has never been a reasonable man, but for two years, he has gotten worse. He literally cannot tell the truth from a lie, he often seems completely unable to comprehend even basic information, and he flies off the handle in ways that would make most of us take our children to a pediatrician for evaluation.

This is why policy doesn’t matter. I have only two requirements from the Democratic nominee. First, he or she must not be obviously mentally unstable. Second, the nominee must not be in any way sympathetic — or worse, potentially beholden — to a hostile foreign power. This rules out Gabbard, Williamson and maybe New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, although in de Blasio’s case it’s hard to tell whether he is unstable or just a terrible person.

As for the rest of them, I am willing to live with whoever wins the Democratic primary process. I will likely hate the nominee’s policies, but at least I will not be concerned that he or she is incapable of understanding “the nuclear” or “the cyber.” I will feel like I have a shot at trying to convince my elected representatives that they should listen to the policy preferences of normal human beings instead of two old men wearing shirts that say they’d “rather be a Russian than a Democrat,” or a woman in a shirt indicating that she is willing to have the president grab her genitalia.

The Democratic candidate will promise to nominate people into Cabinet posts who will make me tear my hair out. But at least I will be confident that they are in charge of their own inner circle, instead of surrounded by unprincipled cronies who keep their own boss in the dark while taking a hatchet to the Constitution. Is there anyone that Warren or former Vice President Joe Biden could bring to, say, the Justice Department, whom I would fear more than an odious and sinister courtier like William Barr?

It is a sign of how low we have fallen as a nation that “rational” and “not compromised by an enemy” are now my only two requirements for the office of the president of the United States. Perhaps years of peace and prosperity have made us forget the terrifying responsibilities that attend the presidency, including the stewardship of enough nuclear weapons to blow the Northern Hemisphere to smithereens.

As long as the Democrats can provide someone who can pass these simple tests, their nominee has my vote.

Sadly, the analysis is 100% on point. Trump Must be defeated in 2020.

Retired General: Trump’s Judgment is Fundamentally Flawed

Trump and Emperor Nero - two of a kind?

Some likely think my comparisons of Donald Trump to mentally deranged Roman emperors of the past are off target, but this past week and stories coming out of the White House suggest that the comparisons are all to appropriate.  Worse yet, they suggest that dangerous actions could come from an emotionally and - in my view and that of others - mentally ill occupant of the White House.  A piece in the Washington Post based on interviews with 22 White House officials, friends and advisers to the president and other administration allies suggests that thinking Americans - which excludes Fox News viewers and evangelical Christians - should be very worried if not truly frightened.  Here are story excerpts:

Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of anxiety and volatility — with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center. . . . As one official put it: “We haven’t bottomed out.”

Trump is now a president in transition, at times angry and increasingly isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at a television screen, the cable news headlines are trumpeting yet another scandal. He voices frustration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has few on-air defenders. He revives old grudges. 

Still, Trump’s friends are increasingly concerned about his well-being, worried that the president’s obsession with cable commentary and perceived slights is taking a toll on the 71-year-old. “Pure madness,” lamented one exasperated ally.

Retired four-star Army general Barry McCaffrey said the American people — and Congress especially — should be alarmed.

“I think the president is starting to wobble in his emotional stability and this is not going to end well,” McCaffrey said. “Trump’s judgment is fundamentally flawed, and the more pressure put on him and the more isolated he becomes, I think, his ability to do harm is going to increase.”

This portrait of Trump at a moment of crisis just over a year after taking office is based on interviews with 22 White House officials, friends and advisers to the president and other administration allies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Trump’s state of mind.

The tumult comes as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s 2016 election interference and the president’s possible obstruction of justice has intensified. Meanwhile, Kushner, a White House senior adviser, was stripped last week of his access to the nation’s top secrets amid increasing public scrutiny of his foreign contacts and of his mixing of business and government work.
 Trump seethed with anger last Wednesday night over cable news coverage of a photo, obtained by Axios, showing Sessions at dinner with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation, and another top Justice Department prosecutor. The outing was described in news reports as amounting to an act of solidarity after Trump had attacked Sessions in a tweet that morning.

The next morning, Trump was still raging about the photo, venting to friends and allies about a dinner he viewed as an intentional show of disloyalty.

“Trump’s fundamentally distorted personality — which at its core is chaotic, volatile and transgressive — when combined with the powers of the presidency had to end poorly,” said Peter Wehner, a veteran of the three previous Republican administrations and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “What we’re now seeing is the radiating effects of that, and it’s enveloped him, his White House, his family and his friends.”
 Trump is testing the patience of his own staff, some of whom think he is not listening to their advice. White House counsel Donald McGahn and national economic council director Gary Cohn have been especially frustrated, according to other advisers.
 “Morale is the worst it’s ever been,” said a Republican strategist in frequent contact with White House staff. “Nobody knows what to expect.”

 I definitely do not sleep well know that we have in essence a mad man in the White House.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

As regular readers know well, I am a constant critic of ignorance embracing fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.  Much of this celebration of ignorance stems from a blind belief in the Bible as a literally true work of historical fact rather than the myth nature of much of the Old Testament. The Book of Genesis and its mythical figures, Adam and Eve provide a base for this willful rejection of science and knowledge as do Leviticus and other "books" authored by unknown, uneducated Bronze Age individuals.  A new book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, looks at these fictional figures  and the efforts to legitimize them by an array of individuals, including St. Augustine who bears much of the blame for Christianity's bizarre views on sex and sexuality and the Catholic Church's fossilized and wrong headed "natural law" that has been used for centuries to demonize gays and subjugate women.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the book.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at St. Augustine's role in creating neurotic views on sex and sexuality.  Here are highlights from The Guardian piece (it goes without saying that the book will NOT be popular with Southern Baptists):

We may be a godless lot, but our world remains hopelessly religious. As Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates in his enthralling, thrilling book about Genesis and its afterlife, myths that once compelled belief have dwindled into make-believe, but in the “post-truth” era fiction and fantasy still determine the lives of many – Islamic fanatics, members of the Jedi church, Trump loyalists – and make them bow down before false gods. Greenblatt . . . . here picks apart the most invidious and onerous of myths. Genesis devised a story that told us where we are, why we are here, and established rules for our conduct. Human history in the Christian west has been a long battle to come to terms with that tale, whose inflictions include a drastic ban on acquiring knowledge and a baleful sexual morality, with the pain of childbirth and inevitable death imposed by God as penalties for disobedience. Greenblatt follows Adam and Eve out of the garden and shows how they were loaded with an extra burden of guilt by St Augustine, who invented the vile notion of original sin to make us all take the blame for an impromptu erection that embarrassed him in the public baths. Along the way, there is an often hilarious account of scholastic efforts to rationalise the myth’s illogic, and an array of entertaining heresies. From the evidence of fossils, a 16th-century French mathematician estimated that Adam was 123ft tall; another addled expert calculated that he lived to be precisely 930 years old. In the Talmud, a rabbi speculated that – before asking God to create a female partner for him – Adam tried sex with all the other animals. Iconographers worried whether he should be painted with a navel, since he had no mother. He is torn, as Milton and Darwin were, between respect for clear-eyed knowledge and reverence for the grand fabulations with which we redesign the messy, cheerless world. The more Milton humanised Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost – writing for them a quarrel which, Greenblatt says, will ring true to anyone with a spouse – the more he challenged God’s insistence that we should “know to know no more”. Though Greenblatt knows that the biblical story is the source of our abiding unhappiness and self-dislike, he still wants to cling, as he says, to “the peculiar satisfaction that the ancient story provides”. His book, however, is written not to glorify God but to extol the defiant endeavours of human thinkers, and more generally to admire the self-help of a species that, rather than being created fully fashioned and set down in a fruitful garden, spent arduous aeons slowly acquiring “the fathomless complexities of toolmaking, art-making, language, and the capacity to reason”.

Here are a few excerpts from the piece in The New Yorker that looks at Augustine's obsession with sex and the price Christianity and the world paid for one man's bizarre psyche:

Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary [sexual] arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin. This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy—but not before decades of dispute. Chief among those who found it both absurd and repulsive was a British-born monk, Pelagius. . . . . Pelagius and his followers were moral optimists. They believed that human beings were born innocent. Infants do not enter the world with a special endowment of virtue, but neither do they carry the innate stain of vice. Augustine countered that we are all marked, in our very origins, with evil. It is not a matter of particular acts of cruelty or violence, specific forms of social pathology, or this or that person who has made a disastrous choice. . . . There is something deeply, essentially wrong with us. Our whole species is what Augustine called a massa peccati, a mass of sin. It is here, when Augustine must produce evidence of our individual and collective perfidy, that he called in witness Adam and Eve. For the original sin that stains every one of us is not only a sin that inheres in our individual origins—that is, in the sexual arousal that enabled our parents to conceive us—but also a sin that may be traced back to the couple in whom our whole race originates. 

Augustine and many of the early "church fathers" by modern standards likely suffered from mental illness.  What made their warped views attractive to the Church was that they offered a means to instill guilty and  thereby exert control over the sheep like followers.

Trump’s Tantrums Over Rosenstein Speak Volumes

As the Washington Post and other news media outlets have reported, Der Trumpenführer let loose with a Twitter tantrum directed at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that complained as follows:

“I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt,” 

Never mind that Trump himself told the world on national television that he was going to fire James Comey regardless of an advice from Mr. Rosenstein or anyone else. Sadly, it is part and parcel with Trump's constant lying that is believed only by the most brain dead of his core base of evangelical Christians and white supremacists.  There's a reason why Trump now has a disapproval rate of 64% based on the latest polling.  Unfortunately, as a column in the Washington Post notes, this may be the beginning of even more chaos if Trump fires Rosenstein, something that will only add to grounds for finding obstruction of justice.  Trump is proving daily that his is mentally and morally unfit for office. We are rapidly approaching a 2017 version of Watergate. Here are column excerpts:

It’s come to this, on his 146th day in office: The president, under investigation for obstruction of justice, attacked his own deputy attorney general for orchestrating a “witch hunt” against him.

Sometimes my role as a columnist is to advise readers not to overreact, to maintain perspective. Today my advice is to buckle up. Brace yourselves.

I’m not sure for what, exactly. President Trump firing Rod J. Rosenstein or taking moves that would force the deputy attorney general, and perhaps others, to quit? Firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose probe has pushed Trump to this frenzied state? Using his pardon power in an effort to shut down the investigation, on the theory that Mueller would then have nothing left to probe? Pardoning himself, a move of contested legality that even Richard Nixon balked at? Facing impeachment proceedings, however unlikely that may be with a Republican-controlled Congress?

 

That any of these seem within the realm of possibility is the measure of how unsettled, and unsettling, this moment is. Actually, that’s an understatement. This situation is alarming in a way I have never experienced in almost four decades here.

 

I am not alone. “The message the president is sending through his tweets is that he believes the rule of law doesn’t apply to him and that anyone who thinks otherwise will be fired,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement Friday. “That’s undemocratic on its face and a blatant violation of the president’s oath of office.”

 

 Trump’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted. He has seemed determined — frantic, really — to see that the case against fired national security adviser Michael Flynn is dropped. If you credit Comey’s sworn account over Trump’s news conference denials, Trump demanded Comey’s loyalty; pressed him to drop the case against Flynn; and eventually fired Comey himself because of his handling of “this Russia thing.” As Comey might say, no reasonable prosecutor would fail to investigate in these circumstances.

What Trump derides as a “phony witch hunt” is the legal system working as it should. Attorney General Jeff Sessions needed to recuse himself. Rosenstein needed to name a special counsel. And Mueller needs to pursue the investigation, impartially and fearlessly, to its logical end.

That Trump now feels the need to attack seasoned prosecutors for simply doing their jobs speaks volumes — and says nothing reassuring about the lengths to which Trump, for whom self-preservation has always been the top priority, might eventually go.

Again, the irony is that with ever lie and insane outburst, Trump is only adding to the momentum of the Russiagate investigation.  If Trump colluded with Russia - something I would not put past him - and/or engaged in illegal money laundering schemes with Russians, he has no one to blame but himself.  If he is forced from office and/or prosecuted, he will have done it to himself.  Another Post article looks at this irony:

 We are heading toward Donald Trump’s version of the Saturday Night Massacre.

While the details aren’t precisely the same, the parallels are many. A president under a widening investigation for (among other things) possible obstruction of justice. A special counsel targeted by the president’s ire. High-ranking officials in the Justice Department unwilling to put loyalty to the president above their obligations to the country, and losing their jobs because of it. All that’s left is the dramatic round of firings and resignations and the headlong rush toward impeachment.

Richard Nixon didn’t have Twitter, but Donald Trump does. And this morning, he attacked his deputy attorney general, . . . . In addition to everything else, Trump confirms here the reports from anonymous sources that he is the target of an obstruction of justice investigation. Glad we cleared that up.

What does this have to do with Watergate? Let’s go back to the Saturday Night Massacre. In October 1973, Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, demanded that President Nixon turn over recordings of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon refused, and tried to negotiate a deal that Cox rejected. Nixon then ordered the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson refused, and resigned. Nixon then ordered the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused, and resigned. Nixon then ordered the next person in the Justice Department hierarchy, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork agreed. While it would be 10 more months before Nixon himself resigned, the Saturday Night Massacre may have been the point where his determination to obstruct the Watergate investigation became the most clear to everyone in the country.

We aren’t there yet, but let’s take a good look at where we are. There is something serious going on between Trump and Rosenstein, who is overseeing the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. . . . . only Rosenstein has the authority to fire Mueller. And it’s plain that Trump would like to rid himself of this meddlesome special counsel; the question is whether he will try. Multiple reports from inside the White House paint a picture of Trump as obsessed with the investigation, railing against Mueller and considering whether to fire him — an act that everyone around Trump knows would be a political catastrophe (and possibly a legal one as well).

By Trump’s own admission, he had already decided to fire FBI director James Comey when he ordered Rosenstein to prepare a report describing Comey’s alleged shortcomings.

If Rosenstein is considering recusal, it’s because of his role in the Comey firing — which, let’s not forget, Trump admitted both on national television and in a conversation with Russian officials in the Oval Office that he did out of unhappiness with the Russia investigation. Rosenstein could become a witness in the obstruction investigation, which would make it problematic for him to be overseeing Mueller. The authority would then fall to Brand. Is Trump going to go after her next? What happens if he orders her to fire Mueller? Would she resign in protest like Richardson and Ruckelshaus, or follow orders like Bork?

Let’s step back and try to grasp everything that’s going on here. The president of the United States is waging an inept public relations campaign against the special counsel’s investigation . . . 

[I]t [the Russiagate investigation] seems to be pushing Trump to particular heights of irrationality. If you were trying to limit the investigation and its political fallout and not antagonize the prosecutors, it would be utterly insane to send out these kinds of tweets. Trump’s staff and lawyers are surely begging him to stop. But they can’t control him.

In an ordinary scandal, you have some initial set of misdeeds, and then possibly a coverup that adds more misdeeds that could themselves be criminal. In the Russia scandal we could have those two sets of actions, but on top of them we have a paranoid, infantile president seemingly determined to put himself in ever-greater political and legal jeopardy. The more we learn about how deep Mueller’s investigation is reaching, the higher the chances that Trump will, in a moment of rage, order Mueller to be fired. If you think things are dramatic and absurd right now, just wait — it’s going to get worse.

 What I cannot understand is why anyone sane would have voted for Trump.  His entire career and behavior for decades proved beyond question that he was unfit for office. 

The Dangerous Russification of America

Der Trumpenführer has made his admiration of Vladimir Putin well known.  Whether the admiration stems from his desire to rule America as an authoritarian dictatorship or because he wants to keep Putin happy because of information Putin is holding over his head is unclear and a question that no one knows how to answer for certain at the moment.  Nonetheless, Trump and Putin both lie incessantly and with Trump's launch of an anti-gay jihad to please his Christofascist supporters certainly mirrors Putin's war on Russian gays in order to win the support of the Russian Orthodox Church which has a centuries old history of supporting autocrats at the expense of the populace. With America in chaos - one of Putin's objectives -  the larger question is what happens to the West now that America seemingly is no longer its leader.  A column in the New York Times looks at the unsettling situation.  Here are excerpts: 

MUNICH — This Munich Security Conference was different. A Frenchman defended NATO against the American president. The Russian foreign minister was here but the phantom American secretary of state was not. An ex-Swedish prime minister had to respond to the “last-night-in-Sweden affair” — an ominous incident in a placid Scandinavian state dreamed up in his refugee delirium by Donald Trump.

Surreal hardly begins to describe the proceedings at this annual gathering, the Davos of foreign policy. This is what happens when the United States is all over the place. Allies get nervous; they don’t know what to believe. “Trump’s uncontrolled communication is unsettling the world,” John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, told me. That is an understatement. The Trump doctrine is chaos.

Vice President Mike Pence came, communicated and exited without taking questions. He said the United States would be “unwavering” in its commitment to NATO, whose glories he extolled. (He never mentioned the European Union, whose fragmentation Trump encourages.)

[G]etting used to an American president who responds through Twitter to the last guy in the room or what he’s just seen on TV, has no notion of or interest in European history, and has turned America’s word into junk, is not easy. Europeans are reeling.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich conference, told Deutsche Welle that if Trump continues to advocate against the European Union it would amount to a “nonmilitary declaration of war.” Those are extraordinary words from a distinguished former German ambassador about the American president.

[T]he most troubling thing was finding myself unsure who was more credible — Pence or Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. The Russification of America under Trump has proceeded apace. Vladimir Putin’s macho authoritarianism, disdain for the press, and mockery of the truth has installed itself on the Potomac.

The Russian system under Putin is a false democracy based on a Potemkin village of props — political parties, media, judiciary — that are the fig leaf covering repression or elimination of opponents. Russia runs on lies. It’s alternative-fact central (you know, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine). But what happens when the United States begins to be infected with Russian disease?

Pence’s speech may not have been precisely a barefaced whopping lie, but it certainly showed barefaced whopping disdain for the intelligence of the audience (you know, nothing has changed with Trump, ha-ha.) By comparison, Lavrov was blunt. He announced the dawn of the “post-West world order.”

I wonder what that means — perhaps a world of lies, repression, unreason and violence. It advances as America offers only incoherence. To counter the drift, what is needed? A functioning American State Department would be a start.

America today has no foreign policy. It’s veering between empty reaffirmations of old bonds (Pence) and the scattershot anti-Muslim, Sweden-syndrome, anti-trade, bellicose, what’s-in-it-for-me mercantilism of Trump.

The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight.

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, joked to me that the most terrifying aspect of Trump’s “incident” in Sweden was “the suppression of it by all the major Swedish newspapers, and even Swedish citizens.” We laughed. The unfunny moment will come when Trump lashes out based on nothing but fervid imaginings and the “post-West” order stumbles from confusion into conflagration.

Trump is a clear and present danger to both America and the world at large.  Congressional Republicans need to stop pretending otherwise.  It's as if we have our own Emperor Nero in the White House. #NotMyPresident.  

Is Trump's Impeachment Inevitable?

A piece in Huffington Post - which I hope proves accurate - argues that the impeachment of Donald Trump is inevitable.  Of course, impeachment hinges not only on Trump's actions and violation of the law and the U.S. Constitution but also on when Congressional Republicans will finally view Trump as more of a liability than an asset.  As he alienates the business community and foments the consolidation of opposition by the majority of Americans to not only himself but to Republicans in general, at some point the critical mass will be achieved where impeachment will become an attractive option and allow Republicans who have sold out the nation in favor of personal advancement and partisanship to actually appear as patriots.  Never mind that they prostituted themselves to Trump and played a role in his election.  Here are column highlights:

Trump has been trying to govern by impulse, on whim, for personal retribution, for profit, by decree ― as if he had been elected dictator. It doesn’t work, and the wheels are coming off the bus. After a week!

Impeachment is gaining ground because it is the only way to get him out, and because Republicans are already deserting this president in droves, and because the man is psychiatrically incapable of checking whether something is legal before he does it.

Impeachment is gaining ground because it’s so horribly clear that Trump is unfit for office. The grownups around Trump, even the most slavishly loyal ones, spend half their time trying to rein him in, but it can’t be done.

They spend the other half fielding frantic calls from Republican chieftains, business elites and foreign leaders. Trump did what? Poor Reince Priebus has finally attained the pinnacle of power, and it can’t be fun. 

It is one thing to live in your own reality when you are a candidate and it’s just words. You can fool enough of the people enough of the time maybe even to get elected. But when you try to govern that way, there is a reality to reality—and reality pushes back.

One by one, Trump has decreed impulsive orders, un-vetted by legal, policy, or political staff, much less by serious planning. Almost immediately he is forced to walk them back by a combination of political and legal pressure—and by reality.

Unlike in the various dictatorships Trump admires, the complex skein of constitutional legal and political checks on tyranny in the United States are holding—just barely at times, but they are holding. And the more reckless Trump’s behavior, the stronger become the checks. 

The more unhinged he becomes, the less will conservative judges be the toadies to ordinary Republican policies that they too often have been. Anybody want to wager that the Supreme Court will be Trump’s whore?

In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting his view of Putin. They have ridiculed his screwball claim of massive voter fraud. 

They are running for cover on how to kill ObamaCare without killing patients or Republican re-election hopes. 

Trump proposed to reinstate torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the Senate’s third ranking Republican said Wednesday that the ban on torture was settled law and the Republicans in Congress would oppose any reinstatement. Trump’s own defense secretary holds the same view. After blustering out his new torture policy, Trump meekly agreed to defer to his defense advisers. 

The bipartisan group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, (CREW) has been conducting a detailed investigation. Senior legal scholars associated with CREW have filed a detailed legal brief in their lawsuit, documenting the several ways Trump is in violation of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits a president from profiting from the actions of foreign governments. 

There are already plenty of other grounds for impeachment, including Trump’s putting his own business interests ahead of the country’s and his weird and opportunistic alliance with Vladimir Putin bordering on treason. A lesser-known law that goes beyond the Emoluments Clause is the STOCK Act of 2012, which explicitly prohibits the president and other officials from profiting from non-public knowledge.

Republicans at first thought they could use Trump for Republican ends. But from his embrace of Putin to his sponsorship of a general trade war, this is no Republican. One can only imagine the alarm and horror being expressed by Republicans privately.

In 1984, the psychiatrist Otto Kernberg described a sickness known as Malignant Narcissism. Unlike ordinary narcissism, malignant narcissism was a severe pathology.

It was characterized by an absence of conscience, a pathological grandiosity and quest for power, and a sadistic joy in cruelty. 

Given the sheer danger to the Republic as well as to the Republicans, Trump’s impeachment will happen. The only question is how grave a catastrophe America faces first.

Trump's Alarming First Week - Is He Mentally Ill?

Having safely escaped Tidewater Virginia for a long weekend of warm weather, there is one thing that we have not been able to escape: the continuing menace to the nation and the world posed by the current deranged occupant of the White House.  The first week of Der Fuhrer's presidency has been marked by bizarre lies and one demonstration after another that Trump likely DOES suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, a real danger to national security and the civil rights of everyday Americans.  As for immigrants and refugees, Der Fuhrer is imposing policies reminiscent of the bans that sent thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe to their deaths.  Everything revolves around satiating Trump's insatiable and fragile ego and pandering to the ugliest prejudices of his base.  Some Republicans have begun to display alarm, but most seem indifferent to the reality that the White House id now occupied by a madman who is incapable of controlling himself or moderating unhinged behavior.  A conservative columnist recaps the week's alarming cavalcade of unbalanced and ego mad behavior in a piece in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

Week One of the Trump administration was among the most alarming in the history of the American presidency.

There have been scarier weeks for the country, certainly — the Cuban missile crisis and the Sept. 11 attacks. There have been more tragic ones — the Sept. 11 attacks again, the terrible toll of wartime, the horror of four presidential assassinations.

There have been occasions of terrible presidential judgment — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order to detain U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II. And there have been moments of looming constitutional crisis — during Watergate alone, the Saturday Night Massacre, the showdown with the Supreme Court over the release of the tapes, the impeachment inquiry that resulted in Richard Nixon’s resignation.

But the first week of the Trump presidency was alarming in a different way, because the frightening part involved the president’s own erratic, even bizarre, behavior.

Anyone who paid even glancing attention to the 2016 campaign already understood Donald Trump to be undisciplined, easily provoked and self-absorbed to the point of narcissism. But it was one thing to know that in theory; it was much more unsettling to witness President Trump in action. 

[Each day feeling scarier than the one before, and Trump’s sycophantic aides modeling his own fact-free rants — press secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehood-filled briefing-room tirade, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway’s brazen defense of “alternative facts,” chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s brutish admonition to the media to “keep its mouth shut.”

Trump himself outdid his petty obsession with crowd size with his delusional obsession with popular-vote fraud. . . . . What was once delusional ego-salving now appears headed for official inquiry.

This is ominous not only for the implicit threat of imposing new and unnecessary obstacles to voting, but also because it means that no one, neither American citizens nor foreign leaders, can believe the president of the United States when he makes an assertion.

[M]y lament about the week is largely devoid of ideological content. That is not because his policy moves are not appalling — they are. But you don’t have to disagree with Trump’s policies to be rattled to the core by his unhinged behavior.

What is to be done? In a meeting last week with The Post editorial board, Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight Committee, said he was weighing legislation to require presidents to undergo an independent medical examination, including for mental health. Chaffetz cautioned that he wasn’t “talking about some of the rhetoric that’s flying around” about Trump. Still, he said, “If you’re going to have your hands on the nuclear codes, you should probably know what kind of mental state you’re in.”

That can’t happen soon enough.

How anyone sane and rational can continue to support the man and make excuses for his bizarre behavior is baffling.  Are really that many Trump voters who put satisfying their bigotries ahead of the nation's long term welfare.  Trump represents "change" only because he is insane.  

Ignoring Trump at Our Peril

Never in my lifetime have I felt so much animosity toward or fear of a president of the United States, and that includes Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.  The latter two certainly had their psychological issues but despite policy disagreements and active dislike of them, I never viewed them as insane.  That cannot be said for Der Fuhrer who increasingly displays a deeply disturbed personality more akin to Hitler or Stalin than John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson.  Yet disturbingly, far too many Americans continue to act like sleep walkers ignoring the clear and present danger Trump poses to not only America but the world at large.  We are at risk perhaps more so than ever in our history.  A column in the Washington Post argues that we are at great peril.  Here are highlights:

Where to begin? That’s the daily question for anyone trying to follow the words and deeds of the new administration, which is like drinking from two fire hoses — one gushing policy, the other spewing insanity.

Neither stream can be ignored. I wish I could agree with those who say we should pay little attention to President Trump’s verbal eruptions and focus only on concrete actions, but I can’t. It matters that the most powerful man in the world insists on “facts” that are nothing but self-aggrandizing fantasy. It matters that the president of the United States seems incapable of publicly admitting any error. It matters that Trump’s need for adulation appears to be insatiable.

The president’s most acute obsession is with the false notion that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because of widespread election fraud committed by “millions” of people.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan(R-Wis.) is among the many officials who have acknowledged there is zero evidence of the kind of fraud Trump alleges. It simply did not happen.

At a meeting with congressional leaders on Monday, Trump cited a different piece of purported proof, according to the New York Times: He told a story about how professional golfer Bernhard Langer tried to vote in Florida on Election Day but was not allowed to do so, while suspicious-looking voters ahead of and behind him, possibly Latin American immigrants, were permitted to cast provisional ballots.

[T]his simply did not happen. Langer indeed lives in Florida but is a German citizen. He has never voted in this country.

Why is any of this important? Because Trump, relying on a misinterpreted study and a garbled anecdote, has called for a “major investigation” of all this nonexistent voter fraud. He now has the vast resources of the Justice Department at his disposal, which means that if he wants a big investigation, he can have one. 

Trump’s fixation on his own popularity, or lack thereof, dovetails with the Republican Party’s long-standing political interest in minimizing the electoral weight of Democratic “urban” strongholds — meaning cities with large populations of minorities and liberals. We should prepare for a GOP attempt to channel Trump’s delusion into the rational, but nefarious, purpose of voter suppression.

Another example is Trump’s insistence on the value of torture in the fight against terrorism. Trump pledged during the campaign to bring back waterboarding and “much worse.”  . . . . How can allies fully share intelligence with the United States if they believe captured suspects may be tortured?

Trump’s off-the-wall statements and Twitter rants cannot be dismissed as mere attempts to distract. We have a president who is obsessed with his public standing, given to outlandish statements, eager to believe in conspiracy theories and unwilling to admit when he is wrong. To our peril, his character and moods will shape his policies.

Will the GOP Save Us From the Trump Monster?

Personally, I gave up on the Republican Party many years ago when I resigned from the party when it became clear to me that the GOP could no longer grasp or respect the concept of the separation of Church and state.  In the intervening years, the GOP has gone form ugly to downright hideous and grotesque.  Racism, white supremacy, religious extremism and contempt for objective facts and science are now the GOP norm.  It was a very different party in the days of my parents and grandparents. Now, with the election of Donald Trump as the Republican president of this once great nation, the GOP has reached a new low.  Lying and "alternate facts" pass for integrity and and honesty.  Thus, the question becomes that of who will save America from the Frankenstein monster it has unleashed?  I myself put almost zero faith in the willingness or ability of the GOP to redeem itself and save the nation.  I think that new popular forces and  new political approaches are all that stand between America and fascism or Trumpism, things that are not all that different.  Yet a column in the Washington Post calls of the GOP to rise to the occasion.  I will not hold my breath, but here are column excerpts:

What we know so far is that the man is who he is. There is no larger, finer man inside him trying to get out. Everyone who is paying attention knows this. Flags flying at the Capitol, the U.S. Marine Band, gray eminences in black coats, and He Who Is Smarter Than Those With Intelligence delivers 16 minutes of hooey and horse hockey about corrupt politicians betraying the people, and American carnage, and patriotism healing our division, though the division is mainly about Himself and though love of country does not necessarily make people stupid.

There might as well have been a 14-year-old boy at the lectern  . . . . The next day he motored out to the CIA and stood before the memorial wall honoring heroes who gave their lives in anonymity and he bitched about his newspaper coverage. The next day he boasted that his inauguration’s TV ratings were higher than those in 2013. The day after that, he told the congressional leadership that he lost the popular vote because millions of illegal votes were cast, which everyone in the room knew was a bald-faced lie, except perhaps Himself. The man is clueless, tightly locked inside his own small bubble. A sizable minority of Americans, longing for greatness or wanting to smack down an ambitious woman and to show those people in the hellhole coastal cities what the real America is all about, has elected him. To him, this minority is a mass movement such as the world has never seen. God have mercy.

Everyone knows that the man is a fabulator, oblivious, trapped in his own terrible needs. Republican, Democrat, libertarian, socialist, white supremacist or sebaceous cyst — everyone knows it. It is up to Republicans to save the country from this man. They elected him, and it is their duty to tie a rope around his ankle. They formed a solid bloc against President Obama and held their ranks, and now, for revenge, they will go after health insurance subsidies for people of limited means, which is one of the cruelest things they can possibly do. . . . . when upward of 30 million are left high and dry, people will suffer horribly.

The question is: How cynical are we willing to be and for how long? How long will Senate Republicans wait until a few of them stand up to the man? Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. American self-respect is what is at stake here, ladies and gentlemen. The only good things to come out of that inauguration were the marches all over the country the day after, millions of people taking to the streets of their own free will . . . . That’s the great America I grew up in. It’s still here.

Will White House Leaks Defeat Trump?

Despite his full blown assault on the free press, Der Fuhrer has one problem that may yet sink him and open the way for his removal from office: leaks flowing in a torrent from White House staffers and others. The picture that is emerging should surprise no one other than the most brainwashed or bigotry filled Trump supporters:  the occupant of the Oval Office is a thin skinned narcissist who cannot stand anything that does not further inflate his overweening ego and who will lash out at anything not in keeping with his alternate universe.  One can only hope that with time even the worse political whores in the Republican Party will wake up to the fact that Trump needs to go for the good of everyone in America.  I loath Mike Pence, but at least he isn't clinically insane and might be controlled by tradition and the ability to grasp some semblance of objective reality.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the ongoing leaks flowing from the White House.  Here are highlights:

 We now have a story from The Washington Post ("The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot") to match yesterday's from The Times ("Rocky First Weekend for Trump Troubles Even His Top Aides"). They are each a classic type for a major newspaper.

But there is an underlying, not-made-explicit message to both which is perhaps the most important. We are three days into the administration and the Trump White House leaks not so much like a sieve as a bucket with no bottom.

The Trump White House not only leaks like crazy. It casually leaks the most intimate and humiliating details about the President - hurt feelings, ego injury, childlike behavior, self-destructive rages over tweets, media failure to credit his own grandiosity. We have simply never seen this level of leaking, with this little respect for the President's dignity or reputation, this early.

From The Post ...

Trump has been resentful, even furious, at what he views as the media’s failure to reflect the magnitude of his achievements, and he feels demoralized that the public’s perception of his presidency so far does not necessarily align with his own sense of accomplishment.

From Politico ...

One person who frequently talks to Trump said aides have to push back privately against his worst impulses in the White House, like the news conference idea, and have to control information that may infuriate him. He gets bored and likes to watch TV, this person said, so it is important to minimize that.

There is, to put it mildly, a rather clearly recurring theme: a torqued up man-child, alternatively rageful and fragile, both grandiose and profoundly insecure.

It is a bracing picture, chilling and hilarious. But don't lose the point: no White House leaks like this, leaks this much or leaks this casually about the President's emotional weakness. 

Again, no one should be surprised if they have even casually followed Trump over the years.  That said, it is frightening that we have someone mentally disturbed in the office of the presidency.  Trump needs to go and the sooner the better.  He is a clear and present danger to America and the world.