Newspaper readers on Earth 2 woke up this week to a shocking headline in the Bizarro New York Times: “President’s Mental Health Crisis Spirals Downward Again in Stunning and Senseless Speech to UN.”
The article began: “BIZARRO NEW YORK — In a rambling and at times incoherent 40-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly that shocked delegates from around the alternative planet, President Donald Trump made up his own new name for artificial intelligence, lied about his regime’s murderous attacks on boats in the Caribbean, and threatened a nuclear Armageddon in Iran.
“The speech from a hoarse and occasionally confused Bizarro American president sparked a rushed press conference on Capitol Hill from rattled Democrats calling for Mr. Trump’s immediate removal under the 25th Amendment, an outcome also urged by three major U.S. newspapers in front-page editorials.”
Meanwhile, here in the polluted reality-based atmosphere of Earth 1, Trump’s mashugana speech to the U.N. was more or less “sanewashed” by the media and by Congress — just like everything else from 21st-century Caligula, like his 2 a.m. AI-fueled posting sprees on social media, his growing obsession with renaming lakes and whatnot, or the more serious unconstitutional power grabs.
The actual not-bizarro New York Times did mention the Iran annihilation threat in its headline, but explained that Trump had laid out his “Winner-Takes-All Vision” of geopolitics, which also presumably would have been the paper of record’s 1938 sanewashing of a certain German dictator’s foreign policy.
It’s not the first time a vision of journalistic objectivity that was forged in a very different mid-20th-century America has failed the public. I say that as someone who began an evolution from “straight” news reporter to opinion journalist when conventional reporting failed to call out the obvious lies when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.
But what was a big problem a generation ago now looms as a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe: A demagogue who hijacked American democracy, just as the nation’s founders feared would happen, is devolving into a mad king before our eyes.
Less than halfway through Trump’s second term, a buck-naked monarch is parading down Fifth Avenue atop a horse he just appointed to his cabinet, holding nothing but a .38-caliber pistol he occasionally fires into a stunned paradegoer, just to prove he can still get away with it. Somewhere in New York or Washington, D.C., a headline writer is hailing a president’s “One-of-a-Kind Approach to Diplomacy.”
The United States is in a world of trouble right now — losing a totally pointless war in which insane prices at the gas station are collateral damage, committing crimes against humanity from the waters off South America to the meatpacking plants of Dodge City, Kan. — but there is no more pressing crisis than the mental state of a president who believes the only limits on his power are “my own morality, my own mind.”
The salary of both the elite Beltway media and our corporate-sponsored members of Congress depends very much on not understanding the seriousness or nature of this crisis, and so both occupations cower at the thought of making the hard moral choices required by even a child’s understanding of our mad emperor’s new clothes.
There are some eyes-wide-open scribes out there like indie journalist Dan Froomkin, formerly of the Washington Post, who’s long been crusading against the news media’s sanewashing of Trump and wrote in a recent piece that “his idiocy is intertwined with his derangement. And yes, it’s compounded by the lack of anyone inside his bubble willing to correct him. But it’s not so much correction that he lacks. It’s a functional brain.”
Froomkin backed up those words that you won’t see on your TV screen or in leading newspapers with a slew of examples: Trump’s imposition of economically crippling tariffs despite not understanding what a “trade deficit” is, his shifting day-to-day comments on whether or not the Strait of Hormuz is open for oil tankers, or his frequent bragging about passing a cognitive test used to detect dementia.
I try not to write a “hot take” column every time the president utters something completely irrational, because that would be at least five or six times a week and there’d be no time to write about all the other bad things happening in our country right now.
I did find myself baffled by the coverage of what I thought was maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing to come out of Trump’s unhinged Truth Social feed: his “announcement” that his 250-foot “triumphal arch” in the nation’s capital will now become a sniper’s nest stockpiling live ammo and lethal drones.
What read like a plea for a 302 involuntary commitment police call for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was instead treated by too many journalists as a serious news story, followed up by thumb-sucking pieces about Trump’s new penchant for invoking “national security” to silence critics of his many vanity projects. Fellow journalists: We need fewer “think pieces” and more “this man cannot think” articles.
The U.S. Supreme Court, with its three Trump-appointed justices, has made it clear that the president will never be punished in a courtroom for his multiple high crimes and misdemeanors. But if another trial did somehow take place, I believe Trump could have grounds for an insanity defense, because he certainly appears to lack an ability to understand how politically toxic his shtick has become.
This week, with some polls showing Trump’s approval rating plunging to Richard Nixon pre-resignation levels, the president commandeered Air Force One to fly to yet another college football stadium’s luxury box, with his blonde Rasputin, Natalie Harp, right by his side. This came after a week dominated by a gaudy three-day summit with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, where tuxedoed guests gorged on sesame-crusted sea bass while nothing was done about the planet’s many pressing problems.
It was Trump’s close aide and social media guru Dan Scavino who put an exclamation point on the “let them eat cake” mindset by posting an AI video of him getting pushed through the aftermath of the Xi dinner on a cart spraying a bottle of Champagne, with two attractive women at his side. But can you truly “own the libs” with a 29% approval rating? Or do they just not care, and if so, why not?
In a broken country that now runs on the “mind” and the “morality” of its weakened strongman leader, there are three explanations the media needs to discuss, but for the most part won’t:
- The oldest man ever elected president in American history is gradually succumbing to dementia, much like his own landlord father whose employees created a desk full of fake work for him in his final years, and his yes-sir Oval Office aides refuse to confront the problem.
- Trump has always been like this — an out-of-control, unrepentant narcissist — and he is determined to spend his last three years of power achieving only the things that matter to him, which are building giant monuments to himself as well as the infrastructure to make sure no one from his family goes to prison. In such a world, his approval rating, or your vote in November, matters not.
- The scariest of the three: Trump is crazy … like a fox. In other words, all the insane pronouncements about his power to change the names of things like AI or Lake Ontario are really just numbing the public to the idea that he can do anything he wants, including somehow nullifying the upcoming election with the Democrats looking likely to win both houses.
That would certainly explain a rash of blatantly illegal recent actions such as spending taxpayers’ dollars on what are clearly political pro-Trump TV ads, not spending nearly $1 billion authorized by Congress, or his nakedly unconstitutional banning of journalists from the White House press pool because he didn’t like their stories.
If no one is blocking Trump from these fairly serious violations, who will try to stop him when he sends troops or immigration agents to polling places, seizes huge numbers of ballots, or conspires with Republicans on Capitol Hill to not seat Democratic election winners? And then ignores judicial orders to cease and desist?
This is exactly why the time to sound the alarm is now, and not Nov. 10 or Jan. 3, when undoing irrational and unlawful moves by the White House will be much, much harder. Look, TV punditry and newspaper analyses that stop pretending the president is a well man, or newspaper editorials calling for his resignation, or leaders in Congress backing impeachment won’t end the crisis … today.
But calling attention now to Trump’s gross unfitness to hold office will set the stage for the battles to come — moving the Overton window on what can be done to restore democracy and helping any sensible Republicans understand there’s still a way to save both themselves and the country before it’s too late.
The right words matter, a lot. We need to start urgently looking for them.
