A nightmare for Trump enters, stage right

Donald Trump has a new challenger for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. He's someone who has absolutely no chance of winning, of course; the overwhelming majority of Republicans have embraced Donald Trump and his insanity, and are not going to budge. Libertarian William Weld has already committed to making the race, but only a handful of hard-core libertarians will support him. Despite efforts to mount a challenge from the center, those in a position to do so realize how hopeless the task truly is.

But now, a challenger to Mr. Trump has entered the lists from the right.

Joe Walsh is a radio talk-show host and one-term Republican congressman elected as a part of the Tea Party movement. Accusing him of being some sort of liberal or 'RINO,' the knee-jerk response of Trumpenvolk to any opposition to our erratic and egotistical president from within the Republican party, would be kind of silly. Of course, such accusations are usually rather silly, especially since they falsely assume that Donald Trump is himself a sincere conservative rather than a narcissist who has found the conservative movement to be a convenient vehicle for self-glorification. And, of course, neither Mr. Trump or his supporters shy about making themselves look silly in any event.

But Joe Walsh is as hard-line on immigration, trade, and the president's other signature issues as Mr. Trump is himself.  Walsh is running on a simple platform, a simple premise: that Donald Trump is an unstable, erratic, narcissistic bully and pathological liar who has made a career out of dividing Americans and bringing out the worst in them. Walsh's argument is not that Mr. Trump is wrong on the issues. It's that Donald Trump is personally unfit to be president and a danger to the nation every moment that he holds that office.

One of the frustrating things about talking to many Trump supporters is that, again, they are neither afraid of being ridiculous nor necessarily even conscious of it. So the absurdity of trying to change the subject- of making something other than Mr. Trump's personal fitness for the office he holds- the issue undoubtedly will not deter them. It will certainly not deter Mr. Trump himself. He will respond to Walsh with juvenile insults and personal attacks, with name-calling and ridicule. The president has difficulty engaging his opponents substantively even when actual policy issues exist. Instead, he will prove Walsh's point every time he responds to him.

Not, of course, that his supporters will notice that.

But the interesting thing about the Walsh challenge is that no reasonable and objective person will be able to miss the point that what Walsh is saying is the simple and obvious truth. Even Trump's own reaction will only serve to document it. Walsh will not, of course, deny Mr. Trump the nomination, or even make substantial inroads in the Republican primaries and caucuses. But he will draw attention to the reasons why even folks like Walsh, who agree with Mr. Trump on most matters of policy, nevertheless should and must recognize that the most important issue facing America in 2020 is not policy, but rather Trump himself.

Primary challenges- even ones that fizzle- are not healthy signs for incumbent presidents. Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980 and did reasonably well. But there was never any real question of Mr. Carter being denied the nomination. Nevertheless, the Kennedy challenge not only highlighted the fact that there were people in the president's own party who were unhappy with him, made the fissures in the Democratic party manifest, and helped to make Ronald Reagan's victory in November inevitable.

President Trump is not only displeased but gravely threatened by any dissent or any criticism. His thin skin betrays the self-doubt he denies even to himself. He is simply not secure enough, not comfortable, as the saying goes, in his own skin to be able to handle criticism, let alone outright opposition. He will be enraged by Walsh. As I said above, he will prove Walsh's point. The voters in the Republican primaries and caucuses won't notice that, or more likely won't care. But the nation, in general, will notice, and a great many of us will care.

Donald Trump jolly well should feel threatened by a campaign in which, however hard he tries, he will be unable to avoid the reality that he, and his unfitness for the office he holds, is the defining issue. I myself was frustrated in 2016, and am even more frustrated today, by the fact that so many are either unable or unwilling to recognize Mr. Trump's ignorance of the law and the Constitution (most recently, making the bizarre and inaccurate argument that a law giving him a few discretionary powers for use in emergencies to restrict foreign investment also authorizes him to "order" businesses not to deliver Chinese goods and to seek alternative markets). The point is rather hard to miss that even as regards his own duties, he has no idea what he's talking about.

So are his constant lies, exaggerations, and misstatements of fact.  So is his childishness and cruelty. But somehow, many Americans either can't see them or in many cases (perhaps most) choose to pretend not to see them.

But they will be hard to avoid to the extent that the Democrats make him the issue in the Fall campaign, and if they're smart they will make him, and not zany and unaffordable social programs, the issue.  And they will be even harder when his opponent is a man who is his virtual clone when it comes to policy, and his own fitness for office is the only real issue.

Mr. Trump and his campaign will respond, no doubt, by trying to make Walsh the issue. And the fact is that it's not impossible to paint Joe Walsh as a bit of an eccentric himself. He, too, has been known to nibble on a conspiracy theory or two, and as he openly admits, he has engaged in the same kind of divisive and even racist rhetoric as Mr. Trump does in the past.

Walsh is, of course, exactly right about Trump, and it's healthy that the president should be challenged from the right because it's Trump who is the problem, not his faux conservatism. Trump is erratic. He is a bully. He is a narcissist. His only real agenda is the greater glory of Donald Trump. He has no idea what he's talking about and no idea what he's doing and the damage he's done to the country is exceeded only by the long-term damage he's done to the conservative movement and to the Republican party. It may take them a generation to recover. Trump isn't "nuts," in the sense of being psychotic. But he's not a healthy man psychologically, either. And he's dangerous to the nation and to the world in the office he currently fills.

It's to Walsh's credit that he's willing to take ownership of the degree to which he himself has been no better than Trump. While I am happy to have an alternative to Trump other than Joe Biden or one of the far left characters who are competing with him for the Democratic nomination, Walsh has some work to do to prove to me that he's more than just a less narcissistic and transparently ridiculous version of Trump himself. I do not necessarily exclude the possibility of supporting Walsh at the Iowa caucuses, but he has a lot of proving to do before I'll be willing to sign on myself.

In the meantime, it's going to be fun watching the president and his supporters try to change the subject. However zany Joe Walsh may have been in the past, Donald Trump is zanier right now. Joe Walsh publicly repents of his sins; Donald Trump, as we found out early in the last campaign, isn't necessarily sure that he has any.

Whether or not I eventually decide that Joe Walsh is worthy of my support at my precinct caucus, he is doing both the Republican party and the nation a service by making it manifest that despite all the efforts of Donald Trump's supporters to justify their support for him on the basis of the issues, the real issue is- and always has been- Donald Trump, his personal unfitness for the office he holds, and the imperative to do something about it.