Relax, everyone. The president was joking. He's not nuts.
This was, of course, reassuring. So was the statement by the president himself that when he seemed later the same day to be claiming messianic status, he was joking. Not so reassuring was the fact that, as usual, he blamed somebody else for the fact that he, and nobody else, had made him look foolish and set himself up for ridicule.
Next, Mr. Trump used Twitter to "order" FedEx and UPS not to deliver Chinese goods, and American businesses, in general, to look for alternatives to dealing with China in response to that nation's latest round of retaliatory tariffs in the trade war Mr. Trump started with it.
Yes, this has been quite a couple of days for the Leader of the Free World. And Donald Trump has nobody to blame for it but himself. Not that this matters, of course; he never blames himself for anything. Everything is always somebody else's fault.
Consider the following salvos from the White House on Twitter:
Mr. Trump, who once said that he "doesn't bring God into it" when he does something wrong, whom William F. Buckley and a great many other people have described over the years as a narcissist, who never admits to being wrong, who takes credit for everything and blame for nothing regardless of the facts, who loses no opportunity to brag whether his bragging is warranted or not, who describes himself humbly as "a stable genius" (he is neither) and who habitually insists that he is "the only person" who can accomplish this or that goal, might have been well-advised not to repeat this gushing praise from a windbag conspiracy-mongering radio personality. And if he did, he might have demurred a little. It almost sounds as if he thinks the shoe (or sandal) fits.
He topped it off by describing himself to reporters later in the day as "the Chosen One," while looking up to heaven.
Today he said that he was joking. Snopes called it a "tongue-in-cheek" remark. Fine. But does he seriously think that he has anybody but himself to blame when people took it otherwise, and even started talking (not for the first time) about Section Four of the 25th Amendment?
And then, there was this:
This is not the first time Mr. Trump has given us cause to wonder whether he has ever even read the Constitution he swore at his inauguration to "preserve, protect, and defend." But, remarkably, an allegedly conservative president thinks that it's within his power and authority to "order" American businesses not to do business with China or deliver goods from there.
True, as he later pointed out, he does have certain statutory authority available to him to restrict investment in a country in times of emergency. But he doesn't seem to have even read that law very well.
Yet people actually continue to defend him. Intelligent human beings insist that no, he isn't a dangerously loose cannon.
But I guess if burning an Israeli intelligence asset to brag to Russian diplomats about the breadth of his knowledge didn't convince them of that, nothing will.
Donald Trump isn't psychotic. He doesn't think he's God or the king of anything. Really.
But he is dangerously ego-driven, he has no filters, he has no idea of how our system works, and he doesn't care to learn. He is a danger to the Republic. In all likelihood, we'll have to wait until January of 2021 to remove that danger, but all the talk about the 25th Amendment is not hyperbole.
The man is not fit to be President of the United States, and I doubt that any man who has ever held the office was less fit than he is.
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