Lunatic Fringe

If you are a Christian conservative, you’ve been quite willing to overlook Trump’s many deviations from devout behavior. There’s the nonstop lying, cheating, adultery, “unrepentant mendacity,” arrogance, gleeful boasting that he hates his opponents, and threats of death on all who oppose him. Despite his “suspect professions of faith and his glaring unfamiliarity with scripture, conservative Christian leaders have praised him and described him as heaven sent.”

But now, our most holy of presidents has indulged in full-force, straight-up blasphemy, and he believes you are too stupid to see it. Yes, he has presented a defense, which is based on the man being so moronic that he doesn’t understand basic imagery that a nine-year-old would comprehend. And that is the best-case scenario for his behavior.

It’s bad enough that the president is a narcissistic liar who doesn’t even care if he insults his followers and who revels in ultimate cringe. The bigger problem is that he is a nutjob.

Yes, I’ve addressed the man’s frayed sanity before, and as far back as his first term, many political commentators and healthcare professionals were shouting, “This guy is cuckoo for Coco Puffs.”

It will forever be mystifying to me how millions of Americans saw this demented act in 2024, excused the word salad and meandering as “passionate” or “joking,” and thought this dementia-addled bigot was fit to make economic policy and negotiate with heads of state. This philandering oligarch was one step from babbling on the subway. Clearly, “they’re eating the cats and dogs” was a cry for help, but huge swaths of Americans thought it was a campaign slogan.

In any case, more people are openly debating the 25^th Amendment, which I advocated for in 2017.

This development is because “Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” 

Instead of leadership, we get “a series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements,” interspersed with threats to destroy entire civilizations. It leaves even the most partisan of observers with “the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.”

And Americans are catching on. Polling shows that 61% of Americans “think Mr. Trump has become more erratic with age” and half think he is too old to be president. Only one-third of Americans thought the near-octogenarian was too old just a year ago, so we have to wonder why such a large percentage of people suddenly realized how time works.

Regardless of this abrupt epiphany, we now have a government run by psychos, and a president who went from “making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later,” even if the situation did not change in the interim. It is no exaggeration to say the chief executive is “an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”

Right now, this is how we live: “The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war.”

This is madness.