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The question of the moment

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How long can this go on?

After little more than three weeks, Trump’s behavior is no more erratic than it used to be, but in the context of the Presidency it seems so. This year’s “Saturday Night Live” season has been very funny, but the most startling moment was not a sketch but a depiction of something real: Trump’s obsessive tweeting, four years ago, about the end of the relationship between Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. It’s been fascinating to watch him change policies in the twinkling of a tweet, as with his briefly confrontational China policy, inaugurated in December with a telephone call to Taiwan’s leader, and then reversed; or to witness his cobra-like lunges at newfound enemies, including the Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, who revealed that Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, had told him that he found the President’s attacks on the courts “demoralizing.” Trump just can’t seem to stop himself. Three months after the election, which he won, he’s still talking about those mythical fraudulent voters, and still calling Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” When he again alleged voter fraud recently, in a room filled with senators, it got awkward; one attendee told Politico that “an uncomfortable silence” filled the room.

Those uncomfortable silences accompany chatter about Trump’s state of mind, which is abetted by talk from a leaky White House and even from a Trump doctor, Harold Bornstein, who may have crossed a doctor-patient confidentiality line when he told the Times that Trump has been taking the drug finasteride, to preserve his unique haircut. Writing in the Washington Post, Daniel Marchalik, a urologist at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, discussed what he called “potentially life-changing and irreversible side effects that may be associated with these medications,” and which may include sexual, physical, and psychological changes, pretty much none of them good. It’s hard to dismiss all of this.

CBS’s Scott Pelley recently began his evening broadcast in a way that no evening news in this nation has ever begun: “It has been a busy day for Presidential statements divorced from reality.” He went on to give several now familiar examples, such as Trump’s insistence, contrary to all available evidence, that the press hasn’t reported on a number of terrorist attacks, or that opinion polls showing high levels of Trumpian disapproval are “fake news.” Perhaps there is some causal link between Trump’s distance from the recognizable world and his bodily distance from what once were the landmarks of his life, apart from brief treks to Mar-a-Lago. With Trump living inside what Harry Truman called “the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations” (although Truman, for most of his Presidency, lived in the cozier Blair House), and not inclined to drop by the Situation Room when an anti-terror Navy SEAL mission in Yemen was about to go terribly wrong, it’s hard not to wonder where this Presidency will go next. The mood inside the gates is said to be distressed. “Really hard to overstate level of misery radiating from several members of White House staff over last few days,” the Times’ Maggie Haberman recently tweeted. Outside, those who worry about all this are worrying less about policies—even those that are regarded with revulsion—but, rather, about how much longer someone who controls the power to destroy the world will be able to control himself.

A non-American friend of mine was asking me this morning if there isn’t some sort of mechanism for removing a president other than declaring him to be a criminal or mentally/physically unfit.  She was thinking of something along the lines of a legislative no-confidence vote, requiring the president to either resign or call a new election.

The absence of any such mechanism is a pretty serious flaw in our system, as we’ll probably have occasion to ponder a few thousand times in the next 1400-odd days.

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