Critics say president is demented and mentally ill; White House disagrees

Peter Baker on the front page of the New York Times:

President 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.

A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his “a whole civilization will die tonight” threat to wipe Iran off the map last week and his head-spinning attack on the “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” pope on Sunday night have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.

The White House rejected such assessments, saying that Mr. Trump is sharp and keeping his opponents on edge. But the president’s eruptions have raised questions about America’s leadership in a time of war. While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with such profound consequences.

Democrats who have long challenged Mr. Trump’s psychological fitness have issued a fresh chorus of calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from power for disability. But it is not just a concern voiced by partisans on the left, late-night comics or mental health professionals making long-distance diagnoses. It can be heard now among retired generals, diplomats and foreign officials. And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among onetime allies of the president.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who recently broke with Mr. Trump, advocated using the 25th Amendment, telling CNN that threatening to destroy Iran’s civilization was “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster, called him “a genocidal lunatic.” Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, said Mr. Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.”

Some of the questions about Mr. Trump’s soundness come from people who once worked with him and have since become critics. Even before the civilization post, Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Mr. Trump’s first term, told the journalist Jim Acosta that the president is “a man who is clearly insane” and that his recent string of belligerent, middle-of-the-night social media posts “highlights the level of his insanity.” Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary for Mr. Trump, wrote online last week that “he’s clearly not well.”

Mr. Trump fired back in a long, angry social media post that did not exactly radiate calm stability. “They have one thing in common, Low IQs,” he wrote of Ms. Owens, Mr. Jones, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” He threw the crazy charge back at them. “They’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”

The dissent on the right has not extended to Congress, where Republican lawmakers remain publicly loyal to the president, nor has it reached the cabinet, which would have to approve any invocation of the 25th Amendment, rendering that idea moot. But it reflects growing unease among Americans who in recent surveys have increasingly questioned the fitness of Mr. Trump, already the oldest president ever inaugurated, as he approaches his 80th birthday.

“Is the president mentally ill?” is one of those debates that it’s impossible for a president to win, because merely having the debate is a massive loss in regard to the marginal voters to whom it will trickle down in one form or another. Plus as we all know, the way this stuff works is that once it’s out there, it’s out there, as somebody or the other once said.

This again is why banging on the 25th amendment drum is a good thing to do: Not because Trump can actually be removed that way, but because making the invocation of the amendment a topic of discussion among Very Serious People is a big win in regard to the de-legitimation that needs to be happening on multiple levels at the same time.

Note that this story was obviously reported and written before Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ, before turning around a few hours later and deleting it — he almost never does this — while claiming he thought it was just him playing doctor, not God. As incidents like that pile up, and they will continue to do so, the discourse about his craziness and dementia will become more embedded in the general public’s consciousness.