Nuts

Really, fucking nuts. The news media and politicians of all stripes are struggling with how to respond to a "president" who is manifestly insane.

To be clear, I have absolutely no interest in this ridiculous debate over whether psychiatrists should apply a diagnostic label to him. The very idea that there are entities called "personality disorders" that constitute specific, identifiable diseases is nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. Some people behave in ways that create unnecessary difficulties for themselves and/or others. There is nothing to be gained by declaring that this person has "narcissistic personality disorder," or "psychopathy," or whatever word you care to sling.

But, he does what he does, which is to habitually assert preposterous falsehoods and then refuse to back down in the face of overwhelming evidence and reason; and order his flunkies to participate in his alternative reality. That is insane, in the vernacular use  of the word.

Here is one take from the estimable Josh Marshall. "The real story here is that the President, by force of his office and audacity, was able to inject into the national conversation a preposterous claim which the country has spent two weeks debating. . . . I would say that this ability - both the President's pathological lying and our institutions' inability to grapple with it - is the big, big story." He concludes that "this is a warning case of people in power deciding what's true and false which is a harbinger of free government dying." (I draw to your attention what I believe is the relatively new motto of the Washington Post: "Democracy dies in the dark.")

However, I am more inclined to Simon Malloy's view. The fact is that nobody except for Trump's equally deluded juggalos credits his fantasies. The spectacle of Republican politicians trying to evade forthright comment, or of reporters unable to find the letters l, i and e on the keyboard is disheartening, but none of this will lead to any sort of concrete result. In other words the Justice Department isn't about to prosecute Barack Obama and the U.S. isn't going to recall the British ambassador. (No doubt about that -- there isn't one.)

So for the immediate term, this is basically a distraction. The real danger is that we have a "president" who nobody with any sense will believe about anything. So what happens when there is a crisis of some sort and the nation, and the world, depend on presidential leadership? Congress doesn't have to pass the worst atrocities in his budget proposal, and they won't, but the time will come when a president with no  credibility will be catastrophic.