“People are tired of Covid. People are tired of hearing Fauci and…all these idiots who got it wrong…This guy’s a disaster.”
— Trump on Dr. Anthony Fauci
“You turn on CNN, that’s all they cover: Covid, Covid, pandemic, Covid, Covid, Covid… You know why? They’re trying to talk everybody out of voting. People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.”
— Trump
“He’s a criminal. He’s committed crimes.”
— Trump on Biden
Throw in a few hundred “lock her ups” and these quotes compiled by Garry Trudeau on the Doonesbury website pretty well sum up Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election the past few weeks.
Most of us have never heard a serious candidate — let alone a president — use some of those words in describing opponents or adversaries. They sound, well, insane.
Call Trump a racist and he will say he’s the least racist person you’ll ever meet.
Call him lazy for watching hours and hours of television and he’ll say he’s the hardest-working president ever.
Say he neglects black Americans and he’ll say no president since Abe Lincoln has done as much for black people as he has.
It’s never enough for him to deny something bad. He wants you to believe he is the polar opposite of what he’s accused of, and it is getting worse. The president is starting to sound at least a little bit insane.
Back during the Cold War, analysts used to say that the nightmare scenario for Americans was a Russian Hitler in the Kremlin. A Communist leader who was somehow beyond sanity. In 1965, political novelist Fletcher Knebel published “Night of Camp David,” posing the question of an insane president in the White House and what it would mean to us.
In Knebel’s novel, President Mark Hollenbach is suffering from paranoia as well as delusions of grandeur. The book came out the year Congress passed the 25th Amendment, but it wasn’t ratified by the states until 1967, so at that point, the only way to remove a living president from office was by impeachment.
And since Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump had yet to be president, there was still a certain benefit of the doubt when it came to presidents telling the truth.
We have certainly had a variety of presidents when it comes to goals. But I’m not sure we ever had a president whose goals were more about personal enrichment than the country.
Is Trump insane?
I hate to fudge or equivocate, especially since I have no use for Trump, but if the choice is insane or evil, I’m not sure which choice is better` and which is worse. The most appalling thing is actually that about 40 percent of the country seems to love him no matter what he says or does.
The odds are pretty good that in two week he will be rejected for re-election, and then we’ll see just how far beyond the pale he has gone.
Can we hope for a calm, peaceful transition with the president showing at least a modicum of grace as he leaves the White House?
Well …
Let’s hope he’s at least as graceful as Mark Hollenbach.