Just across from the White House is Lafayette Park, where on any given day you can find small clutches of demonstrators protesting this or that issue. At the moment, the park is fenced off, but on the northern edge that runs along H Street, I came across an old guy with a sandwich board and the inscription: “Trump is mad. Invoke the 25th.”
Section four of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of the US President if they are incapable of carrying out their duties. Now, my normal rule of thumb is that people who wear sandwich boards, walking up and down, conducting one-man protests, are normally the ones who may be in need of a little psychiatric help. But this one man is starting to represent an important chunk of opinion in America.
When I lived here in Washington during Donald Trump’s first term, I would periodically get unsolicited emails to my BBC account from this or that person telling me they thought Trump was two coupons short of a pop-up toaster, elaborating their reasons for saying so, and demanding that I should be saying this on the evening news. He was a narcissist. He was psychotic. He was senile. He was batshit.
I would politely write back that I am a journalist and not a shrink, and that if I had to diagnose badly written copy, I could do that. But it is not for me to start offering pronouncements on other people’s mental health.
That is still my view. And yet.
It is hard simply to carry on and say everything is perfectly normal when in the space of a few days we’ve had posts like this from him: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
Or this: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
If he were lying prone on a psychiatrist’s couch, there would be a lot to unpack here. There is rage. There are genocidal threats. There is the inappropriate mocking of another religion. And frankly, if it’s OK to call the Iranian leadership “crazy bastards”, then isn’t it OK to return the compliment? It is crazy that the elected leader of the world’s pre-eminent and most powerful democracy is speaking like this.
Apologists for him – and it should be noted they are declining in number – would say that is what he’s always been like. It’s how he negotiates. He takes things to the extreme to get a deal done.
But really? Is that what he’s doing? Isn’t it more the case that the war with Iran has spun out of control? He didn’t realise the effects would be so quickly felt at home; he didn’t appreciate that you could bomb the hell out of the country and kill its leadership, but the Strait of Hormuz would still remain shut. Trump has got himself cornered and he is panicking. So he threatens to wipe out a 6000 year old civilisation.
These are not rational acts.
Something that got far less attention but again raises questions about his mental health was the behaviour of the President at the children’s Easter parade at the White House last weekend. It is something successive presidents have hosted, with the kids having fun on the White House lawn with the Easter egg race.
The President engages the youngsters in conversation, and is a bit disappointed that none seems to want his autograph. So he starts talking to these five-and-six-year-olds about how he is a proper President because he signs his name, whereas his predecessor, Joe Biden, used an autopen to sign all his letters and documents.
Now, I have a five-year-old granddaughter, Eliza. And I think she is the smartest, brainiest, most advanced kid the world has ever seen – as granddads are wont to. But if some stranger started going on to her about autopens and his predecessor, I think she might think he was unwell. That is, if she knew what the hell he was going on about.
I think in the Republican Party right now, with the cult of personality rife and fear of crossing Trump acute, what is most telling is not the noise but the silence. There has been precious little voicing of support. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has kept schtum. So too the Senate leader, John Thune.
Yet there are now some saying out loud that they do think the President is behaving in an unhinged manner – and that, like the old guy on Lafayette Park, it is time to consider the 25th.
More than 70 Democrats called for it after Trump’s posts this week – as well as former Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrat Connecticut senator Chris Murphy told CNN on Tuesday: “No President in control of his senses would publicly promise to eradicate an entire civilisation.”
The amendment, though, needs to be triggered by the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet, then ratified by Congress and the Senate. Is the Trump cabinet – packed as it is with toadies, sycophants and arse-lickers – really going to do that? And even in the unimaginable circumstances that they did, are the two houses going to vote for it with a two-thirds majority? Probably not a cat’s chance in hell.
But is it significant that this is a conversation now being held by a growing number of people in Washington? It most certainly is.
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