Trump: Is he unfit for office?

After a series of shocking revelations engulfed Donald
Trump’s presidency this week, said David Brooks in The
New York Times, there can no longer be any doubt: Our
nation is being “led by a child.” The common thread
linking Trump’s sharing of highly classified intelligence
with Russia and his firing of FBI Director James
Comey is the president’s impulsiveness and sheer
“immaturity.” Trump reportedly blabbed topsecret
information to the Russian officials visiting
the Oval Office not for strategic reasons, but
just to impress them, like a “7-year-old boy desperate
for the approval of those he admires.”
He fired Comey because, as he admitted in an
interview, he got tired of seeing that “showboat”
on TV, talking about the Russia investigation. “None of
these disastrous decisions was part of a deliberate plan,” said
Anne Applebaum in WashingtonPost.com. “Each one was made
because of the president’s willful ignorance, impulsiveness, and
inexperience.” But can anyone really be surprised? Last August, 50
Republican national security experts warned that the ill-informed,
thin-skinned Trump “lacks the character, values, and experience”
to lead the nation. Nearly four months into this disastrous experiment,
it’s clear they were right.
“There is clearly something wrong with Trump,” said David
Roberts in Vox.com. His chaotic, scandal-plagued few months in
office have exposed him as an “extreme narcissist” haunted by “a
gnawing sense of inadequacy” and driven by his hunger for “adulation,
admiration, and reinforcement for his hypersensitive ego.”
Denied it, he becomes “incredibly vengeful.” Trump has no real
agenda or core beliefs, except a hunger to dominate others; no one
can trust him. “He is a raging fire of need, shaped by a lifetime of
entitlement, with the emotional maturity and attention span of a
6-year-old.” To put it more simply, said Andrew Sullivan in
NYMag.com, the president is flat-out “off his rocker.”
Pay no attention to the “armchair diagnosers,” said Cullen
Herout in TheFederalist.com. It’s no coincidence that those
now speculating aloud about various psychiatric
conditions afflicting President Trump—from
“malignant narcissism” to Alzheimer’s disease—
also loathe him on ideological grounds. Their
concern about his mental health “rings hollow.”
As for the speculation that Trump is showing
signs of age-related decline, said Tony Schwartz
in The Washington Post, I see no difference
between the Trump of today and of 30 years
ago, when I wrote The Art of the Deal for him. Then as now, he
was a desperately needy guy who saw every human encounter “as
a contest he had to win” by any means necessary, and “damn the
consequences.”
Whatever the state of Trump’s mental health, said Ross Douthat
in NYTimes.com, he just isn’t up to the job. Even his inner circle
now report a constant struggle to keep him focused on the task
at hand, and to curb his self-destructive impulses, as if they were
“stewards for a syphilitic emperor.” The 25th Amendment to the
Constitution provides a mechanism for removing a president who
is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and
it’s time for Congress to apply that remedy. I agree that Trump isunfit for the presidency, said Charles Cooke in NationalReview
.com, but for Washington elites to depose him on such “nebulous
grounds” would enrage the tens of millions of Americans who
voted Trump into office. They’d see it, not without justification,
as a coup, and the result would be rage and turmoil “the likes of
which we have not seen in a while.”