Hit the Psychotic Brake

What if the 25th Amendment came with a trophy… If that doesn’t work, maybe we should enact a similar amendment for citizens made crazy by the relentless craziness coming out of the Oval Office. I’d say it was ironic that a guy so vehemently against granting asylum has made the whole country feel like it’s one big one, but irony is long gone, having emigrated from America and cut off all internet access about two minutes into Kid Rock’s alternative halftime show. If I were on the Artemis II, which is scheduled to splash down on Friday, I think I’d suggest we do another loop. Why come back to this? In the course of about an hour on Thursday, we experienced the latest maniacal spinning about the Iran negotiations, a shock Epstein-related press conference from the First Lady, and a 482-word presidential post that attacked former allies like Tucker Carlson and MTG (he gave more details about what is wrong with them than he did about why he went to war with Iran). Maybe this is all a secret plot to get us to look at our devices less often. Sorry, I’m out of the office messages have escalated to Sorry, I’m out of my mind. Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner explain how the craziness has spread, if not all the way to you and me, definitely throughout the administration. “What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how the president’s pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is because it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state. This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president himself. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, his impulsivity, inconsistency and his outright breaks with reality have become state policy.” NYT (Gift Article): The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State. (I’m pretty sure that headline applies to news curators as well.)

+ While it might be driving the rest of us crazy, it’s not clear Trump feels uncomfortable in the psychotic state (so long as it’s not a blue state). Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker: The Costs of Trump’s Iran-War Folly. “Defeat will not temper his mania. There is no strategic setback so big as to embarrass him … He’ll handle this like all the rest by moving on and getting over it even before the cleanup crews have finished in Tel Aviv and Tehran.”