Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Yep. Despite the lies, the invective, the rambling, the dancing, the incoherence, and the lunacy—a big faucet in California that turns the water on and off? Immigrants eating cats and dogs? Really? Despite the January 6th coup attempt and recommendations to drink bleach and shine light inside the body to cure Covid, despite thirty-four felony convictions, despite numerous sexual assault allegations, despite all the rest of it, he got elected. It was a shock to many that a man like this could be elected President of the United States. Twice. But here we are.
The sitting administration has already accepted the outcome of the election and graciously welcomed the President-Elect back into the White House, unlike the last transition, when then President Trump had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, the President-elect has been busy. In the past week, been busy making his cabinet appointments. And his choices are raising eyebrows.
Matt Gaetz, under House investigation for drug use and sex trafficking, as well as having relations with underage girls, is Trump’s nominee for Attorney General.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., the rabid anti-vaxxer who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park, sawed the head off a dead whale, and claimed that a worm had eaten part of his brain (his one plausible assertion), is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Tulsi Gabbard, who is a Russian and Syrian (sworn nemeses of the US) sympathizer who has also shown strong empathy for strongmen and dictators like Viktor Orban was nominated for Director of National Intelligence—the national spymaster.
And, finally, Robert Hegseth, Fox News anchor—and very little else—is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.
To say these nominations are disconcerting is an understatement. These nominees are underqualified, inexperienced, and incapable of handling the work of administering the nation’s security, health, and armed forces. They are so unqualified, it’s almost laughable, as if we were sending The Three Stooges to perform brain surgery. Add Elon Musk and Steven Bannon to the equation as special consultants to Trump and you have a souped-up clown car on steroids.
Political analysts have been saying that these appointments are part of Donald Trump’s grand strategy to bend the Senate (who must confirm these appointments) to his will. He’s already (unsuccessfully) tried to force the confirmation of Senator Tim Scott as his choice for Senate Majority Leader, who that body rejected in favor of Senator Thune. Now he’s applying political pressure to force the Republican majority to confirm his other choices. Should that fail, he is seeking to implement recess appointments to bypass the Constitutional confirmation process.
What puzzles me is that all during the election, these same political analysts and pundits were speculating about Donald Trump’s mental acuity, wondering aloud whether he was suffering from dementia, but now this seems to be an irrelevant point.
According to a letter signed by 230 mental health professionals in a report from The Independent, Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently call for a full neurological workup,” including “a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait).”
That sounds about right. And the pundits and analysts were all over it, citing example after example of weird and inappropriate behavior like pretending to fellate a microphone, or cutting short a town hall to play music and dance for a rally crowd, or rambling about sharks, electric car batteries, or Elon Musk’s beautiful rockets. He certainly seemed unhinged. But that was then, and this is now.
This begs some questions. One, why isn’t the media talking about his mental health anymore, especially in the wake of these at best questionable—and at worse, moronic—choices for his cabinet. Why are these choices being framed as a grand strategy to eviscerate the Department of Justice, take over the armed forces, and roll out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin? Why aren’t they being looked at as the choices of a person not in complete control of his faculties?
Of course, Trump’s dream of unmitigated power and wealth is a sort of mental illness unto itself, but is he truly and clinically mad? Is he suffering a sort of megalomaniacal narcissistic dementia? Or was it all an act? Is he crazy like a fox? This of course begs yet another question: Is Donald Trump really that shrewd or is he as mad as a hatter?
It’s true that Trump’s reality is vastly different than that of any normal American. He’s never had to work or worry about money or do anything he hasn’t wanted to do. As a rich celebrity, he’s been able to grope, bully, break the law, and slander without consequence. In other words, he’s a seventy-eight-year-old spoiled brat.
One thing is certain. Whether he is facilitating a broad strategy to browbeat the Senate, bend the House to his will, and continue to pack the Supreme Court, gathering all the powers of our democracy to himself, or whether is he simply a demented old man listening to the sociopathic advisers surrounding him, he is a clear and present danger to our democracy.
Which begs the final question—who’s really running the asylum?
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