The worry is that Trump will lead the US into a war
A widely accepted view is that the American president suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder
Much of America’s capital has entered a state of near-panic. In recent days, President Donald Trump has been acting more bizarrely than ever, and the question raised in the mind of politicians and civilians alike, though rarely spoken aloud, has been: Can the United States afford to wait for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to wrap up his investigation ? That could still take quite a while.
The question of timing has become increasingly urgent, given the heightened danger that the US will deliberately or accidentally end up in a war with North Korea. That risk, coupled with Trump’s increasingly peculiar behaviour, has made Washington more tense than I’ve ever known it to be.
During an Oval Office ceremony to honour Native-american heroes of World War II, he offended them by issuing a racist comment. He picked an unnecessary fight with the prime minister of the United Kingdom by retweeting a British neo-fascist group’s antimuslim posts. And he continued to bait North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who seems equally unstable.
Trump has also been revisiting his mendacious claim about Barack Obama having not been born in the US — the bogus allegation that launched his political career, which he’d renounced prior to the election.
A widely accepted view is that he suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder. According to the Mayo Clinic, such a disorder “is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others.” Another view held by a number of medical professionals, based on how Trump spoke in interviews in the late 1980s and how he speaks now is that the president is suffering from the onset of dementia.
Trump’s erratic behaviour has been attributed to his anxiety about Mueller’s investigation into his and his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia in the Kremlin’s effort to tilt the 2016 election in his direction – an investigation that could end in a charge of conspiracy. And that increasingly bizarre behaviour came even before the news broke, on December 1, that Trump’s first national security adviser and close campaign aide, retired General Michael Flynn, had agreed to plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI in exchange for his cooperation with the investigation.
It has been speculated that Flynn will point a finger at his son-in-law Jared Kushner. But Trump’s earlier efforts to steer prosecutors away from Flynn were strong signals that Flynn knows something that Trump desperately hopes that prosecutors won’t find out.