Unfit to rule?
A damning White House exposé
There is no more serious issue facing America today “than the possibility, if not the likelihood, that we have in the White House a man who is mentally unfit for the job”, said Bill Press on The Hill (Washington). The “drumbeat of doubt” about Donald Trump’s stability has reached a new pitch following the publication of Michael Wolff’s tell-all book, Fire and Fury ( see page 56). Even allies now talk of removing Trump from office on the grounds of incapacity. Wolff’s book paints a picture of a man whose “closest aides, friends and even family believe is congenitally unfit to be president”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Trump, Wolff reports, won’t read anything, not even one-page memos. He retreats to bed at 6.30pm, where he eats burgers, watches cable TV and rants at his cronies on the phone. He repeats himself endlessly; he fails to recognise old friends. White House officials describe him as an “idiot”, a “child”, a “dope”, a “moron”. And yet this man has “unchecked power over the world’s mightiest nuclear arsenal”.
Trump himself took to Twitter to scotch the rumours. “Actually, throughout my life,” he declared, “my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” His achievements, he added, qualify him as a “genius… and a very stable genius at that!” What a relief, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. You see, if he weren’t a very stable genius – if “he were instead an erratic, vindictive, uninformed, lazy, would-be tyrant – we might be in real trouble”. Even if Wolff’s book is all true – and many of his own sources reject his version of events – it changes nothing, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. It’s not as if Trump previously impressed us all with his sanity and intellectual grasp, his “sensible hairstyle” and “mature response to criticism”. We know by now that “Trump’s bark is worse than his bite”. In terms of actual policy, as opposed to “stupid schoolyard insults”, he is fairly restrained. Cutting taxes, and having a more aggressive foreign policy than Barack Obama is not mad. “Presidential sanity” is not easy to judge, said Jake Novak on CNBC.COM. Was it sane for George W. Bush to invade Iraq? For Bill Clinton to have an affair with an intern? Judged by his actions so far, Trump is no less sane than his predecessors.
In fact, his “crazy” style may even be a diplomatic asset, said Justin Webb in the Daily Mail. North Korea, alarmed by Trump’s bellicose and unpredictable stance, appears to have “blinked first”: it has restarted talks with South Korea. Syria has launched no chemical weapon attacks against civilians since US forces blasted a Syrian airfield last year. Maybe, but it’s a very risky strategy, said The Times. A feuding, “dysfunctional” White House that makes up policy on Twitter, is far more likely to stumble into a real geopolitical disaster: a war in Korea or a trade conflict with China. There is an “extraordinary mismatch” between Trump’s behaviour and “the global challenges of 2018”.