The president’s first week was alarmingly erratic

Week One of the Trump administration was among the most alarming in the history of the American presidency.

There have been scarier weeks for the country, certainly — the Cuban missile crisis and the Sept. 11 attacks. There have been more tragic ones — the Sept. 11 attacks again, the terrible toll of wartime, the horror of four presidential assassinations.

There have been occasions of terrible presidential judgment — Franklin Roosevelt’s order to detain Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. And there have been moments of looming constitutional crisis — during Watergate alone, the Saturday Night Massacre, the showdown with the Supreme Court over the release of the tapes, the impeachment inquiry that resulted in Richard Nixon’s resignation.

But the first week of the Trump presidency was alarming in a different way, because the frightening part involved the president’s own erratic, even bizarre, behavior.

Anyone who paid even glancing attention to the 2016 campaign already understood Donald Trump to be undisciplined, easily provoked, and self-absorbed to the point of narcissism.

On the new president’s agenda when he woke up the next morning, The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty and Juliet Eilperin reported, was an angry phone call with the acting director of the National Park Service. Peeved over reports about inaugural crowd size, Trump ordered up new photographs of the event.

That was followed by Trump’s extraordinary performance at the CIA where, before a wall honoring fallen agents, he once again boasted of his intellect (“trust me, I’m, like, a smart person”); falsely blamed the media (“among the most dishonest human beings on earth”) for inventing his feud with the intelligence community; complained about coverage of his inauguration crowds (“We caught them and we caught them in a beauty and I think they’re going to pay a big price”).

And so it went, each day feeling scarier than the one before, and Trump’s sycophantic aides modeling his own fact-free rants — Sean Spicer’s falsehood-filled briefing room tirade, Kellyanne Conway’s brazen defense of “alternative facts,” Stephen Bannon’s brutish admonition to the media to “keep its mouth shut.”

Trump himself outdid his petty obsession with crowd size with his delusional obsession with popular-vote fraud, first behind closed doors with incredulous congressional leaders, then for all the world to watch in his ABC interview.

There have been reasons to worry about other presidents’ mental health.

Lyndon Johnson’s senior aides were so concerned about his behavior that they consulted psychiatrists.

Nixon in the throes of Watergate was drunk and unstable, so much so that his defense secretary, James Schlesinger, reportedly ordered the military not to respond to White House orders without clearance. Still, other presidents’ outbursts occurred behind closed doors, and there was some hope that aides would intervene. Trump’s inner circle seems divided between enablers and inciters.

What is to be done? In a meeting last week with The Washington Post editorial board, Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, said he was weighing legislation to require presidents to undergo an independent medical examination, including mental health. Chaffetz cautioned that he wasn’t “talking about some of the rhetoric that’s flying around” about Trump. Still, he said, “If you’re going to have your hands on the nuclear codes, you should probably know what kind of mental state you’re in.”

That can’t happen soon enough.

Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.