Trump and the truth

The preposterous second-place president, Donald Trump, put on Twitter as an absolute fact that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phone in Trump Tower. Then the White House, where Trump is the supposed boss, put out a statement that an investigation is needed to determine if there is any truth to what the president declared as truth.

We need to find out if the American president is full of it—that essentially was what the American president’s own staff said.

Here’s what the White House staff could do to investigate the president’s statement: Walk down to his office and ask him what in the world he’s talking about.

The preposterous second-place president is the crazed-alleger-in-chief. He is the chief executive of irresponsibility and irrationality. No-drama Obama has been succeeded by all-harrumph Trump.

James Comey, the FBI director who keeps finding a need to serve his agency by making a political statement, has reportedly pleaded with the Justice Department to say publicly that there is nothing to Trump’s charge, which implicates the FBI as lawbreaking.

Through it all, the president could make a phone call and determine the truth about what he alleges—that there isn’t any; that, most likely, and at most, certain communications, such as Mike Flynn’s phone conversation with the Russian ambassador that Flynn lied about, have been listened to or transcribed, based on monitoring of the Russians, not of Trump, and certainly not with an FBI illegal, abusing phone tap of Trump’s phone at the personal behest of Obama.

Apparently, there is hesitation in the Justice Department to say the president is a liar or insane. The words need to be chosen less candidly than that. There may not exist sufficient euphemism for the task.

There are three powerfully colliding truths about Trump and his preposterous presidency.

One is that his restrained speech to Congress and the positive reaction to it demonstrate that, if he could maintain that “presidential” demeanor, he could yet succeed, even in no less than realigning American politics.

The second is that he apparently can’t maintain that demeanor because he is incapable of it, being hypersensitive, ego-consumed, obsessed with superficial appearance, volatile and indeed unstable, possibly to the point of posing a danger to the country.

A president who rises on a Saturday morning, beholds crazed-right talk radio, grabs his phone and thumbs out a constitutional crisis is not a stable leader of the world’s greatest military and economic power.

Our only hope is that he remains more interested in his own ego than that North Korea is testing missiles. Chances of that are good. A report on North Korea would require more than one page of bullet items, which is all Trump’s attention span is said to permit. Most likely Trump will limit his wild tweets to what he cares about, which are domestic matters igniting his ego.

The third is that Trump contradicts himself with such spectacular frequency and depth that he holds no personal credibility whether momentarily restrained or gone wild on Twitter, to wit:

● A few weeks ago, after a meeting, he said that he really liked and admired Barack Obama. On Saturday morning, Obama was, to him, a bad or sick man.

● A few days ago, Trump said that 3 million votes were cast against him illegally in November and that he would mount an investigation that hasn’t been undertaken. (Again, he says something dramatic as truth, then an investigation is demanded to see if indeed there is any truth to what he is spouting as truth.)

● He decried the media’s use of undisclosed sources when he, in fact, had quoted an undisclosed source in alleging that Obama was not an American, but a Kenyan, and that the long-form birth certificate Obama was insultingly burdened to release because of Trump’s baseless smear was a fraud. Eventually, you’ll recall, Trump mumbled officially that, oh, OK, Obama is an American. The undisclosed sources in the New York Times seem to pan out more than Trump’s.

● Trump said he won the biggest electoral landslide in decades, when, in fact, Obama and Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had won bigger electoral margins. When a reporter challenged him, he said he was talking about Republican presidents. When the reporter challenged him on that, he said he was only repeating what he’d been told. Then he asked the reporter if he would agree at least that his electoral margin was impressive, which it wasn’t, especially when combined with the fact that Trump’s popular-vote deficit was larger than Richard Nixon’s against John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford’s against Jimmy Carter.

But, remember, those were fraudulent votes, per a Trump truth, meaning the ranting of an unstable man so unreliable that the best his hired apologists can do is call for an investigation to find out the truth of what he is spouting.

The investigation we really need would be conducted at the highest level by an all-star team of psychiatrists.