Donald Trump Unhinged, On His Own Account
The president of the United States told The New York Times within the past few days, with perfect equanimity and matter-of-factness, that his authority and decisions with regard to foreign policy, up to and including any threats and military engagements against America’s allies, are limited only by “my own morality, my own mind.” This may provide reassurance, or more likely rapture, to his millions of MAGA minions who for the past ten years have committed their earthly lives and their immortal souls to Donald Trump as their personal deity. But how should it feel to everyone else? — to the two hundred and seventy million Americans not invested in this new religion, for example, not to mention the billions around the world who are watching with horror and/or sadness as the erstwhile bulwark of the free world evolves at lightning speed into a rogue state ruled by a decrepit incarnation of Anthony Fremont. (Look it up.)
The world now lives, in reality and on his own account, at the mercy of Donald Trump’s morality and mind. The morality of a man known for decades of boasting about his life as a sleazy lounge lizard and serial abuser of women, and his equally boastful penchant for treating other human beings in his “professional” life as nothing but dupes and victims of his vulgar vanity and material acquisitiveness. The mind of a man who never met a sober second thought he wouldn’t reject in the name of his whims, or an uncomfortable truth he wouldn’t deny, against undeniable evidence, in the name of saving his frail ego. Such as, for example, the sober second thoughts about executive power written into the founding documents of the country this demagogue is currently destroying, and the uncomfortable truth that the principles of limited government enumerated in those documents were intended precisely to save America from a man who believes his only restraints are those of his own conscience and preference.
The fact that those documents were indeed carefully written to save America from a man such as Trump — or rather from a smarter and braver version of Trump, than which the Founding Fathers surely could not have imagined anyone worse — has, regrettably, run up against the harsh reality of the impotence of sage words in a nation grown illiterate. “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin supposedly warned, in answer to a citizen’s question about the results of the Constitutional Convention. They couldn’t keep it, and the remains of the civilized world will be suffering the consequences of America’s failure for a long time to come.
