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A short post. Today doesn’t seem like a day for charts and number-crunching. I had never heard the term “sundowning” before it happened to my own father, yet it’s a fairly common syndrome. In his last few months my father remained lucid and rational — remained himself — during daylight hours. Once the sun went down he deteriorated, becoming confused, paranoid and aggressive. It’s terrible to watch sundowning in someone you love. But that’s a personal tragedy – not a national or global one. It’s an entirely different matter when the president of the United States is sundowning — a president surrounded by malign sycophants who tell him whatever he wants to hear and indulge his every whim, no matter how destructive. For good reasons, it’s normally bad practice to pronounce on someone’s mental health from afar. Some of us still remember when right-wing pundits liked to call anyone critical of George W. Bush mentally ill. But after reading the letter that Trump just sent to the prime minister of Norway (Jonas Gahr Støre has confirmed that it’s genuine) there should be no doubt that we have a president who is suffering a real detachment from reality:
This might not exactly be sundowning, since it’s not clear that Trump is lucid and rational at any time of the day. What is incontrovertible is that he’s deeply unwell and rapidly getting sicker. In fact, Trump is so deeply unwell that it’s time to stop blaming him for all the terrible things he’s doing. He is what he is. Responsibility for the catastrophe overtaking America now rests with his enablers — people who have to know that he’s a sick man but continue to support his depredations. Some of these enablers are monsters themselves. For example, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar and the architect of his violent ethnic cleansing policies, is clearly a fanatic who is using Trump to achieve his own fascist goals. However, many of Trump’s enablers aren’t fanatics, just amoral opportunists. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, clearly understands how destructive Trump’s actions are, evidenced by the fact that he has at times tried to tone them down. But for some inexplicable reason, Bessent has decided to sell his soul to Trump. And then there are those who revel in the reflected glory, who are such utter narcissists that they’re willing to destroy this country in return for the limelight and perks. In that camp we can find Pete Hegseth with his Pentagon makeup studio, who is purging the finest officers in the military; Kristi Noem with her Barbie-in-a-10-gallon-hat act, who positively gushes while calling a murdered mother a terrorist; and Kash Patel, who thinks its fine to fly on an FBI jet to watch his girlfriend sing while overseeing the debasement and corruption of the FBI. And what can we say about the cowardly Republicans in Congress, who are still sustaining Trump even though many of them – perhaps most of them – are privately appalled by his behavior? It would take just eight of these people — four Republican senators and four Republican House members — to switch sides and caucus with the Democrats to end G.O.P. control of Congress and eliminate much of Trump’s power. But taking such a step would mean risking Trump’s wrath by standing up and acting like patriots, rather than knuckling down and averting their eyes as Trump descends into madness. How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia? That’s an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what’s more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don’t try to sugarcoat and sanewash what’s happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America. |
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