gracchusdixit

Three times this week, I have begun this essay, only to stop and start over, because new events popped up out of nowhere.  It is becoming all but impossible to keep up, let alone cope with, the crescendo of chaos swirling around, and within, the White House—or to see how it all will end.

Exactly one week after Donald J. Trump stunned the nation by firing the director of the FBI and then admitting, on television, that he had done so to derail the bureau’s investigation into his Russian entanglements, he put those entanglements on full display.  Not only did he meet with Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to the United States—a case of bad “optics,” if ever there was one, since the ambassador is a major figure in the investigation—he revealed top secret information that could compromise an ally and jeopardize the lives of valuable intelligence sources.

And it didn’t stop there.  Less than 12 hours later, we learned that Trump had tried to influence then FBI Director James Comey to drop the bureau’s investigation of one-time National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for his Russian ties.

To top it all off, one day later came the news that the Assistant Attorney General had appointed an independent special counsel to head up the ongoing investigation of Russian meddling in our election, possible collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and Trump’s murky financial affairs.

The administration’s response to this series of colossal snafus and scandals has followed a pattern that we have seen before, over and over.

First comes the revelation that Trump has, once again, done something stupid, reckless, or even illegal.  Then, his spokespeople provide a cover story that is flagrantly untrue.  Next, Trump himself contradicts the cover story, exposing the underlying untruth and humiliating his staff and surrogates.  Finally, both Trump and his entourage try to dismiss their initial lies as inconsequential, asserting that what he did was either unremarkable, or entirely normal, or “decisive.”

It is tempting to dismiss the most recent examples of this pattern as merely the latest among many unusual acts by an unconventional president.  But they are far more serious than that.

Not only has Trump has lost any last shred of personal credibility—which wasn’t much, to begin with—he has damaged the reputations and destroyed the credibility of the few, supposedly “serious” people left in his administration.  It is one thing for paid political flacks like Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders to embarrass themselves by peddling outright lies; it is quite another for people like H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor to the President, to do the same.

How do we account for this monumental and self-destructive confusion, ethical compromise, and political chaos?  How do we explain a president whose administration appears to be coming apart at the seams after fewer than 120 days in office?

There are three possible answers to those questions.

The first is that Donald Trump is a clueless and incompetent dunce, who, for all his rhetorical bravado on the campaign trail, has no idea what he is doing and now finds himself flailing and failing, as he confronts real-world complexities that he is incapable of dealing with.

There is much to be said for this theory of the case.  By all accounts, Trump knows nothing about our constitution, the history of the nation, or world affairs.   He is lazy, does not read, and gets his news from Fox News Channel and the front pages of trash-talk tabloids like the National Inquirer.  His daily intelligence briefings have been reduced to “bullet points” to accommodate his limited attention span, and, even then, he cannot focus longer than a few minutes before wandering off on tangents and distractions. He seems incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, embracing conspiracy theories peddled by lunatic right-wing websites and rejecting any information that doesn’t agree with his prejudices.

What’s more, Trump’s much-touted skills as a manager and negotiator have turned out to be nothing more than hot air.  The White House is rife with back-biting and infighting.  Hundreds of top-level jobs in the executive branch remain unfilled.  Rumors abound that a major “shake-up” of the president’s staff is about to take place.  If so, where on earth does he expect to find any experienced or credible replacements?  Which qualified and professional public servant in his right mind would now be prepared to work for Donald Trump?

The first possible explanation for Trump’s troubles, therefore, is that he is simply not equipped, intellectually or temperamentally, to be President of the United States.

The second possibility is that Trump is afflicted by some psychological or emotional disorder—narcissism, paranoia, the list of possibilities is long—that makes him incapable of exercising his public responsibilities.  Several distinguished psychiatrists have broken with a long-standing taboo against diagnosing public figures to say that Donald Trump’s behavior is clinically abnormal, that he suffers from discernible mental problems, which compromise his ability to function.

I have no idea whether any of that is true, but there is abundant evidence of Trump’s strange public and private behavior.  We’ve all seen the public lunacy:  the blatant lying, the on-stage temper tantrums, the manic tweets.  Accounts of his private behavior are equally strange.  He is increasingly isolated.  He doesn’t sleep.  He watches cable news obsessively and rants at what he sees.  He throws things at the television set and hurtles insults at his staff.  He ignores their advice, refuses to learn from experience, and insists that his own vision of reality is the only reality.

Whether or not any of this means that Donald Trump is “crazy” in a clinical sense, his behavior is certainly not “normal” in any ordinary sense.  It is not the sort of behavior we want from our presidents.

A third, and much simpler, possibility is that Donald J. Trump is corrupt and that, for him, the presidency was and is nothing more than a money-making opportunity to enrich himself and his family.  The evidence for this possibility grows by the day.

Trump continues, not only to hide his tax returns, but to deny any financial connections with Russia, a denial that is absurd on its face.  The law firm that set up his so-called “blind trust”—which is not a “trust” in any meaningful sense, certainly isn’t “blind,” and does nothing to separate Trump from his innumerable conflicts of interest—has deep ties to Russia.  A recent documentary by Dutch investigative journalists reveals that Trump and his family have deep and long-standing financial connections to a host of unsavory characters:  Russian oligarchs, diamond smugglers, organized crime, innumerable gangsters here and abroad.  Many of his highest-profile real estate projects, including Trump Tower in New York, appear to be little more than shells for money-laundering. And just today, we learned that a state-owned Russian bank, where Vladimir Putin sits on the board of directors, was a major investor in one of those projects.

So, what in the end explains the calamity of the Trump presidency?  Is he clueless, is he crazy, or is he corrupt?  Tragically, the answer seems to be:  all three.