The madness of King Donald: is Trump really losing his mind?
- Yonden Lhatoo writes that the US president’s recent struggles with basic vocabulary and facts have triggered fresh public concerns about his mental health and fitness for office, but he’s still on track for a second term
“Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time,” Haruki Murakami wrote in Kafka on the Shore.
Is that going to be the philosophy of American voters when they elect US President Donald Trump to a second term in the White House next year?
The latest Rasmussen survey puts his approval rating at a robust 51 per cent, reflecting how all the escalating clarion calls for some sort of intervention and professional assessment of Trump’s mental health mean nothing to his fanatical support base.
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And yet, it’s easy to give his detractors the benefit of the doubt when they raise the alarm over signs of cognitive disorder, pre-dementia and even sheer delirium, whether the president is sending out incoherent tweets, ranting and raging at media briefings, or taking off on unintelligible tangents in his rambling speeches at public rallies.
It can be inane sometimes, such as when he substituted Apple CEO Tim Cook’s surname with the name of his company. He first tried to walk it back with a cringeworthy explanation that he had actually said “Tim Cook, Apple” with the “Cook” part being pronounced quietly, then tweeted an even more fatuous clarification that he had “quickly referred to Tim+Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words”.
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There’s no similar algebraic explanation for his struggle to say the word “origin” during a media session at the Oval Office this week when he questioned the Russia-collusion investigation.
“I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges, the oranges of the investigation,” he said. The official White House transcript later identified the word as “oringes”, whatever that might mean.
At the same session, while sitting next to Nato’s secretary general, Trump declared: “My father is German, was German. Born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”
It’s not the first time Trump has made up a story about the oringes of his father, who was born in New York, but his penchant for pathological lying is now under the microscope in the context of his sanity.
According to the last count by The Washington Post, which runs a handy fact-checking database on Trump, he’s made 9,451 false or misleading claims in 801 days. Over the past 200 days, he has averaged 22 a day, which is four times higher than the rate recorded during his first year in office. The problem is obviously getting worse.
As Tony Schwartz, the author who ghost wrote Trump’s biography The Art of the Deal puts it, the fact that most of us are “constrained by the truth” gives Trump a “strange advantage” through his complete disregard for it. It works with his voters.
The other thing about lying is that it goes hand in hand with cheating, and if veteran American sports writer Rick Reilly’s new book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump is anything to go by, Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant”.
Among many eye-catching anecdotes, he cites caddies at a New York golf club nicknaming Trump “Pelé”, after the Brazilian soccer legend, because of the president’s habit of kicking his ball out of the rough and up the fairway to win at all costs.
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Sounds “cray-cray”, but jokes and ridicule aside, American mental health experts have been getting increasingly vocal about the possibility of Trump, beyond the idiosyncratic grandpa narrative, actually losing his mind. They’re calling for a full clinical examination to ensure the man occupying the most powerful office on the planet hasn’t gone off his rocker. It doesn’t reassure them either that he often feels compelled, without prompting or provocation, to talk about how “very normal” he is.
Trump regularly boasts about being “like, very smart” and “a very stable genius”. But, as they say, there’s also a very fine line between genius and madness. Has he erased it?
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post
