The U.S. is one month away from inaugurating a saner president. One more month for the incumbent to try pardoning or martial lawing his way out from under the damoclean sword awaiting his return to civilian life. He’s cracking under the strain, or is he?
Michael Kruse writes at Politico:
“He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,” Mary Trump, his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and bestselling book about him and their family, told me. “We continue to wait for him to accept reality, for him to concede, and that is something he is not capable of doing,” added Bandy Lee, the forensic psychiatrist from Yale who’s spent the last four years trying to warn the world about Trump and the ways in which he’s disordered and dangerous. “Being a loser,” she said, for Trump is tantamount to “psychic death.”
The combination of an unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has some people wondering if there is a chance that Trump’s unusual actions suggest something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown?
No, says former Trump political aide Sam Nunberg and fleeting White House spokesman Anthony Scaramucci. Not so fast, say others closer to the inveterate con man.
Everybody, after all, has a breaking point. “And he’s not indestructible,” said Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive vice president who was the construction manager for Trump Tower and just wrote a book called Tower of Lies. “I do think Trump is struggling,” Tony Schwartz, the actual author of The Art of the Deal, told me, “and that this is far and away the toughest time he’s ever had.”
“His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,” Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney and enforcer before he turned on him, told me. “While he’s creating a false pretense of strength and fortitude, internally he is angry, depressed and manic. As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.”
Seeing people celebrate the demolition of the decaying Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino on Atlantic City’s boardwalk, watching it on an endless loop on social media and on the evening news (perhaps even on Fox), should not add to his stress level at all.
“The probability of something very bad happening is very high, unacceptably high, and the fact that we don’t have guardrails in place, the fact that we are allowing a mentally incapacitated president to continue in the job, in such an important job, for a single day longer, is a truly unacceptable reality,” said [Bandy Lee, the Yale forensic] psychiatrist. “We’re talking about his access to the most powerful military on the planet and his access to technology that’s capable of destroying human civilization many times over.”
That’s comforting. Good thing Cohen does not see Trump going that route. Trump will instead go back to Mar-a-Lago and MAGAstan where sycophants will “bolster his ego and he can go from table to table, listening to people placate him about how the election was stolen from him. And that’s just going to further create that mishigas in his head.” Whatever keeps him the center of attention.
If only we can stop him from being ours.
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