The Bubble: Trump no crazier than other presidents
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Donald Trump is getting his first medical exam since taking office Friday as questions swirl about the health and fitness of the oldest president elected to office. UVA presidential historian Barbara Perry explains why the country should care. (Jan. 11)
AP
Each week, USA TODAY’s OnPolitics blog takes a look at how media from the left and the right reacted to a political news story, giving liberals and conservatives a peek into the other’s media bubble.
This week, pundits from the left and right debated President Trump’s mental health in the wake of Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and the author’s claim that “100%” of people around Trump question his fitness for office. In addition, a Yale University psychiatry professor told a group of lawmakers that Trump “was going to unravel.”Â
Last week: Michael Wolff’s book a ‘gift’ to Trump, liberals say
The left: Trump’s mental health can no longer be ignoredÂ
Should the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove Trump because he is unfit for office? Salon‘s Chauncey DeVega asked.Â
“Political disagreements aside, the public evidence in support of such an action is overwhelming,” DeVega said, answering his own question. “Trump’s speech and other behavior indicate a man who is detached from reality and living in a universe of his own delusions.”
DeVega calls Trump “a serial liar who has convinced himself that his untruths can bend empirical reality to his will.” But DeVega’s main reasons in support of removing the president from office are centered more on Trump’s policies and statements — which DeVega calls undemocratic and fascistic — than actual evidence of mental incapacity.Â
More: Battles over Trump’s mental health and ‘fitness’ for office sidetrack his policy agenda
The right: Armchair psychology is dangerousÂ
After the 1964 election, failed Republican candidate Barry Goldwater won a lawsuit against a magazine that published a survey of psychiatrists who said he was mentally unfit for office. This led to the “Goldwater rule,” which says psychiatrists should not conduct long-distance diagnoses.Â
“This is a good rule that guards against a lot of bad,” said Washington Examiner commentary writer Becket Adams.Â
Armchair diagnoses are sloppy, unprofessional and “have the potential to do real harm to the mentally disturbed,” Adams wrote.Â
Moreover, we believe that medical expertise shouldn’t be used as a weapon against political opponents. That’s a dangerous road we don’t want to take. Trump’s not-normal presidency is no excuse for the normalization of this sort of behavior.
More: Stop trying to diagnose our ‘very stable genius’ president. He might be right.
The left: Trump is not cognitively up to the jobÂ
There is a lot of juicy gossip in Wolff’s book, but primarily it is a “portrait of a man coming undone by the very forces he has unleashed,” said Vox founder Ezra Klein.Â
The picture painted of Trump in Wolff’s book is the same picture painted of Trump by Trump’s own tweets, speeches, comments, and actions, as well as the constant on- and off-the-record statements of his staff. It is similar to what I, and many other reporters who have covered this White House, have heard from top staff. Trump is not cognitively up to the job of the presidency.
“So what happens when a man who isn’t fit to be president and a campaign that never expected to staff and manage a presidency unexpectedly wins the White House?” Klein asks. “Chaos.”
More: Trump, mocking questions on his mental state, tweets he is a ‘stable genius’
The right: Trump’s policies aren’t crazier than other presidents’
Trump’s opponents could stop him in the election, they couldn’t stop his agenda in Congress and so far the hopes they’ve pinned on Mueller’s investigation haven’t borne fruit, wrote CNBC columnist Jake Novak.
“So enter phase four in the anti-Trump movement’s efforts to remove, delegitimize, or at least weaken the duly elected president of the United States: They’re making the case that he’s crazy,” Novak said.Â
Novak conceded that Trump’s “public behavior is totally out of sync with what we’ve seen from every president before him.” But he said, “the hard fact is that President Trump’s policies, executive orders, and the bills he’s supported are no less sane than any of his predecessors’ actual body of work.”Â
More: Battles over Trump’s mental health and ‘fitness’ for office sidetrack his policy agenda
Left bubble: Is Trump unfit? It’s a political questionÂ
There are several Republican figures who come across in Fire and Fury as thinking they can control and manipulate Trump precisely because he is not a “stable genius,” and they themselves suffer from “delusions” and “self-deceptions,” wrote Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker.Â
As for Trump himself, “there is no question that he is unpredictable and undisciplined; he has bragged about that,” she wrote. “But insanity is distinct from either idiocy or indifference. If the people around Trump are covering for him in that respect, they should put what they know before the public; if they don’t, they might reflect on whether they have become captive to the idea that they themselves are essential, stable geniuses — and on how much of the nation’s safety they are wagering on that notion.”Â
In reality, the question of whether Trump has the right mind to be President must be seen for what it is: a political question. Voters are the ones asked, ultimately, to make the risk assessment. Those who oppose him, in highlighting his really dangerous volatility, might ask when his supporters will see that he is stupid and unfit — and that they, in contrast, are clever and competent — and just stop this crazy Presidency? The answer, for all practical purposes, is when someone comes up with a candidate who can beat Trump.
More: Trump’s ‘stable genius’ reality check: America, this isn’t a drill
The right: Trump proved he isn’t cuckooÂ
By making people wonder if Trump is mentally unstable, Wolff did the president a favor, said Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger.Â
If you are Trump, “and like any normal person don’t want the world to think you’re cuckoo, what do you do? You prove they are wrong,” Henninger reasoned. And Trump did exactly that with his speech to the American Farm Bureau on Monday and his public negotiation on immigration Tuesday, Henninger said.Â
The Trump immigration negotiation session with Congress is the sort of public presidential face the world should see more of. In fact, that meeting’s productive content is a template for broadening the president’s Twitter account, an underutilized asset.
The morning after the immigration summit, a grudging consensus formed that Mr. Trump had confounded critics of his basic competence. A parallel consensus snorted that this positive moment won’t last.
More: Trump aides: No need for a psychiatric exam, president is ‘sharp as a tack’
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