He is the president now, but who knows what the federal and state investigations into him and his administration will find. Keep in mind the house may shift parties in 2018, and we may get legitimate investigations into Trump & Co. starting in 2019. The GOP investigated Benghazi 7 separate times, imagine how many investigations the dems are going to do into Trump & co with his long history of suspected sex crimes and financial crimes (not to mention collaboration with Russia).
Even if Trump can’t be indicted while sitting and he isn’t impeached, he may be indicted and arrested after he leaves office.
As long as his cabinet and the judiciary prevents him from doing anything truly authoritarian and stupid, his presidency won’t be ‘that’ bad. But he sets a bad precedent for the next deranged, mentally ill white nationalist authoritarian.
The only sad part is that the public won’t learn anything.
Also, a real diagnosis probably wouldn’t be sufficient to kick him out of office. I think his behavior is erratic and dangerous, and indicate mental instability, but I suspect there’s a world of difference between ‘‘mental instability’’ and ‘‘mentally unfit to lead’’ and I honestly don’t know whether that standard could be met. The evaluator would have to conclusively determine that the pattern of behaviors he exhibits are due to the specific traits of a specific illness. We’d run into the problem that a lot of folks enumerate when asking about personality disorders: ‘’'When is a person mentally ill and when are they just a raving asshole?"
I personally don’t think those two things ever need be mutually exclusive. But I doubt we have precedent for even conducting such a mental evaluation. I doubt we even have clinical standards that describe what duties the office of a president entails and how mental illness may or may not infringe upon those duties. Just setting up the infrastructure to objectively* define those parameters would take a team of researchers, clinicians and other experts that would likely take years. And then the evaluation. Who would do it that could not reasonably be called biased one way or another? Assuming we’d use the DSM, it bears noting that the whole construction of personality disorder in DSM is highly culturally biased, to begin with. The DSM is not some perfectly objective tome of clinical knowledge, it is itself influenced by politics, cultural norms and biases.
In a very real sense, it is up to the American People to decide whether or not Trump is unfit to lead. We’ll find out their diagnosis in a few years.
Basically, nothing can be done. Well… one thing might be done. Some intelligent successor to Trump’s throne might put in place the infrastructure to guard against future crazy people holding office. But actually, I should be really clear, my problem is not with crazy people being president. My problem is with people whose mental illness prevents them from performing essential duties of their jobs. But do you know how easily those two ideas can become conflated? The worst thing that could come out of such a crusade would be to further stigmatize the mentally ill. We deal with enough stigma as it is. I don’t trust the average American person to pick up on all these nuances. Or perhaps I should say I don’t trust to average American media outlet to do so. They get mental health shit wrong all the time, I don’t see why they would suddenly get it right now.
Lots of presidents and world leaders have been mentally ill. LBJ and Teddy Roosevelt supposedly had bipolar disorder. Churchill and Lincoln both had major depression.
Lots of presidents have had mental illness, but when that illness interrupts their ability to work then it becomes a serious issue.
If Trump has dementia and it makes it hard for him to concentrate, focus or learn that is a serious issue. If he has a narcissistic disorder and it makes it hard for him to have any concern for the public, or it makes him oversensitive to criticism until he lashes out in dangerous ways then it becomes a public hazard.
There is a line between having responsibility while having an illness (physical or mental), vs having an illness that makes it hard to handle the responsibility. Where that line is drawn, I don’t know. But with Trump’s angry tweeting at north Korea, his calls to attack the first amendment because he is oversensitive to criticism, his inability to accept he lost the popular vote makes him invent a fantasy that millions voted illegally which will be used to suppress voters, his constant lying, his complete lack of understanding of government policy, etc. his illnesses are affecting his ability to handle his responsibilities.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s a serious issue, I’m arguing that it’s almost logistically impossible to do anything about it. It’s relatively easy to diagnose someone with a mental illness. It is orders of magnitude much more difficult to determine that the President’s mental illness makes him unable to perform the essential duties of his job. That is particularly the case if every person in the President’s sphere of influence is highly motivated to avoid such a diagnosis. In today’s political climate it would also be near impossible to get anything resembling an objective evaluation. That’s not even considering all of the political machinations and backlash and consequences of such an attempted undertaking in a country generally primed for violence.
I’m not arguing that this reality is good for fair, just that I don’t see it as a particularly productive pathway for people who want to get Trump thrown out of office. It’s one thing to say to another person on a message board ‘‘Can’t you see that this person is mentally ill? Here are a number of behaviors that point to mental illness’’ and another thing entirely to actually diagnose and remove Trump from office.
I think the only means of getting rid of him that is really on the table is convincing people not to vote for him for a second term. And I honestly have no idea how to do that. Clearly, none of us do, or else he wouldn’t have been elected in the first place.
(Upon reread: People dealt with social phobia as President of the US? :eek: Christ.)
It was lengthy, so I skimmed most of it (if there are some particular areas that you thing deserve scrutiny, please indicate). It described the federal government as “Two million federal employees take orders from 4,000 political appointees.” When those political appointments are in transition, by and large the career civil servants step in to fill the void. This happens when an ambassadorship hasn’t yet been given away, and I imagine it happens similarly at most of the federal departments.
Not to be too cavalier about it, but I haven’t really noticed, which makes me question your claim that they’re really ‘critical’.
Yours is an opinion that I respect, so I’ll file it away as one data point that indicates Trump is significantly worse. I hope you’ll understand it won’t be the only data point I take into consideration, but it is one that I’ll assign some value to.
I think your husband nailed it.
This is a post that’ll stick with me for a while.
I’d give him about an A- on handling Syria, but only about a C+ on handling North Korea (and it’s probably only that high thanks to the stabilizing influence of James Mattis). His tweeting hasn’t helped anything. The fact that he has more or less straddled the line between looking weak in the face of North Korean aggression and managed to avoid starting a war with them (so far) is a good thing, I think.
I’m a Trump supporter now? Well, then. I do like the fact that he was able to pick a SC Justice. Aside from that I don’t know what policies of Trump I actually support since I haven’t seen all that many. I don’t think a wall is practical. Though it is infrastructure and jobs…
Trump’s maturity? Yeah. Haven’t seen much of that. Trump is a clown. Trump making fun of the disabled? Trump makes fun of all sorts of people. Why should the disabled by excluded? He’s an equal opportunity jack-ass.
Should I feel bad that Trump makes fun of people including the disabled? No. No I shouldn’t. Everyone here makes fun of Trump and he might be mentally disabled so that’s just how people act nowadays.
Now concerning if my own child acted like Trump or Clinton or any other of these nutty, self absorbed, power hungry politicians I’d give them a timeout. But our politicians are grown people and we reward them for their corrupt, self serving behavior. Why should we expect better?
They didn’t cause anyone to think they were batshit insane, dangerously unstable and self-centered enough to start a war if he’s insulted.
How’s that for a start?
Seems reasonable to me. They’re our allies. Any conflict we spark they’re probably going to be involved with financially and with the commitment of some of their troops, as they did in Iraq.
Because, I don’t know whether you know anything about international politics (obviously not too much) but everything that erupts out of Trumps erratic gob affects much of the western world, Australia included.
Do you think that Trump is just a US problem-child? Really? Are you that insular that you think his madness doesn’t have repercussions on a global scale?
Go scurry back under your rock D’Anconia…you’ll be safe there.
Hell, he thought a county clerk denying marriage licenses for gay couples after the SCOTUS decision was only a problem that concerned that specific county. And that everyone else should butt out.
I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve had quite a few Ds tell me that they prefer Trump to Pence. For example, these were posted earlier in the thread:
I’m not sure it was so much that the hurricane was mishandled, so much as Puerto Rico itself has been mishandled for so many years before that.
As Spice Weasel noted, they can’t give an actual diagnosis, so they’re just playing politics.
There are a lot of things about him that I question. I think he’s an asshole, but that probably has more to do with him being a New Yorker than any fake diagnosis or dementia (which, btw, I haven’t really seen evidence of yet)
This sounds like some even-handed analysis. Bravo.