The President has lost his Marbles
Trump was never half as smart as he said he was, but even as recently as six months ago he was a lot quicker than he is now. Pretty much every word out of his mouth these days bears witness to his declining cognitive capacities, his inability to control his impulses, and his estrangement from anything resembling reality. He has become a walking, talking poster for the symptoms of early-stage (or not-so-early stage) dementia, but because his politics are so poisonous, his administration so corrupt, and the stakes for the world so high, we continue to talk about him as if he is strategizing instead of clinically devolving.When I read this item at Axios this morning, I suddenly saw the elephant in the room. The headline is (after his Paris Accord decision, it actually reads like a punchline): "Trump Pitched Congressional Leaders on a Solar-Powered Border Wall."
Trump floated the idea that the wall could be covered in solar panels and the electricity generated used to pay for the cost.Trump said his vision was a wall 40 feet to 50 feet high and covered with solar panels so they'd be "beautiful structures," the people said. The President said that most walls you hear about are 14 feet or 15 feet tall but this would be nothing like those walls. Trump told the lawmakers they could talk about the solar-paneled wall as long as they said it was his idea.
This happened yesterday--after he broke diplomatic relations with Qatar with a Tweet (stranding our military bases in now-hostile territory) and challenged Sadiq Khan to an IQ test. This is from the guy who thinks that climate change is a fraud, solar power is a waste (Solyndra!) and that our energy future is in coal.What else happened yesterday? A story broke that he made his dopey son Eric steal from a cancer charity on his behalf (that was when he still had all his marbles). We learned that Russia maybe did do a little more to our election than just plant fake news stories. We also learned that Trump has turned on Jeff Sessions of all people, and that he is resentful of all the attention that his son-in-law Jared is getting.The proverbial anthropologist from Mars would take one look at any of those stories and conclude that Trump is not just an authoritarian agent of Russia but cognitively and emotionally off the rails. If he wasn't such a monster, his unraveling would be a tragic spectacle.I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'm pretty certain that some very important figures in the military, business, the Republican party, and even Congress have noticed this too and have already started discussing how they can ease him out of power and install Mike Pence in his place. I would bet that Mike Pence (who I just learned from Jane Mayer's DARK MONEY was Charles Koch's favorite for president in 2012) is an active participant in those conversations--and maybe Jeff Sessions too. And I would further bet that they've decided that the best way forward is to give him enough rope to hang himself with--which in his case is his cell phone and his Tweeting compulsion.Russia stole the election, the president they installed is not only a sociopath but mentally incompetent, and Mike Pence--the Evangelicalist tool of the Koch brothers--is about to become our next unelected president.Why isn't everyone else talking about this? Because I'm pretty certain that I'm not the crazy one.
