Strategists are openly worrying about Donald Trump

Andrew Feinberg, The Independent

For a man who craves the spotlight as much as President Donald Trump does, the past two weeks must have been hell.

The 45th president, by many reports the most voracious consumer of television news to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk, has spent the days since November 13 in virtual exile from the airwaves as most networks offered gavel-to-gavel coverage of the fourth impeachment inquiry in American history.

Yes, most of the White House press corps still arrived each day to cover Trump’s comings and goings while recording even the most prosaic of his utterances. But for the most part, the man who has become accustomed to being the centre of attention since January 20, 2017 was shoved aside in favour of a new cast of characters led by Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has become a go-to hate object for Trump and his supporters.

So when Friday finally arrived without an impeachment hearing to capture anyone’s attention, Trump decided to air the grievances he’d been nursing for past 10 days, with — as the Beatles put it — a little help from his (Fox and) Friends.

For just under an hour, whatever dam that had held back the presidential logorrhea that had accumulated while most eyes were trained on the Capitol broke with spectacular results.

And as the faces on hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade vacillated from excited to fascinated to very concerned, Trump spewed forth some of the same conspiracies that a succession of witnesses had debunked at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

From his baseless claim that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped him to the equally baseless claim that Ukraine — not Russia — interfered in the 2016 election and there’s a server secreted away in the former Soviet republic which can prove it, it was a parade of Trump’s favourite fever dreams.

He even threw in some self-incrimination for good measure by directly tying his attempt to withhold $391 million in military aid to Ukraine to his desire for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to investigate that non-existence server. He then admitted — for the second time — that he’d fired former FBI Director James Comey to stave off an investigation into him.

For Republican strategist Rick Wilson, Trump’s behaviour came as no surprise.

“This is classic Trump behaviour — whenever he’s almost out of trouble, he does something that puts him back in trouble. The stupidity is strong with this one,” said Wilson, who is the author of Everything Trump Touches Dies and the forthcoming Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump — and Democrats.

That Trump would engage in such self-defeating behavior is evidence of both his lack of intellectual means and lack of competent advisers, Wilson said, adding that the president “is not a terribly bright man.”

“He has terrible judgment, and if he had real lawyers they would’ve hit him with a cattle-prod before they let him do that interview,” he said.  Trump’s declaration that he welcomes an impeachment trial in the Senate — a view reportedly shared by senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner — reflects equally poorly on Kushner as it does his father-and-law, Wilson added.

“Jared’s strategic sense is in his ass — he’s truly not that smart,” he said, but cautioned that Democrats could hand Trump a victory if they move too quickly or give up trying to get more information about Trump’s scheme to extort the announcement of investigations into Biden and 2016 conspiracy theories.

“If they buy into the bulls**t reality distortion field and keep the pedal to the metal, they lose,” he explained. “They need to bring another round of witnesses, they need to bring (Giuliani associate Lev) Parnas, and they need to go to court to compel the State Department and other agencies to turn over the documents the White House is withholding. If you’re in, you stay in the fight...until one guy is down and bleeding.”

Dr Bandy Lee, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine, said the president’s morning gab session was “very concerning,” but for medical — not political — reasons.

“It’s alarming because he always had a paranoid disposition… but he’s entering into delusional territory,” said Lee, who is also the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, a group of mental health professionals “who have come together in historically unprecedented ways to offer our consensus view that Donald Trump’s mental state presents a clear and present danger to the nation and the world.”

“He has doubled down on conspiracy theories in the past, which seemed to indicate a psychotic spiral which can happen under duress in individuals with his emotional fragility,” Lee continued. She posited that Trump has exhibited similar behavior as part of a “maladaptive coping mechanism” when he has been criticized or challenged in the past, with impeachment being “the ultimate challenge that he has feared.”

Specifically, Lee said Trump “has repeatedly show an inability… to conform his thoughts to facts and emerging information,” as well as “an inability to consider consequences and not be unduly influenced by impulsivity or their own emotional needs.”

“He believes what he needs to believe emotionally and this is very dangerous,” she said, adding that his behavior is that of “a person without mental capacity,” which she defined as “somebody who has an inability to take in information, process that information, and incorporate that information into their belief system.”

Lee heads the Independent Expert Panel Working Group, which she said has “set up an expert panel that is now available for consultation if called upon during the impeachment proceedings”.

But as things now stand, she added that Trump “has failed every criterion of our mental capacity evaluation.”

While some have criticised her group as one that is mounting political attacks on the president, Lee said the concerns she and her colleagues have raised are genuine and based on valid observations.

“People try to discredit us by saying we have not examined him, an examination is crucial for diagnosis and treatment, but when assessing dangerous (people) or incapacity… the direct reports by coworkers and close associates are considered far more valuable,” she said. “Collateral information is considered far more important for assessing dangerousness or incapacity — many clinicians believe we know far more about Donald Trump than any patient we have ever seen.”

Still, whether it is by her group or another one, Lee stressed the need for Trump to be examined by experts who are “non-governmental and apolitical” to determine whether he is fit to serve. 

“Because White House doctors are conflicted due to their employment and their status as subordinates to the commander-in-chief, we do not believe that the White House physician would be able to put public interest ahead of following the president’s wishes,” she said. “That is why we believe an independent expert panel is critical to be able to examine the president for fitness for duty.”