Dana Milbank, who's a longtime Villager and Beltway pundit, wrote a column last night that should get the attention of the rest of us. In a column called "The President Seems To Be Transparently Mad," he starts off with this sentence: "This is not the work of an orderly mind."
He called Trump's Rose Garden rant a "12-minute parade of paranoia."
The compulsively contrarian centrist used his bully pulpit to build a case for a Mad King scenario:
Positively everybody was out to get him. They were out to get him in the third person: “They hated President Trump. They hated him with a passion,” he said. They were out to get him in the first-person plural: “These people were out to get us, the Republican Party and President Trump. They were out to get us.” What’s more, they have been after him “pretty much from the time we came down the escalator in Trump Tower.” And now they probably will impeach him because they “do whatever they have to do.”
He did a pretty good job illustrating Trump's Twitter style:
He ricocheted randomly among inchoate thought fragments: Infrastructure. WITCH HUNT! Unemployment. NO COLLUSION! Drug prices. HOAX! A special election in Pennsylvania. ONE-SIDED HORRIBLE THING! Tax cuts. DON JR. HAS GONE THROUGH HELL! I love the American people. IMPEACHMENT! Regulations. A DISGRACE! ABUSE!
Milbank points out that Democratic leaders have accused Trump of a cover-up before, and asks if Trump didn't want to work on legislation during an ongoing investigation, why begin infrastructure talks "in the first place?"
What changed, apparently, is the president’s state of mind. People often describe him as “unraveling,” but that implies he was once fully knitted. Whatever his mental starting point, those seeking the method in Trump’s madness lately have encountered less of the former and more of the latter.
And then he wound up with this:
“I’m the most transparent president, probably, in the history of this country,” he also said.
In one sense, that’s true: Trump’s state of mind is utterly transparent, revealed in real time. At the moment, he seems to be transparently mad.
Back at the Capitol, Pelosi reacted with concern more than anger. “I pray for the president of the United States,” she said. “And I pray for the United States of America.”
So should we all.
This is Trump so far today:
