Sunday, August 7, 2016
Two days ago, I posted an entry entitled “Trump Towers as the Berlin Bunker of 2016.” My piece on Donald Trump’s notable levels of mental distress ends with the following assessment:
In the end, anyone so deluded as to rank himself above Dwight D. Eisenhower is in such serious psychological trouble that it can only be categorized as a death spiral of psychotic fantasy. When — not if, but when — Trump loses, he should be immediately put under a suicide watch. One must have compassion even for those who exploit the prejudice of others to whip up fear and loathing. Let us hope that he seeks professional psychological help in 2017, instead of turning Trump Towers into a parody of Hitler in his Berlin bunker. (posted August 5, 2016, 3:23 p.m.)
It would appear that I am not the only commentator on the presidential election who is concerned about the psychological stability of Donald Trump. The final two paragraphs of Maureen Dowd’s latest column (dated August 6) would suggest that she seconds my conclusion. See her article, “Crazy About the Presidency,” which can be found on-line, as well as in the print edition (Sunday, August 7) of the New York Times on page SR1.
For a complementary satire on Trump’s lack of global perspicacity, see Nicholas Kristof’s recent piece on an imagined dialogue between a C.I.A officer and Mr. Trump, published on August 4th. For the real thing, in terms of what such a C.I.A. employee might be thinking, I recommend Michael Morell’s op-ed, “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” which appeared the day after Kristof’s piece. I doubt the sequence of Kristof followed by Morell is a coincidence.
As with Meg Whitman’s endorsement of Clinton, Morell’s affirmation only serves to underline how truly atrocious a candidate Mr. Trump is. Would Morell (or Meg Whitman) come out this way if someone as qualified as Mitt Romney were running again? I would never vote for Romney, but no one would say that he is utterly unqualified to run for President. Morell would not be publicly endorsing Clinton, had Romney launched yet another run for the White House and secured the GOP nomination.
Republicans who scorned Romney as a potential candidate in 2016 must now rue their haughty judgment. Romney would have made cheesecake out of Trump in the primaries if he had run this year instead of in 2012, and my guess is that he would be running ahead of Clinton in the polls right now. Clinton is very fortunate that Romney underestimated the determination of Obama’s supporters, however, and didn’t realize that even those of us who were dismayed by his tepid performance in reacting to the unemployment crisis of 2009-20011 were going to vote for him again. He would have been her most formidable opponent, and his decision to run in 2012 may well have cost the GOP the White House for the rest of this decade.
About Bill Mohr