IT was somehow entirely appropriate for the so-called master of reality television to have had his mental breakdown live on screen last night.
I have never seen anything like Donald Trump’s shambolic shut-eyed performance in the White House press room shortly before midnight GMT last night. It was not so much a car crash of a briefing as a multiple pile up on a highway to hell of his own making.
We were watching the disintegration of a man’s psyche in front of the eyes of tens of millions. Lie after lie cascaded from his tormented mind that simply could not deal with the fact that he might be about to lose the election – well, would you be comfortable with a looming situation that could see you and your family going to jail for years of nefarious activities?
Usually you can have sympathy for a fellow human being going through a psychotic episode, but not for Trump. He is, after all, the President of the United States of America, and he used his position last night to trash his own country’s democracy for the sole purposes of shoring up his own ego by mumbling a farrago of nonsense that even a trainee psychiatrist could have diagnosed as demented.
Facts? Evidence? No, Trump is infallible and what he says is gospel truth. That’s what his supporters believe. He could say the Sun orbits the Earth and they would buy into his fantasy. For that is what we saw last night – the completely fantastical ramblings of an individual going bonkers.
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He deliberately chose to promote his agenda of divisiveness for his own ends, being perfectly aware that in doing so he was crying havoc and letting slip his dogs of war to take their ugly aggression to the streets of America. That is the action of a man gone insane.
It does not matter now who wins the election. Donald Trump is a shattered husk of a man and vice-president Mike Pence and the cabinet must invoke the 25th amendment and remove Trump from his office on grounds of loss of mental capacity – for how can any president who said what Trump said last night still be considered of sound mind?
They won’t act, of course, because the Trump presidency has become a cult and the Republicans have become cultists. If, as seems probable, Trump loses today then he will still have more than 10 weeks to unleash the second American Civil War. Only a mad man would do such a thing but on the evidence of last night that is exactly what Trump has become – stark, stareless mad.
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