What If President Trump Truly Decompensated?

[babylonsister]

https://prospect.org/article/what-if-president-trump-truly-decompensated

What If President Trump Truly Decompensated?
Paul Waldman
September 4, 2019
The answer is profoundly troubling.


Trump has around him an infrastructure of support that will work tirelessly to excuse, explain and justify literally anything he does, no matter how terrifying.

In the 1971 Woody Allen film Bananas, after a revolutionary leader succeeds in overthrowing the government of a small Latin American country, he begins issuing bizarre edicts. He declares the country’s official language to now be Swedish, and announces that “all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.” The new president’s aides, realizing that he has gone off the deep end, immediately remove him from power.

Our current situation would resemble that kind of absurdist comedy were it not for the fact that the stakes are so high and the consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency so grave. But the real difference between America today and Bananas lie not in the president’s behavior but in the apparatus of support that surrounds him.

One can make a convincing argument that President Trump has become so erratic and his public comments so disturbing that he has shown himself to be mentally incapable of carrying out his duties. Alternatively, one could argue that not much has really changed, and in fact he has been this erratic since he took office. Even if you don’t agree with either of those assertions, it’s worth asking: What would happen if Trump truly decompensated? The answer is profoundly troubling.

snip//

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke, and for the last year of his term in office, the government was essentially run by his wife Edith, all while Wilson’s administration pretended that he was in command and nothing was amiss. We look back on that and say it could never happen today, because of the far greater demands on the president and the ubiquitous gaze of the news media. If the president was incapacitated, we’d know about it almost immediately.

But what if we knew about it, but we couldn’t do anything about it? The most likely scenario of Trump losing his marbles is not that the 25th Amendment is invoked and Vice President Pence takes over, but that it would become just one more partisan controversy. Democrats would say, “For Pete’s sake, the president has plainly gone mad—he just ordered the Air Force to nuke the moon!” Then Republicans would say, “No, in fact his unique genius is more evident than ever, and the moon has had this coming for a long time but other presidents didn’t have the guts.”

Every day on Fox News, programming would alternate between discussions of the moon's dangerous perfidy and attacks on Democrats for taking the moon's side over America's Mainstream news organizations would write stories headlined, “Parties disagree over moon-bombing plan,” while pundits caution Democrats not to get too shrill in criticizing the president lest they alienate white blue-collar voters in the Midwest for whom nuking the moon sounds like just the kind of action-packed initiative America needs.

After all we’ve been through up until now, that doesn’t sound like a particularly outlandish series of events, does it?

[The Blue Flower]

1. In this respect, the constant tweets are a positive

First ladies Edith wilson and Nancy Reagan shielded the public from the truth about their husbands. This current madness is fully public so we're at least aware of it.

[Cyrano]

2. Yes, yes, yes. I saw Woody Allen's 1971 film, "Bananas," and

the orange creature is pretty much as insane as the banana republic dictator in that film.

The irony is that, in that film, the dictator's aides knew he was nuts and removed him from power immediately. Seems that ain't happening here. The entire GOP, and the madman's cabinet, are just "going along to get along."

Or, to put it in terms that everyone can understand, each and every Republican is fucking America in order to hold onto power (and make a profit).

[LastDemocratInSC]

3. Oh, I thought you said "decomposed"

[flotsam]

4. How insane-this clip says it for me

Not yet-but within months:

[uponit7771]

5. "..IF ?!.." America's genocidal racist president is already there ... there's no if.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

6. now, now. he still has command of his Sharpie

You have entered the Twitler Zone.