The Situation: “Evident Clinical Symptoms”

The Situation on Friday detailed a temper tantrum in a legal brief.

Today let’s talk about the molten core problem at the heart of The Situation: The president is deranged.

I don’t know if President Trump is going to seize Greenland by force—and neither does anyone else, probably including President Trump.

I do know that we have entered a new era of imperial conquest: unashamed, resource-extractive imperialism that does not even pretend to have any higher purpose.

Sometimes, this takes the form of an American military adventure to depose an undesirable foreign leader who doesn’t do as Donald Trump wishes. Sometimes, it takes the form of an irrational demand on an allied government facing an existential military conflict for mineral extraction rights. This time, it may merely take the form of threats against a tiny country that has always been a staunch ally, threats intended to force it to capitulate and give up a gigantic ice sheet—or it may take a more militaristic form than that.

Trump’s imperialism speaks the language of resource extraction—or in the case of Greenland, the language of security. But it is not ultimately about resources. And it’s not ultimately about security either.

Trump’s imperialism is about grandiosity. Greenland is big—very big. And the United States would be bigger, a whole lot bigger, if it had the island. And Trump wants America to be bigger. And Trump wants to be the one who made America bigger. Because Trump is derangedly grandiose.

Nobody can actually doubt that the president is deranged.

Nobody, at least, who has read his text exchange with the Norwegian prime minister—an exchange in which he links his demands for Greenland to the Nobel Committee’s decision not to award him the Nobel Peace Prize. “Dear Jonas,” he wrote:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a "right of ownership" anyway? There are no written documents, it's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT"

Nobody who watched him impose tariffs on European allies who oppose his imperial grandiosity can doubt his derangement either.

Nor can anyone who watched him extort the Nobel Peace Prize medal from Maria Corina Machado, and then get it from her and exult over having snatched it from a woman who led the Venezuelan opposition to victory even when she couldn’t run for president herself.

Nobody can watch him destroy NATO and the broader transatlantic partnership of which it is a part—all the while claiming to be its champion and demanding Greenland as payment—can doubt his derangement either. 

What can Europe do about a derangedly grandiose president of the United States? For that matter, what can Americans do about him?

The Situation still has three years on its clock—three years to the day, to be precise. That’s a long time. And it’s a particularly long time in the absence of congressional push-back against the deranged man who is dragging us all into perdition.

Even if one hypothesizes that Trump will suffer some devastating electoral setback a mere nine months from now, that setback will still—under the best of circumstances—leave the deranged man in full control of “the Executive power” of the United States for the following two years and leave him almost wholly unchecked for the next year.

Impeachment is, of course, of no use at all. Sure, sure, Trump has committed impeachable offenses—too many to count. But the votes aren’t there to initiate impeachment, and the votes aren’t there in the Senate to remove Trump even if the House could somehow get its act together.

Whenever Trump lets his freakiest flag fly, whispers of the 25th Amendment inevitably follow. And sure enough, 25th Amendment talk is in the air these days. But this is foolishness too.

Even if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet were to declare, for so the amendment reads, “that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and even if J.D. Vance were thereby “immediately [to] assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President,” Trump would simply reply with a “written declaration” of his own “that no inability exists” and try to wrest them back.

Yes, Vance and a majority of the cabinet could hold their ground. But “Thereupon Congress [would] decide the issue.” And only if Congress “determine[d] by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office [would] the Vice President . . . continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President [would get to] resume the powers and duties of his office.”

In other words, to remove the president using the impeachment process, the forces of sanity would need to muster a two-thirds majority in the Senate. To remove the president under the 25th Amendment, they would need to do it in both houses.

Don’t kid yourself, folks: There is no magic bullet here. There is no constitutional magic bullet. There is no investigative or prosecutorial magic bullet—no Bob Mueller or Jack Smith. There is no combination of protests and elections or lobbying that can make this problem go away quickly.

There is, instead, a long hard slog ahead of us—a long hard slog of elections, advocacy, protest, litigation, and people fighting for their rights.

And there is a long hard slog ahead of Europe too in handling the disaster the United States has unleashed on the world. Because that is what managing a deranged person is like. 

Nine years ago, I wrote what I think was the first article to analyze seriously the notion of Donald Trump as a threat to national security. (It was not, I should note, the first article to posit that Trump posed a threat to national security; that distinction goes, to my knowledge anyway, to John Bellinger, also writing in Lawfare.) The article identified seven features of Trump’s personality that formed “an unusual combination of—from a national security perspective, anyway—terrifying liabilities” in a president. A number of these features have, alas, held up well analytically: the attraction to war crimes, for example. 

For present purposes, however, item number six is worth revisiting.

I genuinely struggled at the time, as the text reflects, with whether and how to include it. This was long before George Conway wrote his famous Atlantic article about Trump’s malignant narcissism. Trump’s mental health was not a subject it was considered appropriate to discuss—at least not in a serious way, and I’m not a clinician, and Lawfare is not a medical or psychological journal. And yet, even then—eight months before he was elected the first time—there was, “the small matter of Trump’s—there’s no polite way to say this—evident clinical symptoms. I’m not a psychologist qualified to make a diagnosis, but it simply has to be significant that it’s hard to have a serious conversation about Trump without using words like egomania, grandiosity, or narcissism.”

There was no escaping it. He was deranged—grandiose, egomaniacal, narcissistic, the sort of man who would get obsessed with acquiring Greenland and blow up America’s most sacred international commitments to get it done. The sort of man who would respond to not getting the Nobel Peace Prize by declaring he was no longer solely interested in peace. The sort of man who would take the medal from its rightful winner and feel no shame at the theft.

The sort of man who would guarantee that The Situation might continue tomorrow—and 1,094 days after that.