Is he coming apart at the seams, or what? Talk about unfit...
If I just went by his speeches to his audiences at rallies, I would very much feel that something was wrong mentally with the President. And at the moment, he's not taking a lot of things well. Publicly, as always. Expresses a desire to increase America's nuclear arsenal 10 fold. His generals, and Mattis and Kelly, said to be stunned, and concerned. Trump proclaiming "fake news". Again fake news, as always when the story does not glorify him.
It is a narrative, this story of crisis in Trump's presidency. Everybody has a narrative, everybody has a story to tell. But is it a true narrative? Is he losing it? Or is the whole construct that he is losing it a liberal based fiction, at its heart a type of attempted coup, to strip him of the office? If you repeat a lie often enough. History will render a judgement here, simply because there has never been a Presidency like this one, and the competing narratives are leading to some sort of reckoning. For somebody. For Trump? Or for the media, the press? An adversarial press has long been regarded as a necessity of sorts, the press as watchdog. A 100% compliant press grants free reign. Unless one believes the anti-Trump narrative is based on all lies, then the attack on the press is chilling. Unless one favors authoritarianism, unless one favors free reign in one's ruler.
Trump creates the reality for his supporters to believe. Everything is great. The mainstream media always lies about Trump. Democrats can't get over losing. The "Russian thing" is a hoax. Daily he vilifies individuals relentlessly, alternating with proclamations that the President we're seeing is greatness personified. The administration is "great", everything is great to an historic degree. Repeat that lie often enough. Create a world for followers to believe in. If the media narrative is that the emperor has no clothes, Trump's narrative is that he's dressed for greatness, and dressed to splendor.
Then you listen to the man at his rallies. You see the appeal to militant nationalism. And maybe you've seen this before, in other times and places. Maybe you see that this is happening because the culture Trump emerged from made this possible. As it did in other times and other places. And you realize the President's narrative is not a narrative one would really expect from the man who speaks to the audience at his rallies. That man would more likely generate the narrative that is reflected in this piece:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/donald-trump-is-unraveling-white-house-advisers
"At first it sounded like hyperbole, the escalation of a Twitter war. But now it’s clear that Bob Corker’s remarkable New York Times interview—in which the Republican senator described the White House as “adult day care” and warned Trump could start World War III—was an inflection point in the Trump presidency. It brought into the open what several people close to the president have recently told me in private: that Trump is “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling.”
The conversation among some of the president’s longtime confidantes, along with the character of some of the leaks emerging from the White House has shifted. There’s a new level of concern. NBC News published a report that Trump shocked his national security team when he called for a nearly tenfold increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal during a briefing this summer. One Trump adviser confirmed to me it was after this meeting disbanded that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.”
In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods. Trump’s ire is being fueled by his stalled legislative agenda and, to a surprising degree, by his decision last month to back the losing candidate Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. “Alabama was a huge blow to his psyche,” a person close to Trump said. “He saw the cult of personality was broken.”"
