Trump, Sanity and Partisan Politics

Trump, Sanity and Partisan Politics.

No doubt most readers of this blog must already be aware that I am no fan of Donald Trump. 

The reasons why are fairly simple, and largely apolitical, although I may have been misunderstood by those reading my words. If so, I will state it now, for the record : My dislike of Donald Trump has to do with his personality and his history, and has no bearing whatever on his political views or policy positions.

To elucidate further, Mr Trump has a long history of lying when it suits him to lie. He tells lies so much that he may even believe the lies himself. Trump also runs a fraudulent business practice -- he will say anything in order to get a contract signed and then he breaks his word freely, ignoring or even running opposite of what he has contracted to do. Trump has committed fraud so many times it's difficult to count how many -- what has saved him thus far has been his connections, and his late "fixer" Roy Cohn, combined with the fact that it is difficult to prove criminal intent to defraud, especially for Trump, who commits few things to paper and who trusts no one but himself and his family. Still, there is a preponderance of evidence that there have been many instances in which Trump knew he was not going to carry through on his own side of the contract, and refuse to make good his debts. He has also declared bankruptcy multiple times, in order to get out from under his creditors. Combine this with a private penchant for treating women as playthings, treating friends as disposable assets and treating others as less than human. I've seen him for decades, and I have come away despising the man, all without knowing his politics. For that matter, I'm not really sure Trump holds any political positions at all. He's so used to mouthing whatever he needs to say in order to get his "win" (the win is all he wants, he doesn't care if it's good or bad for anyone else. )
But whatever his politics, I maintain that Trump is not a good man, and not a trustworthy man. In short, Donald Trump is not someone I would trust as far as I could throw his building by the smoke coming out of it. So now we come to the second part of this : Trump's mental state.
In recent times, writer Michael Wolff has published a book in which he alleges that the bulk of Trump's White House staff go in fear of him, because he acts like an angry child -- one TV reporter characterized the situation as being like the little boy in the Twilight Zone episode It's a good life, in which Billy Mumy plays a little boy who has great powers but not much mental growth or stability. If you make him angry, he is likely to wish you into the cornfield. In the Wolff book, former Trump advisor and campaign steersman Steve Bannon asserts that Trump has "lost a step". There's also been considerable speculation in other circles -- mostly from anonymous White House leakers, that Trump suffers from "Sunsetting" where his mental state degrades as the day wears on. The implication of this is some sort of senility, or possible Alzheimer's disease. I'm not a physician psychiatrist or psychologist (although I have some training in the field.) so I cannot make a diagnosis -- especially at this distance from the subject. However, the fact that many, if not all of Trump's staff believe he is mentally incompetent serves as a warning sign that The President may indeed be a candidate for a 25th Amendment proceeding. Of course, it is also possible that this entire concept is being set up so that Trump has a mental disease or defect defense in the case he is brought up on charges. All we can do now is await developments.