I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n
This is the point I now usually make first when Spaniards ask me about U.S. politics. I first questioned Trump\u2019s sanity while reading his Truth Social<\/a> feed and watching his June address<\/a> at Fort Bragg, grow ever more confident in my opinion. The world\u2019s most powerful human navigates life with a flickering pilot light, a busted compass.<\/p>\n Some mental health professionals have suggested<\/a> that Trump suffers dementia. I am unqualified to disagree, but the dementia symptoms described online<\/a> suggest a feeble, confused elder who struggles to communicate. That isn\u2019t Trump. He is charismatic, articulate, deftly fielded questions<\/a> in a recent Q&A on Air Force One. He is vastly more lucid than was Joe Biden in the final days of the last presidency.<\/p>\n But, I always thought of Biden (and every other president during my lifetime) as fundamentally sane. Heartless, perhaps, but sane. I doubt that Trump is.<\/p>\n Before he shamelessly hitched his cart to the Trump caravan, Ted Cruz gave a valuable interview<\/a> in 2016. From the 1:40 mark:<\/p>\n \u201cThis man [Trump] is a pathological liar. He doesn\u2019t know the difference between truth and lies, he lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying. … The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level, I don\u2019t think this country has ever seen. Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and goes, \u2018Dude, what\u2019s your problem?\u201d Everything in Donald\u2019s world is about Donald. And he combines being a pathological liar … and I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon, and one thing in the evening, all contradictory, and he\u2019d pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he\u2019s telling, at that minute, he believes it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n I also sense that he believes his lies. Trump insisted that the 2020 election had been \u2018stolen,\u2019 although his own attorney general dismissed these claims as \u2018idiotic<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018detached from reality<\/a>.\u2019 Trump claimed that Ukraine started the war<\/a> with Russia, despite Putin\u2019s 2014 invasion of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Only a few weeks ago, Trump implied a role by the \u201cBiden FBI<\/a>\u201d in the January 6, 2020 capitol riots, although Biden hadn\u2019t yet taken office and a \u201cBiden FBI\u201d couldn\u2019t then have existed.<\/p>\n A particularly telling example:<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s uncle was a professor at MIT. Among his uncle\u2019s MIT students, according to Trump: Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber serial killer. Trump said he asked his uncle<\/a> what kind of student Kaczynski had been. \u201cSeriously good,\u201d replied his uncle, in Trump\u2019s account. \u201cHe\u2019d go around correcting everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n Watch the clip. It has no political content, represents a fleeting pause in the artillery salvos between the parties. Trump is folksy, whimsical, down-to-earth, even charming, speaks without the lapses or blunders that a late-presidency Biden would have shown.<\/p>\n With only one problem:<\/p>\n The story can\u2019t possibly be true. Can\u2019t possibly. Trump\u2019s uncle died in 1985, eleven years before Kaczynski\u2019s identity became known. Further, Kaczynski never attended MIT.<\/p>\n Cruz also referred to the president\u2019s narcissism. Trump\u2019s Truth Social account is endlessly festooned with flattering images of the seventy-nine year old president. He posted an image of himself garbed as the pope<\/a>, re-posted a post declaring himself as second only to Jesus<\/a>. About forty minutes into his September speech<\/a> at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump mentioned his \u201cTrump was right about everything\u201d campaign cap after calling climate change \u201cthe greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,\u201d and added that, in fact, he had<\/em><\/strong> been right about everything.<\/p>\n Please look at this clip, too. Ask yourself: is it rational for the president of the United States to say such things at the United Nations to the assembled ambassadors of our planet\u2019s governments? That he has been \u201cright about everything,\u201d that he as a lay observer with no special knowledge of environmental science can airily dismiss repeatedly-verified<\/a> climate change as a \u2018con job?\u2019 Is it merely eccentric to make these statements, or something a lot more worrisome than eccentric?<\/p>\n Trump can be capable, presidential, more than ready to hold his own in negotiations with other world leaders. He is widely regarded as having bested Japan<\/a> and the European Union<\/a> in tariff negotiations, regardless of what one may think of the tariffs themselves. I remain ashamed of and disgusted by U.S. support for Israel, but Trump firmly took the reins<\/a> after Netanyahu went too far by bombing Qatar, forced Israel to cut a deal, however fragile and inadequate that deal is turning out to be. Give credit where credit is due.<\/p>\n Further, he has been through a lot. He speaks truthfully in saying that he needs no perk offered by the presidency. I believe he joined the presidential race in 2016 as a protest candidate<\/a>, was catapulted into the White House by the degeneracy of the mainstream Republican party. He has survived two assassination attempts. The Thomas Crooks bullet that clipped Trump\u2019s ear in 2024 certainly would have ended his life with a trajectory a few centimeters to the right. Such experiences will change a person.<\/p>\n But, every week gives me more reason to regard him as other than a wholly sane man.<\/p>\n I wonder if the European Union should politely humor Trump (when possible) and avoid a confrontation with an immensely powerful screwball.<\/p>\n Among NATO members, Spain\u2019s Pedro S\u00e1nchez showed courage<\/a> in resisting Trump\u2019s call for NATO members to increase military spending from two to five percent of GDP. The jump to five percent looks utterly arbitrary; why not four percent, or eight percent, or three percent? Further, Trump has threatened to use military force to annex Greenland<\/a>, the territory of a fellow NATO member. I\u2019m skeptical that he would honor any NATO commitment he didn\u2019t feel like honoring in a crisis.<\/p>\n Still, it might be wisest to play along, to follow Giorgia Meloni\u2019s apparent tactic of saying \u2018yes, your Highness\u2019 to everything, and then classifying obviously non-NATO<\/a> projects as military spending.<\/p>\n Trump is unlikely to pay serious attention to how much EU countries spend, as long as they don\u2019t publicly defy him and put on the royal dog when he visits Europe. Consider: earlier this year, Trump was involved in discussions to be the first post-World War II president to suspend habeas corpus<\/em><\/a>. But his Homeland Security secretary didn\u2019t know<\/a> what habeas corpus<\/em> is, and in a recent round table Trump seemed to have forgotten all about<\/a> both habeas corpus<\/em> and its possible suspension.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t armed forces need capable fighters with the know-how to use state of the art military hardware? Spain can provide them, through well-paid teachers in generously funded K-12 schools. A NATO military expense! Similar arguments can be used to fund transit and health care. S\u00e1nchez can apologize for past failures to recognize the wisdom of a president who (after all) is right about everything, then gracefully fob him off to Felipe VI for some sort of kingly pageantry, perhaps with the discreet suggestion that the commander-in-chief not be left alone with the king\u2019s daughters. How about a garden banquet at La Granja de San Ildefonso<\/a>, followed by an exclusive tour of the Granja tapestries<\/a>? The retinue could follow up with a visit to El Pardo<\/a>; Trump could sleep in Franco\u2019s bedroom. Franco was a big TV watcher, like Trump. Trump could channel surf with Franco\u2019s remote control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don\u2019t think so. This is the point I now usually make first when Spaniards ask me about U.S. politics. I first questioned Trump\u2019s sanity while reading his Truth Social feed and watching his June address at Fort Bragg, grow ever more confident in my opinion. The world\u2019s most powerful human navigates life with a… <\/p>\n
\n
\n