Trump's Gone Mad

It seems plain to me just how crazy this president is. His lack of any sympathy for the Reiners was a tell. His 'surprise' at the new name of the Kennedy Center was another. The President is ill.

I would call it a sort of decay that sets in when a man of limitless appetites finally gets everything he wants. We saw it in the late-period love life of Murdoch, in the bloated final act of Harvey Weinstein, in the gilded decomposition of any number of titans who mistook the silence of their courtiers for the admiration of the world. The organism, unchecked, begins to consume itself.

This week, Donald Trump gave us a virtuoso performace of this particular madness.

Let us begin with the death of Rob Reiner — a man whose principal crime was directing “When Harry Met Sally” and voting Democratic. Reiner and his wife Michele were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home on Sunday, allegedly by their own son, a tragedy of almost Shakespearean dimensions. The bodies were barely cold when the President of the United States took to Truth Social to announce that Reiner had died from “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

A sitting president, informed that a prominent American and his wife had been murdered, concluded that they had it coming because they didn’t like him enough.

When given the opportunity to retract — the sort of off-ramp any halfway competent handler would have constructed — Trump barreled through it as he always does. “He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned,” he said from the Oval Office, speaking of himself in the third person, which is never a reassuring sign. “I thought he was very bad for our country.”

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene felt moved to note that “this is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.” When you’ve lost the woman who blamed California wildfires on Jewish space lasers, one might pause for reflection. Trump, of course, did not.

But the Reiner show was merely the amuse-bouche.

On Tuesday, Trump announced a naval blockade of Venezuela, which would be a significant act of war if anyone believed he understood what it meant. The blockade, he declared, would continue “until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

This would be alarming if Venezuela had, in fact, stolen American oil, land, or assets. It has not. There is no such theft in the historical record. The claim is not exaggerated or distorted; it is invented from whole cloth, like a child insisting the dog ate his homework when there is no dog and there was no homework. Stephen Miller, that pale Renfield to Trump’s Dracula, subsequently claimed that Venezuelan oil “belongs to Washington,” a statement that is false. A lie. A pretense to a more horrific reality they are soon to bring our way.

“Irrational,” the Venezuelan government called it, which is rather like calling the Hindenburg “a bit warm.”

The United States of America seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela in international waters.

Then came Wednesday’s primetime address to the nation, an 18-minute performance that conservative commentator Andrew Donaldson described as “rushing and angry” and said “reeked of fear.” Trump, one year into his second term, bellowed about the Biden administration as though the election were still ahead of him, insisted the economy was roaring while 36 percent of Americans approve of his handling of it, and claimed to have negotiated drug price cuts of “400, 500, and even 600 percent.”

For those keeping score at home: a 100 percent reduction makes something free. A 600 percent reduction would require pharmaceutical companies to pay you to take their medications. This is not economics. This is not even madness. It is the verbal flailing of a man who has heard numbers spoken aloud and decided to use bigger ones. And that is the entire calculous.

During this same address, Trump unveiled the “Warrior Dividend” — $1,776 for every service member, the amount chosen because, he explained, “our great nation was founded in that year.” The payment, he suggested, came from tariff revenues, a claim designed to make his trade wars look like Christmas bonuses rather than regressive taxes. In fact, as the administration quietly admitted the next day, the money came from a congressionally-approved housing supplement that troops were already entitled to receive. He had simply rebranded their own money and handed it to them with a bow.

The symbolism is almost too on the nose: taking what already belongs to others and stamping his name on it.

Which brings us to Thursday, when Trump’s hand-picked board at the Kennedy Center voted to rename the institution after him. By Friday at 12:30 PM — less than 24 hours later — workers on lifts had already bolted “The Donald J. Trump” in bronze letters above the original signage. Blue tarps concealed the work while it was underway. National Guard troops assembled nearby.

The speed tells you everything. You do not design, fabricate, and install four-foot bronze letters overnight. You do not mobilize work crews and security details on a moment’s notice unless the moment was scheduled long in advance. This was not a decision. It was a reveal. The “unanimous” vote — disputed by at least one board member who says she was muted when she tried to object — was theater, the rubber stamp applied to a fait accompli.

Federal law, passed in 1964, designates the Kennedy Center as a “living memorial” to an assassinated president and prohibits renaming it without an act of Congress. A 1983 amendment, signed by Ronald Reagan, bars additional memorials in the building’s public areas.

Trump ignored both. But then again, the law is meaningless to Trump - the felon.

“The Kennedy Center was named by law,” former House historian Ray Smock observed. “The Kennedy Center board is not a lawmaking entity. Congress makes laws.”

What are we watching, exactly? The question has become harder to answer as the weeks accumulate.

There is a school of thought that holds Trump has always been this way — that the vulgarity, the cruelty, the allergy to truth were present from the beginning, and we simply failed to take them seriously. This is partially correct but insufficient. Something has shifted. The first Trump administration, for all its chaos, maintained at least the pretense of institutional constraint. Aides leaked frantically to reporters. Lawyers resigned in protest. The machinery of government, creaky and compromised, still occasionally said no.

That machinery has been gutted. The board members who might have objected to renaming the Kennedy Center were purged months ago. The officials who might have questioned a naval blockade based on imaginary grievances have been replaced by loyalists who know better than to question anything. The feedback loop that once existed — however weakly — between Trump’s impulses and reality has been severed.

What remains is pure id.

The Rob Reiner episode is instructive not because it represents a new low — Trump’s lows are fractals, each containing infinite smaller lows — but because it reveals the psychology so nakedly. A man is murdered. The president’s first instinct is to make it about himself. His second instinct is to blame the victim. His third instinct is to double down when criticized. There is no fourth instinct. There is no reconsideration, no embarrassment, no moment of quiet human recognition that a family has been destroyed and perhaps this is not the time.

He cannot do it.

The muscle has atrophied, if it ever existed.

Trump, at 79, is disappearing into himself.

The Venezuela demands are not strategy; they are the noise a man makes when he wants to sound strong and has forgotten what strength requires. The Kennedy Center renaming is not legacy-building; it is a child writing his name on a wall because he cannot bear to occupy space without marking it. The primetime address was not persuasion; it was a man shouting at poll numbers that refuse to move, baffled that the old tricks have stopped working.

Even conservative Erick Erickson saw it clearly, comparing the Kennedy Center gambit to “third-world African kleptocracy.” Swap out Trump for Mugabe, he suggested, and the behavior is indistinguishable: the personalization of public institutions, the rubber-stamp boards, the courtiers who insist nothing has changed while the letters go up on the wall.

The week ended, as Trump’s weeks so often do, with the president surrounded by loyalists, headed toward another holiday of golf and adulation. Behind him, a murdered director’s family grieved while the president who’d mocked their loss prepared his Christmas cards. A Venezuelan government braced for a blockade justified by nothing. A Kennedy family watched their slain patriarch’s memorial get branded like a casino.

And somewhere, bronze letters gleamed in the winter light, spelling out a name that will, one day, come down. And they will come down.

But the fact remains that our president is…well…nuts. And pretending he is anything but serves none of us.