On Easter Sunday, President Donald Trump posted on social media that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day,” extending his threat to destroy civilian infrastructure in Iran. “Open the F——in' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!,” wrote the president, signing off with “Praise be to Allah.”
“I did a double-take and had to make sure that it was real,” said New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Monday. “The President of the United States of America actually said this."
This, said Bouie, is not merely a threat to commit war crimes, but a sign that Trump has “completely lost his mind.”
“When I say things like I think the president is insane,” he elaborated, “like I think he’s lost his mind, like I think he’s delusional, I know some people chalk that up to a Trump Derangement Syndrome — as if it’s unreasonable to be deranged about Trump. When I use those words, however, I am not actually exaggerating. Those words are descriptive. The president is out of his mind.”
According to Bouie, Trump’s “degraded mind” is not just evidenced by his erratic proclamations, but by his decision to attack Iran in the first place, saying that he was “easily taken advantage of” by the war hawks in his orbit. But now that the war is going so badly for the U.S., Trump is cornered and desperate.
“There’s no one to bail him out as there has been throughout his entire life, including his previous presidency, when he’s made mistakes,” said Bouie. With so many lives lost and so much damage done, there’s no way he can unilaterally end the situation. “He’s created a new world and he has to live in it. And because the president finds that intolerable, on a basic psychological level, he is so clearly deteriorating, going beyond his normal madness to something genuinely scarier.”
Unable to achieve what he wants, Trump is now threatening war crimes. And Bouie wonders how far the president is willing to go down that path.
“Knowing his thirst for violence…I feel it is irresponsible not to talk about the possibility that they’re talking about something beyond just bigger bombs,” said Bouie, suggesting that Trump could use nuclear weapons. “I am very disturbed by all of this. I find this quite frightening.”
Bouie points out that in a functional political system, there would be remedies for removing a president who is so obviously “deranged,” and that the U.S. in fact has such remedies.
“But the Republican Party has no interest in making the remedy work,” Bouie argued. “They don’t care about the consequences. I’m sure some of them fully support the president’s delusions and desire to commit mass murder,” but the real reason they won’t take action “is just simple cowardice. So they are abdicating their constitutional duty. If they really cared about this country, if they cared about the lives that will be lost if he’s in power, they would remove him as soon as possible.”
That, fears Bouie, is unlikely.
“So we’re stuck with a president who has lost his mind,” he concluded. “If he ever had it in the first place.”
