President Donald Trump told a Wall Street Journal reporter that he never has to worry about China doing something crazy like what Iran has done. As Trump explained, President Xi Jinping "respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy." One columnist is concerned that the president thinks this is a legitimate negotiation tactic.
Writing for the Washington Monthly on Wednesday, political commentator Bill Scher noted the forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, which comments that Trump knew he had a reputation of being "unhinged" during his first administration. In fact, at one point, he told his ambassador to the United Nations, "Make them think I'm crazy." He also told his attorney general, "Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet? Just the right amount of crazy."
Trump's post on Tuesday claimed that he was likely to wipe out an entire civilization. Loyalists will likely claim that the "dose of crazy once again did the trick," wrote Scher.
"Art of the deal, right? Wrong," he said, citing a comment from Rep. Jim McGovern, who noted that Trump's ceasefire basically achieved what he had before the bombing campaign, only now Iran is making more money.
"For the last six weeks, Trump didn’t just act crazy, he went crazy," Scher explained. "And he doesn’t have much to show for it beyond higher energy prices and a body count."
Having "just the right amount of crazy" isn't a rational negotiating tactic, but it was one deployed by former President Richard Nixon, said Scher, citing a conversation between him and aide H.R. "Bob" Haldeman during his campaign.
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace," said Nixon.
It didn't work for Nixon either. Scher recalled National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger playing "the crazy card" to end the U.S.'s war in Vietnam on favorable terms.
“Henry found the North Vietnamese absolutely intractable. They wouldn’t even negotiate” because they knew “the American people had turned against the war.” In turn, Nixon “would either have to proceed with his threat of force or take the opposite route completely, walk out.” As Trump would put it, they held all the cards.
Looking at Nixon and Trump is arguably a small "data pool," Scher conceded, "but the available evidence suggests that presidential adherents of Madman Theory are more mad than great theorists."
The columnist noted that he doesn't have the knowledge or training to know whether Trump is suffering from dementia, sociopathy, or a narcissistic personality disorder, but no one needs a specific diagnosis to see that something is wrong.
We can "recognize with our eyes and ears than he is not in a sound state of mind and should not be trusted with command of the United States military," said Scher.
He closed by encouraging those in Trump's Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, a process that would officially declare the president "unable to discharge" his duties and hand over power to Vice President JD Vance. As Scher said, however, "sycophants" aren't likely to turn on him. It's a sentiment former prosecutor Andrew Weismann explained that he agreed would never happen.
"But that should not stop the rest of us from sounding the alarm that Trump is manifestly unfit, that he’s a danger to the world, and that a Constitutional mechanism exists to end this nightmare," Scher closed.
