The Big Question – Should Donald Trump Be Allowed to Govern in a Crisis?

It’s no secret that I find the President to be, to put it mildly, a distasteful, arrogant, self-centered, mendacious, manipulative and incompetent president with an inability to generate empathy for others. Not that some or all of those characteristics are not uncommon among other world leaders throughout history, including US presidents. And frankly, Peter, even nasty personality traits are not sufficient to remove a sitting US president. Not enough to impeach… as if there were time to implement what has become, apparently, a futile gesture anyway. There is another path: Only when the damage of a president’s leadership is so grave, so aberrant or so impaired, that he or she simply cannot “discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as stated in Section 4 the fairly recent (1967) 25^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Trump has an innate ability to tell people what they want to hear, with a straight face, even when he knows (or should know) he is lying. 

Typically, removal of a president under Section 4 requires a severe medical reason or out-and-out insanity. It would require the Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet, all selected or appointed by Trump, to vote to remove him from office, a long shot given Trump’s approval ratings (49% generally, and 60% on his handling of the COVID-19 crisis according to a March 24^th Gallup Poll) and the proclivity to underplay the seriousness of the pandemic among Trump’s red state supporters. The unpopularity among red states of masses of blue state liberals (read: almost every major city in the United States, including in red states like Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, etc.), where the pandemic has and will continue to hit the hardest, makes Trump’s support of reopening the economy at the expense of keeping people safe and alive his calling card. Trump appears to be about Trump and little else.

Trump’s tweets on March 29^th were mostly about how his press briefings were generating astounding ratings on television, with parallel consumption in social media. “President Donald Trump boasted about his growing TV ratings on Sunday [3/29], while Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force warned that up to 200,000 Americans could die from COVID-19.

“Trump quoted an article from the New York Times that provided recent viewership statistics of his coronavirus press conferences. The article states that they have averaged 8.5 million viewers, roughly the same size as audiences for ABC’s ‘The Bachelor.’ Last Monday’s conference [3/23] drew nearly 12.2 million viewers, putting it on pace with ‘Monday Night Football.’” Variety.com, March 29^th.

Fauci also found himself on the receiving end of growing conspiracy theorists and others on the alt-right seeking to discredit him and purge him as a senior governmental advisor. Trump’s pronouncements were all they needed. To the President, the coronavirus pandemic was a media event to enhance his glowing and commanding visibility. New York was running out of medical supplies, as Trump’s braggadocio surged. Evidence of severe and dangerous megalomania? It would so appear to most rational thinkers. But not to his committed followers. But that’s now. Things change. People die. Even in red states.

First: Like it or not, most of the economic values, the state-of-the-art productivity in the hottest growth sectors, are in big cities. Red states depend on cities for tax dollars; blue states generally give more to the feds than they get, while the reverse is true for most red states. Cites fail, and the nation fails. Second: Not containing CV-19 anywhere pretty much assures that sooner or later it impacts every community in the United States, however isolated. The greatest concentrations of people will lead the pandemic, but CV-19 is an equal opportunity infector. Sooner or later. Third: viruses are governed by nature’s laws, not susceptible to being legislated or executive ordered away. Fourth: We call that science, understood and subject to new potential processes to alleviate the decimation that will be determined by that red state detested educated elite, scientists and healthcare professionals. 

Not politicians. Not pastors. An elite that includes the 800,000 American doctors (out of approximately 1.1 million physicians in the United States), so deeply concerned at the President’s arbitrary and premature April 12^th date (since extended to April 30^th by irrefutable evidence; still quite unrealistic) – when he hopes to begin to reopen the U.S. economy by relaxing the CDC guidelines on distancing, keeping non-essential businesses closed and sheltering-in-place – that they signed the letter at the end of this blog addressed to the President, the Vice President and White House CV-19 senior advisor, Dr. Deborah Birx.

At one level, we know that Donald Trump is running his administration to maximize his personal position, particularly his electability. He’s all but buried his likely November Democratic opponent’s, Joe Biden, visibility. See my March 29^th Read Anything About Joe Biden Recently? blog for the extreme details. Trump is all about the economy, his raison d’etre for reelection. So, telling people what they desperately want to hear – that this crisis is almost over, and their jobs and businesses will rebound fully in a couple of weeks – is his mantra, however false that may be. That a vast number of Americans will die as a result of his decisions does not appear to faze him.

Personally, I believe that the President’s megalomania has risen so fiercely of late that he may well be dangerously mentally ill in ways that can and will kill people. Do we have to wait until we pass the one-million-person infection rate? Two million? Ten million? Higher? What does the mortality rate have to get before we see the reality of his megalomania and its life and death impact?

Is megalomania actually considered mental disorder? Yes. According to the psychiatric standard-bearing, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 5 (the latest, known to most in the field simply as DSM-5), narcissism and megalomania are the same mental disorder.

Not everyone in the psychiatric/psychological profession agrees; many believe that megalomania is much more dangerous with potentially very severe consequences. “Narcissism is an exaggerated sense of self love while megalomania is an exaggerated sense of self-worth based on fantasies of power, attractiveness and other physical or psychological attributes and, therefore, all megalomaniacs are narcissists, but not all narcissists are megalomaniacs.” Psychology and Neuroscience Stack Exchange. Most folks know Donald Trump is a narcissist, even his followers. He seems to be a full-on megalomaniac now. So what?

When narcissism rises to megalomania in support of a notion of God-like “I can do no wrong” autocratic dictates in the hands of a man whose actions can now kill hundreds of thousands if not millions in his own country, when he prioritizes political revenge over saving lives, are there sufficiently responsible individuals in his cabinet, including the Vice President, willing to act to save their country… or is that just the way it goes? Will Trump’s decision rise to a recognition of some form of voluntary homicide… or is the nation beyond caring about that? History will not remember him well, but what about NOW?

I could spend pages listing all of the self-glorifying, scientifically false and shamelessly contradictory rhetoric from Donald Trump on this CV-19 outbreak. But everybody knows what these statements are and either continue to reinforce their anger, believe what he says as truth, or simply write off his misleading statements as hopeful exaggeration. Little things reinforce his “only I matter” persona, that it is always about his political perception. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported on March 26^th that the President is considering putting his name on all federal stimulus checks. If that is remotely true… That’s bad enough.

However, a recent reality, which I hope the President reverses, shows how he is punishing an entire state, teaching those voters that they need to oust their governor and fall in line under this strict direction, because of a personal feud with a Democratic governor in a swing state, a woman I might add: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Whitmer, speaking on Detroit radio station WWJ-AM on March 26^th, told the listeners that medical supply vendors had been told “not to send stuff” to Michigan needed in the struggle against CV-19. This terrifying reality seemed to be very much directed from the White House, because of a personal feud between Trump and the Governor, an outspoken critic in her belief that Trump’s CD-19 response is/was both inadequate and often misleading. She had attempted to speak with the President the day before, but he did not take her call.

“Whitmer told CNN later in the day that the state’s shipments of personal protective equipment are being ‘canceled’ or ‘delayed’ — and sent instead to the federal government. She said it’s happening to other states as well.

“Trump’s willingness to punish a state’s residents amid a pandemic over a feud with a governor appeared evident in a statement at his press briefing Friday [3/26]. The president said he had instructed Vice President Mike Pence, who heads up the president’s coronavirus task force, not to call the governors of Washington or Michigan. The two states have among the highest number of coronavirus cases in the nation, and Michigan is experiencing a dramatic spike in cases from 350 a week ago to nearly 3,000 Friday [3/26]… ‘I say, ‘Mike, don’t call ... the woman in Michigan. It doesn’t make any difference what happens,’ ’ Trump said.

“Whitmer told WWJ that she has been critical of the weak federal response to her state’s needs amid the fight against rising COVID-19 cases but that other governors have also complained about the lack of “federal preparation.” She complained earlier this week that the number of masks and gowns sent to her state by the federal government was barely enough to cover a single shift at a besieged hospital. The state hasn’t received a single ventilator despite a critical need… ‘I’ve been uniquely singled out,’ Whitmer said. ‘I don’t go into personal attacks. I don’t have time for that, I don’t have energy for that, frankly. All of our focus has to be on COVID-19 right now.’” Huffington Post, March 28^th. 

That the President is willing at all to put the lives of millions of Americans at risk, for intensely personal reasons that have nothing to do with the well-being of this nation, is sufficient evidence of a severe mental disorder that should give rise to removal from office under the 25^th Amendment. Even if he eventually reverses himself, the delay he engendered alone will kill people who might have otherwise survived had he cared more about them than his ego.

I should note an alarming coincidence: the only place where Trump actually ordered a corporate manufacturer to create equipment under the Defense Production Act was after a long-standing personal feud, with a woman, in Michigan. General Motors CEO, Mary Barra. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 26^th that the President is considering putting his name on all federal stimulus checks. If that is remotely true….

            I’m Peter Dekom, and while I doubt what needs to be done will be done, perhaps the leadership from the biggest states can replace the malignant self-serving power at the top of the federal government… a most necessary workaround to give American as safe as they can be.

The letter from 800,000 doctors noted above: