The Madness of President Trump

After barely six weeks into his second term in the White House as America’s 47^th President, Donald Trump and his cronies in his new administration seem to have sent the world spinning off its axis.

In a whirlwind of Executive Orders, appointments, sackings, and demonstrably false and misleading statements, he has managed to offend and dismay almost everybody outside his band of simpering acolytes and that part of the American electorate that voted for him.

Just look at his increasingly deranged foreign policy ‘initiatives’, for example. In short order he has advocated that the USA should take back control of the Panama Canal, ordered the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, should absorb Canada into the US as the 51^st state, plus he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark.

And, in the daddy of them all, he has suggested “taking, not buying” the Gaza Strip, expelling all its inhabitants to Egypt and Jordan (without the agreement of their respective governments), levelling what remains of it, and rebuilding it as the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. Trump Gaza if you like.

If these were the meandering fantasies of anyone else they might be amusing, and no doubt a tad irritating. But they are in reality the wild-eyed musings of the leader of the world’s major superpower and the Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces. This is very worrying.

All of which has, unsurprisingly, led to speculation that Trump may not be a well man. Former employee and associate Andrew Scaramucci has said as much quite openly and declared that his former boss is clearly unwell. Numerous mental health experts have also suggested that Trump has displayed “an assortment of personality problems, including grandiosity, a lack of empathy, and ‘malignant narcissism‘”, and that he has a “dangerous mental illness”.

While it has been repeatedly claimed that they have broken the American Psychiatrists’ Association’s Goldwater rule, which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give professional opinions about public figures without examining them in person – which is never going to happen – they have suggested that his mental state presents a real danger.

If it does become increasingly clear that he is, to use the correct medical technical term, off his trolley, then who is going to step in, inform him so, and replace him in office? Certainly none of his forelock-tugging loyal appointees like Vance or Hegseth, that’s for sure.

So there’s the conundrum; if the President is at some point found to be indeed “mad”, what happens next? Military coup? Armed insurrection? And if he were to be removed from office some time over the next four years, we might end up with Vance in his place. God help us all!

Lt Col Stuart Crawford is a defence analyst and former army officer. Sign up for his podcasts and newsletters at www.DefenceReview.uk

Lt Col Stuart Crawford’s latest book Tank Commander (Hardback) is available now

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