Is Trump Crazy Like a Fox or Plain Old Crazy?
Gail Collins: Bret, I’ve had a lot of these conversations over the years, but I cannot remember ever starting one by asking whether you think the president is off his rocker. In the real, mentally ill sense.
Bret Stephens: Um, was he ever on his rocker, Gail?
Look, I’ve gone back and forth on this question. If you look up old interviews he conducted 20 or 30 years ago (check out this video of his testimony to a congressional committee in 1991), what you find is a much more coherent thinker and verbally acute speaker than the man he is today. I’m not expert enough to say at what point mental decline slides into senility or dementia, but there’s clearly been a decline.
Gail: Agree. But a lot of that is just arrogance. If you’d told the younger Donald Trump he was a future president of the United States, I doubt he’d have bothered to be coherent back then, either.
Plus in that congressional testimony he was reading prepared remarks, which always work better for him. Only problem is now he’s so full of himself he can’t stick to the script.
Bret: There’s also the matter of his emotional state. Again, I’m in no position to make a diagnosis but I’m not alone in suspecting that he meets most of the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. And the frequently unhinged and spasmodic tweets suggests a guy who isn’t in control of himself.
Continue reading the main story
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RECENT COMMENTS
FGPalaco 52 minutes ago
In Trumplandia, Gail & Brett are to the NYTimes like Chuck & Nancy are to the U.S. Senate. PSDon’t forget the timeless wisdom of the...
EEE 53 minutes ago
wrong question.... the answer is he's EVIL.....
Been There 53 minutes ago
Both. Trump clearly is a sociopath suffering from narcissistic personality disorders who pathologically and intentionally employs lying to...
Then again, some of his tweets are slyly funny. He has a capacity for answering questions in a reasonably coherent way. And there’s no getting away from the purely instrumental benefits he derives with his seemingly insane tweets. He baits his critics. He delights his fans. And he debases the currencies of civility and normal politics to the point where we are all sinking to his level.
Gail: One part of the disconnect in his behavior is longstanding. He always was a guy who could sit down with people who were in theory his adversaries and be very pleasant and agree with everything they said. And then walk away as if it had never happened. So now we see Trump with the Democrats, having dinner and toasting the Dreamers, and then the next day he’s screaming about them being soft on immigration and weak on crime.
He’s also always had a problem remembering inconvenient facts. But if we’re now dealing with a guy who seriously believes that the voice on that “Access Hollywood” tape is not really his, that’s super scary.
Bret: I doubt he really believes that. Or rather, this is a guy whose entire career has been dedicated to two timeless propositions. First, that there’s a sucker born every minute. Second, that the truth is whatever he can get away with.
Whether he’s crazy or not, it’s important for his opponents to presume he isn’t. His behavior has a certain pattern, and those patterns can be politically effective. Speaking of which, what do you make of his latest claim that the F.B.I.’s reputation is “in tatters”?
Gail: Bottom line: never a good plan for a president to denounce the F.B.I. Also, when he starts yowling that James Comey was helping Hillary Clinton, I just sort of fall off a mental cliff.
One of the ironies of the last week has been the way Trump’s behavior managed to almost completely obliterate attention on the big tax bill. Which I guess is going to become law.
Can we take a short break from the mental health of our chief executive to talk about it? What do you think?
Bret: I know we’re all supposed to be passionate about it, one way or another, but I’m reserving judgment. This is another “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” kind of deal of the sort that Republicans complained so bitterly about during the Obamacare debate.
Gail: The scene was indeed very similar in a number of ways to the Obamacare finale. However, I feel impelled to point out that the health care bill had tons of public hearings and committee meetings. There seems to be a rule in this Congress that the more important the bill, the more you have to hide it from the public. Even the concealed-carry gun bill that’s zooming through the House never got a public hearing.
But go ahead, about taxes —
Bret: That’s true. We are in white-water rapids legislative territory here. But about this bill. Things I like: A lower corporate tax rate and a vehicle for repatriating capital back to the United States. Generally lower tax rates for all income brackets. A higher alternative minimum tax threshold. The opening of Alaskan hinterlands for oil and gas drilling. The tax break on (usually small) “pass through” companies. The increase in the child tax credit. The near elimination of the estate tax, which I’ve always considered immoral.
Things I don’t: the possibility of a fourth tax bracket, which could push tax rates above 50 percent for people who live in places like, er, Manhattan. The elimination of the health insurance mandate, which I might have supported in a broader health care reform but seems like a way of gutting the current system without reforming it. The “Harvard tax” on large university endowments, which may have the satisfaction of sticking it to liberals but damages great universities that are crown jewels of our society.
Look, most of our readers aren’t going to agree with me on any of this. But the markets on which many of our readers depend through their IRAs and 401(k)s are cheering. And all that corporate profitability will work its way through a private economy that seems to be booming again.
Gail: The thing that scares me most — and I could not be more surprised this is my big worry — is the way the bill sends the deficits skyrocketing. Normally, deficits do not figure on my list of top 50 concerns.
But I have two great fears. One is that the economy is going to become seriously overheated. We already have a very low unemployment rate, a shortage of new immigrant families to expand the younger population, and a stock market that’s hitting historic peaks every day, much to our president’s delight. I’m afraid a new surge — fueled by the government spending money — is going to pop the bubble and push us toward a really mean recession.
The other is that Republicans are already looking at said deficit, licking their chops and preparing to cut entitlements. You’ve already got the president talking about how “we’re looking very strongly at welfare reform.” By which he presumably means those two huge programs he swore he’d never touch during the election.
But then we’ve already pretty much agreed that nothing Donald Trump says counts for anything.
Bret: We have got to be careful about calling Social Security benefits an “entitlement,” as readers sometimes remind us. We paid for them, after all.
Gail: Yeah, that’s why we’re entitled. But I take your point. Go ahead.
Brent: I guess it all depends on what kind of reform we get. We have a system that expected us to die in our 60s that’s now overstretched as we live into our 80s. That will need to change somehow and better to do it before we reach a crisis.
Gail: Yeah, we’ve really let the government down with all this … living.
I vote for a long-term fix by raising the current cap on payroll taxes. But that can be a debate for another time. Go ahead.
Bret: On the economy overheating and combusting, well, we haven’t had a recession for almost eight years, so we are overdue. On the other hand, we had a very slow and weak recovery, so I’m not complaining about sustained 3 percent growth after all these years. The truth is: Nobody knows when the next recession will hit, or how hard it would be (and anyone who claims to is a liar).
What I do know is that if the economy does do well, Trump will claim, and the G.O.P., will get, the credit. And I don’t see Democrats taking that politically into account. Too many eggs in the impeachment basket, methinks. Which makes me wonder: Where do you think Robert Mueller and the Russia investigation go from here?
Gail: I am sad to admit that Mueller doesn’t confide in me. Obviously, there’s a lot of evidence about people in the Trump campaign talking with the Russians when they shouldn’t have, about everything from the Obama sanctions to Israel. But the big issue is whether the investigation provides evidence that the Russians conspired with the Trump campaign to influence the outcome of our election. It seems pretty clear to me they did, but proving it is another matter.
Certainly something to look forward to in the new year. What’s your bet?
Bret: The cover-up is usually the crime, and with Trump’s tweet suggesting he knew Flynn had lied to the F.B.I, and now his desperate backpedaling, we have what seems to me a clear-cut case of obstruction of justice, assuming you don’t believe the president is ipso facto above the law.
Gail: Good old obstruction of justice.
Bret: I don’t think anyone really knows whether there was collusion during the campaign, but that’s why we’ve empowered a special counsel to find out. My conservative friends keep saying that this is a fishing expedition and that Mueller should be fired because he’s “too close” to the F.B.I. Why don’t we just let him do his job?
Here is what we know. The former national security adviser lied to the F.B.I. He appears to have been directed to make contact with the Russians by the president’s son-in-law, who may have been speaking on his father-in-law’s behalf. One former campaign aide who lied to the F.B.I. appeared to have no role in the campaign other than to establish contacts with the Russians. The former campaign chairman was, at a minimum, vulnerable to Russian blackmail on account of his allegedly illicit business ties with a corrupt Ukrainian president. The president of the United States kept bending over backward to make nice to Vladimir Putin and does so to this day. This president also had longstanding ambitions to do business in Russia. The president’s son held a meeting with Russian figures in hopes of finding dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Fire? Maybe not. But we are dying of smoke inhalation.
Gail: Plus we know from an upcoming book written by two more of his former aides that Trump inhaled enough fast food every day to clog the arteries of a rhinoceros. Bottom line, Bret, is we’re going to be having a whole lot of interesting discussions as move into 2018. If the smoke doesn’t get to us first.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/opinion/is-trump-crazy-like-a-fox-or-plain-old-crazy.html
Gail Collins: Bret, I’ve had a lot of these conversations over the years, but I cannot remember ever starting one by asking whether you think the president is off his rocker. In the real, mentally ill sense.
Bret Stephens: Um, was he ever on his rocker, Gail?
Look, I’ve gone back and forth on this question. If you look up old interviews he conducted 20 or 30 years ago (check out this video of his testimony to a congressional committee in 1991), what you find is a much more coherent thinker and verbally acute speaker than the man he is today. I’m not expert enough to say at what point mental decline slides into senility or dementia, but there’s clearly been a decline.
Gail: Agree. But a lot of that is just arrogance. If you’d told the younger Donald Trump he was a future president of the United States, I doubt he’d have bothered to be coherent back then, either.
Plus in that congressional testimony he was reading prepared remarks, which always work better for him. Only problem is now he’s so full of himself he can’t stick to the script.
Bret: There’s also the matter of his emotional state. Again, I’m in no position to make a diagnosis but I’m not alone in suspecting that he meets most of the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. And the frequently unhinged and spasmodic tweets suggests a guy who isn’t in control of himself.
Continue reading the main story
The Conversation
With Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Sex Scandal
NOV 21
The Violence That Never Sleeps
NOV 6
You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream for Tax Cuts
OCT 24
Our Stupid Gun Debate
OCT 10
It’s Donald Trump’s World. You and I Just Live Here.
SEP 26
See More »
RECENT COMMENTS
FGPalaco 52 minutes ago
In Trumplandia, Gail & Brett are to the NYTimes like Chuck & Nancy are to the U.S. Senate. PSDon’t forget the timeless wisdom of the...
EEE 53 minutes ago
wrong question.... the answer is he's EVIL.....
Been There 53 minutes ago
Both. Trump clearly is a sociopath suffering from narcissistic personality disorders who pathologically and intentionally employs lying to...
Then again, some of his tweets are slyly funny. He has a capacity for answering questions in a reasonably coherent way. And there’s no getting away from the purely instrumental benefits he derives with his seemingly insane tweets. He baits his critics. He delights his fans. And he debases the currencies of civility and normal politics to the point where we are all sinking to his level.
Gail: One part of the disconnect in his behavior is longstanding. He always was a guy who could sit down with people who were in theory his adversaries and be very pleasant and agree with everything they said. And then walk away as if it had never happened. So now we see Trump with the Democrats, having dinner and toasting the Dreamers, and then the next day he’s screaming about them being soft on immigration and weak on crime.
He’s also always had a problem remembering inconvenient facts. But if we’re now dealing with a guy who seriously believes that the voice on that “Access Hollywood” tape is not really his, that’s super scary.
Bret: I doubt he really believes that. Or rather, this is a guy whose entire career has been dedicated to two timeless propositions. First, that there’s a sucker born every minute. Second, that the truth is whatever he can get away with.
Whether he’s crazy or not, it’s important for his opponents to presume he isn’t. His behavior has a certain pattern, and those patterns can be politically effective. Speaking of which, what do you make of his latest claim that the F.B.I.’s reputation is “in tatters”?
Gail: Bottom line: never a good plan for a president to denounce the F.B.I. Also, when he starts yowling that James Comey was helping Hillary Clinton, I just sort of fall off a mental cliff.
One of the ironies of the last week has been the way Trump’s behavior managed to almost completely obliterate attention on the big tax bill. Which I guess is going to become law.
Can we take a short break from the mental health of our chief executive to talk about it? What do you think?
Bret: I know we’re all supposed to be passionate about it, one way or another, but I’m reserving judgment. This is another “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” kind of deal of the sort that Republicans complained so bitterly about during the Obamacare debate.
Gail: The scene was indeed very similar in a number of ways to the Obamacare finale. However, I feel impelled to point out that the health care bill had tons of public hearings and committee meetings. There seems to be a rule in this Congress that the more important the bill, the more you have to hide it from the public. Even the concealed-carry gun bill that’s zooming through the House never got a public hearing.
But go ahead, about taxes —
Bret: That’s true. We are in white-water rapids legislative territory here. But about this bill. Things I like: A lower corporate tax rate and a vehicle for repatriating capital back to the United States. Generally lower tax rates for all income brackets. A higher alternative minimum tax threshold. The opening of Alaskan hinterlands for oil and gas drilling. The tax break on (usually small) “pass through” companies. The increase in the child tax credit. The near elimination of the estate tax, which I’ve always considered immoral.
Things I don’t: the possibility of a fourth tax bracket, which could push tax rates above 50 percent for people who live in places like, er, Manhattan. The elimination of the health insurance mandate, which I might have supported in a broader health care reform but seems like a way of gutting the current system without reforming it. The “Harvard tax” on large university endowments, which may have the satisfaction of sticking it to liberals but damages great universities that are crown jewels of our society.
Look, most of our readers aren’t going to agree with me on any of this. But the markets on which many of our readers depend through their IRAs and 401(k)s are cheering. And all that corporate profitability will work its way through a private economy that seems to be booming again.
Gail: The thing that scares me most — and I could not be more surprised this is my big worry — is the way the bill sends the deficits skyrocketing. Normally, deficits do not figure on my list of top 50 concerns.
But I have two great fears. One is that the economy is going to become seriously overheated. We already have a very low unemployment rate, a shortage of new immigrant families to expand the younger population, and a stock market that’s hitting historic peaks every day, much to our president’s delight. I’m afraid a new surge — fueled by the government spending money — is going to pop the bubble and push us toward a really mean recession.
The other is that Republicans are already looking at said deficit, licking their chops and preparing to cut entitlements. You’ve already got the president talking about how “we’re looking very strongly at welfare reform.” By which he presumably means those two huge programs he swore he’d never touch during the election.
But then we’ve already pretty much agreed that nothing Donald Trump says counts for anything.
Bret: We have got to be careful about calling Social Security benefits an “entitlement,” as readers sometimes remind us. We paid for them, after all.
Gail: Yeah, that’s why we’re entitled. But I take your point. Go ahead.
Brent: I guess it all depends on what kind of reform we get. We have a system that expected us to die in our 60s that’s now overstretched as we live into our 80s. That will need to change somehow and better to do it before we reach a crisis.
Gail: Yeah, we’ve really let the government down with all this … living.
I vote for a long-term fix by raising the current cap on payroll taxes. But that can be a debate for another time. Go ahead.
Bret: On the economy overheating and combusting, well, we haven’t had a recession for almost eight years, so we are overdue. On the other hand, we had a very slow and weak recovery, so I’m not complaining about sustained 3 percent growth after all these years. The truth is: Nobody knows when the next recession will hit, or how hard it would be (and anyone who claims to is a liar).
What I do know is that if the economy does do well, Trump will claim, and the G.O.P., will get, the credit. And I don’t see Democrats taking that politically into account. Too many eggs in the impeachment basket, methinks. Which makes me wonder: Where do you think Robert Mueller and the Russia investigation go from here?
Gail: I am sad to admit that Mueller doesn’t confide in me. Obviously, there’s a lot of evidence about people in the Trump campaign talking with the Russians when they shouldn’t have, about everything from the Obama sanctions to Israel. But the big issue is whether the investigation provides evidence that the Russians conspired with the Trump campaign to influence the outcome of our election. It seems pretty clear to me they did, but proving it is another matter.
Certainly something to look forward to in the new year. What’s your bet?
Bret: The cover-up is usually the crime, and with Trump’s tweet suggesting he knew Flynn had lied to the F.B.I, and now his desperate backpedaling, we have what seems to me a clear-cut case of obstruction of justice, assuming you don’t believe the president is ipso facto above the law.
Gail: Good old obstruction of justice.
Bret: I don’t think anyone really knows whether there was collusion during the campaign, but that’s why we’ve empowered a special counsel to find out. My conservative friends keep saying that this is a fishing expedition and that Mueller should be fired because he’s “too close” to the F.B.I. Why don’t we just let him do his job?
Here is what we know. The former national security adviser lied to the F.B.I. He appears to have been directed to make contact with the Russians by the president’s son-in-law, who may have been speaking on his father-in-law’s behalf. One former campaign aide who lied to the F.B.I. appeared to have no role in the campaign other than to establish contacts with the Russians. The former campaign chairman was, at a minimum, vulnerable to Russian blackmail on account of his allegedly illicit business ties with a corrupt Ukrainian president. The president of the United States kept bending over backward to make nice to Vladimir Putin and does so to this day. This president also had longstanding ambitions to do business in Russia. The president’s son held a meeting with Russian figures in hopes of finding dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Fire? Maybe not. But we are dying of smoke inhalation.
Gail: Plus we know from an upcoming book written by two more of his former aides that Trump inhaled enough fast food every day to clog the arteries of a rhinoceros. Bottom line, Bret, is we’re going to be having a whole lot of interesting discussions as move into 2018. If the smoke doesn’t get to us first.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/opinion/is-trump-crazy-like-a-fox-or-plain-old-crazy.html
