Robert Reich's Sober, Necessary Trump Post This Morning
He makes the case Trump is irrational and must be removed from office. Read it all.
Reich’s case is a good one. There are, as Politico writes this morning, many checks and balances left to us and many legal and legislative routes—-e.g. the 24th Amendment—to removing him. And it’s more than Susie Wiles’ notion that he has the president has an “alcoholic personality” that makes him believe he can do anything. But the truth is he can’t do anything and everything, but he can do the worst thing: he can launch a nuclear weapon without the permission of anyone: Congress can’t stop him. The Secretary of War—the godless Pete Hegseth—won’t stop him. And they CAN’T stop him. He needs no permission for this. One of my history professors, in discussing tyrants and the lure of the power of violence, said this:
It’s not just that power itself is an aphrodisiac: it’s that the power to kill with absolute authority and absolute impunity proves that you are above all human restraints. You’ve arrived: now you have the power of God, so that, the logic goes, makes you God.
Where this falls apart is that you still die. And Trump will die just like the rest of us. But maybe he doesn’t really get that.
All on his own, without any help from his rapidly degrading brain chemistry, he is a horrible, incredibly mean person. (See Klugman this morning, and like Klugman says, that matters.) Trump is off his rocker. He needs to be removed.
Trump’s cabinet is just as incompetent&grift prone as he is.
I don’t think they will put the country first
Trump, Miller, and Hegseth would all like to think that they are Nietzschean 'ubermenschen', but they aren't. They're not, though. In reality, they're all three the socially and personally inadequate and socially inadequate individuals who are obnoxious in themselves, with whom no one wants to be friends. We know that Trump has always aspired to be accepted by New York's wealthy social elite, and that they have always spurned him. Gaining the Presidency was, for him, a personal revenge on them for that rejection. And many of his most ardent supporters share that resentment and really do see him as their retribution (as he has put it) for the slights they have felt socially. Hence the so-called 'culture wars'.