November 29, 2017 11:15 AM UTC

Are We There Yet?

• 1 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Donald Trump has said — and done — a lot of wacky things in his first year in the White House, but he may have finally crossed the line and wandered into indefensible crazy town.

As Chris Cillizza writes for CNN while summing up an unusually-bizarre 48 hours for the Twitterer in Chief:

In the last few days Trump feels even more unmoored than usual. More erratic. More wild.

“Something is unleashed with him lately,” Times reporter Maggie Haberman said on CNN Wednesday morning. “I don’t know what is causing it, I don’t know how to describe it.”

If you’ve missed some of Trump’s, uh, “highlights” from the last two days, this CNN story will catch you up. The list is almost too much to include here, from re-tweeting a bunch of anti-Muslim videos and mocking Matt Lauer’s abrupt firing from “The Today Show,” to calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” during a gathering of Native American leaders. Trump is also denying the existence of the “Access Hollywood” tapes that he already apologized for, and doubling back on his old questions about whether Barack Obama is really an American citizen. He’s also insisting that he won a “majority of women” in the 2016 election, which isn’t even close to being true, and is being laughed at for an odd “empty chair stunt” that he attempted on Tuesday. We could go on and on…and we’re only talking about this week.

After 9/11, George W. Bush urged tolerance. Today, POTUS tweets antagonized an entire religion.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 29, 2017

Brian Klaas writes for CNN that Trump’s retweets of a series of anti-Muslim posts “must be the final straw.” Greg Sargent of the Washington Post writes that Trump “has come unhinged.”

Let’s circle back to Cillizza, who poses a very important, and uncomfortable, question: Is Donald Trump losing control? Trump supporters like to argue that he is some sort of masterful strategic genius…but…

But, what if he isn’t? What then? And what if there is no one around him willing or able to slow him down or exert a semblance of control?

These are not hypothetical questions given the way Trump has acted since returning from his Thanksgiving break. And they are not inconsequential ones either. We are talking about the man who is in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal in an increasingly fraught and tenuous world.

These are no longer questions that can be resigned to the trash heap of partisan politics. We can’t just shrug off this escalation of lunacy.