Sleepy Donald slips into second year amid chaos and concerns about his mental health

News and views of concern to Floridians and all Americans

Today marks the anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. When he took the oath of office this time last year, he was the oldest person ever to do so, even older than President Biden whom Trump ridiculed as “Sleepy Joe.”

Which, as we know now, was likely a bit of what psychologists call “projection” given the numerous instances of Trump nodding off during meetings in his current term.

But age isn’t really the primary issue of concern with Trump. It’s his state of mind.

Volumes have been written about his personality defects including an open letter by more than 200 health professionals who diagnosed him as a malignant narcissist.

What does that mean, exactly? Here’s a definition:

A malignant narcissist is an extreme personality type combining traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) with antisocial and sadistic tendencies, characterized by grandiosity, lack of empathy, cruelty, manipulation, paranoia, and aggression, enjoying others' suffering and seeking power through domination.

Were I writing a novel in which I wanted to cast a madman as one of the characters, this would be a great checklist of personality traits to exploit.

Indeed, if we wanted to beat this to death, we could take each of those characteristics and pair them with Trump’s actions through all of his first term and the first quarter of his current term and find countless examples.

We all know this.

But his recent letter to the prime minister of Norway, pouting that since he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he no longer cares so much about peace, has rung alarm bells in both the medical community and Congress.

The letter was a threat. It was an illogical rationalization for why he’s entitled to invade Greenland.

Here are Trump’s words, which he insisted be shared with leaders throughout Europe as a warning:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

The reaction to his madness has alarmed both sides of the Atlantic. Here at home, Rep. Yassamin Ansair of Arizona said:

“The president of the United States is extremely mentally ill and it’s putting all of our lives at risk. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason—we need to invoke it immediately,”

Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Eric Swalwell of California also jumped in, agreeing it is time to invoke the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove Trump.

And former Vice President Dick Cheney’s physician, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, urged a congressional inquiry into Trump’s mental health. In a post on Twitter (currently known as X), he wrote:

“This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”

This has always been one of the great vulnerabilities of democracies: Any lunatic can run for office, and, as Abraham Lincoln famously noted:

“You can fool some of the people all of the time…”

The question I would hope those who voted for Trump would be asking themselves now is pretty straightforward:

Do you feel better about our nation’s state of affairs today than you did a year ago?

I certainly don’t.

How would you answer that question?

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Meme of the Day

He said it:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,”

— Donald Trump to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store. (Note: The country of Norway does not award the Nobel Prizes.)

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