This is just to say …

I don’t often write about politics in this blog. My own beliefs are rather mainstream and inoffensive, on the whole. I tend to like politics as the negotiation of competing interests through compromise. But sometimes, there is something that just needs saying.

It has slowly dawned on me that we have been mistaking Donald Trump for quite some time now. I don’t know how many articles I’ve read or videos I’ve seen coming up with explanations of what Trump is really trying to do. Is he intent on creating a dictatorship? Is it world domination? Is it some clever means of manipulating the market to make himself even more rich? There are a dozen explanations put forward. Even his MAGA people don’t have a single explanation, and choose a Trump that fits their wishes. 

But I have come to the conclusion that seems to be the only one truly possible: Donald Trump is clinically insane. 

I know, we have all been saying he’s crazy for at least the past 10 years, but when we said that we didn’t really mean it. We were using a metaphor to explain the counterintuitive and counterproductive policy decisions he’s made, and the vomitation of lies that spew from his tongue. But I now mean that I think Trump is actually a madman. Spitgargling, foaming at the mouth crazy. The kind of crazy that would normally require a straitjacket  and padded room. That to attempt to understand why he does this or that is a fruitless task. There is nothing to understand. There is no secret meaning behind his policies. He is just insane, like Col Bat Guano in Dr. Strangelove. Stark, raving out of his mind. 

The scariest part of it all is the Republican congressmen and senators who line up behind him for their own craven reasons, often racist, or more often thinking they need to back up the crazy man in order to be re-elected. They repeat Trump’s crazy talk and attempt to explain “what he really means,” or, more often, just run away from town-hall meetings to avoid reasonable questions. 

It really hit me when I remembered Fritz Lang’s 1933 German film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which the famous master criminal, Dr. Mabuse (he’d been the subject of two earlier silent films by Lang) had been caught and declared insane and put in an asylum, where he wrote compulsively these scribbled nonsense notes that were smuggled out to his followers, who then used them to commit robberies, arsons, sabotage, etc. The images of Mabuse in his cell scribbling away with hysterical focus seem so much like Trump and his tweets. Both their utterances make little coherent sense. 

At one point, the police captain in the film talks about “Mabuse the criminal,” his ardent follower shoots back, “No, Mabuse the genius!” and describes admiringly how the “crimes” of the “brilliant” Mabuse will destroy a corrupt world. 

The film was banned by Joseph Goebbels, who proclaimed that The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was a menace to public health and safety and “showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence.” Which, of course, is exactly what his boss, Herr Hitler, had already done.

Lang himself explained, “The film was made as an allegory to show Hitler’s processes of terrorism. Slogans and doctrines of the Third Reich have been put into the mouths of criminals in the film. Thus I hoped to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything which is precious to a people. … Then, when everything collapsed and they were thrown into utter despair, they would try to find help in the ‘New order’.”

Sound familiar? 

And so, I am now of the mind that Trump has no grand scheme, cryptic plan, overall policy design, but rather is a lunatic spouting inanities and non-sequiturs and a portion of the electorate suffering what they see as grievance follow him, hoping for relief, and far worse, a cadre of lawmakers who use the ravings to further their own careers. 

I hope by posting this, and having others make similar observations, we may finally reach a tipping point where the obvious insanity no longer goes normalized, and the tide shifts.

Still, it all makes me even more depressed about what is to come.