Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
It was the cringiest of times. It was the craziest of times.
Welcome to a moment in which one of the most consequential debates Americans (and people the world across) are having is about whether the President of the United States is just a national embarrassment or has full-on blown a gasket. Is Donald Trump just three fries short of a happy meal, or is he full-on howling-at-the-moon mad?
One senior official in the last Trump administration told the Daily Beast of presidential appearances in the past few days that Trump “has definitely lost a step.”
With respect to one of those appearances, Trump’s meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell offered a similar observation, arguing that the president is “clearly off his game.” Like leaders in other recent presidential meetings, Carney “both humbled and humiliated Trump at the same time without Donald Trump having the slightest idea it was happening,” O’Donnell said, labeling Trump’s oft-repeated proposal that the U.S. annex Canada as “demented.”
That’s a sentiment that many others have also suggested in response to presidential initiatives—from seizing the Panama Canal to watching a TV movie about Alcatraz and hours later suggesting the decrepit prison facility, which has been closed for more than 60 years, should be reopened.
Each day we are forced to ask anew, and with more urgency, whether Trump is just an ignorant buffoon not up to the job or whether he is what they might have in the old days called catawampus, past-it, mentally unwell or even broken. How would you categorize the assertion that he doesn’t know whether he is obligated to uphold the Constitution? Has he gone completely Mad King?
Do his top advisers slather him with praise in ways that would make Kim Jong Un blush because Trump is just an egomaniac who needs to be surrounded by fluffers? Or is it something worse than that? Is he so fragile they fear the consequences if they don’t slide on the knee pads and polish his balls until they shine like the rest of his cheeseball throne room?
And what do the choices he has made about his team of top advisers say about him? Some have clearly been chosen simply because they will follow him blindly. It’s why Marco Rubio gets an additional job every week. Recent performances in front of Congressional committees reveal that others really are just the emptiest of vessels—see for example Kristi Noem (who was this week fileted like a haddock by Senator Chris Murphy over her mismanagement at DHS) or Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who has been more out of touch than the radio silence-paralyzed air-traffic controllers who work for him. Putting a wrestling executive who doesn’t know the difference between artificial intelligence and a steak sauce in charge of the future of education in America is just demented.
But other choices Trump has made represent something much worse—something warped and dangerous. They seem to have been made with the intent of doing actual damage to the United States. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tops that list. (In a particularly dark irony given the subject of this article, among the areas where Kennedy is embracing the looniest ideas and doing the most damage is mental health, as Norm Ornstein and I discussed on our “Words Matter” podcast this week.) He’s nuts. Picking him was nuts.
RFK Jr. is a man who may actually be, among 360 million Americans, the very worst possible choice to head our department of health and human services.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
But crazy begets crazy, and this week we have seen how it is compounded atop our government in many ways. One such example comes courtesy of RFK Jr., whose first choice for surgeon general, Janette Nesheiwat, flamed out because she may have misrepresented her credentials. Nesheiwat was immediately replaced by a new nominee who doesn’t actually have a license to practice medicine and is an anti-vaxx peddler of meshuga medical theories.
Then consider Trump’s right-wing extremist choice to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, whose nomination crashed and burned because of crumbling GOP support. Trump decided the right person to replace him was Fox News legal commentator Jeanine Pirro, a woman whose own producer at Fox called her “nuts” too.
Trump must also think Americans are “nuts,” and not just because his policies are driving us so. How else to interpret his demonstrating that he has no idea how global trade works? How else to explain the threats to invade Greenland, or the recent decision to shift intelligence assets to back up his bonkers threats?
Sure, it’s hardly important whether the woman at his side is the real first lady or an inflatable HOV lane dummy. But when it’s someone deranged like Laura Loomer or a sociopath like Stephen Miller who plays along with the president’s own bats--t impulses to advance their own dangerous interests, it matters. Because sane or not (and he’s definitely not), when Miller says they’re “looking at” suspending habeas corpus, it is a gravely serious matter.
When Trump is getting personnel advice from other folks who seem certifiable, like right-wing “influencer” Laura Loomer (second from right) who this week declared the newly chosen Pope Leo XIV to be a “woke Marxist,” it a sign of something several degrees worse than presidential incompetence.Win McNamee/Getty Images
And working tirelessly to destroy our environment, our economy, our system of justice, our national defenses, and our democracy? Working to do it each and every day? Working to do it regardless of the law or the consequences for future generations of Americans? That’s not just a guy who’s off his feed.
We can, of course, further debate which is crazier: Trump’s behavior or electing a guy like him in the first place. In fact, the problems began with his election and will not end until he is stopped by time or by checks and balances in our system or by the electorate.
But there is also a more chilling possibility that we should not rule out. It is also possible that every bad hire, every profoundly destructive policy initiative, every toxic choice made by Trump is not in fact due to mental defect but, on the contrary, is intentional. That it is consciously thought out and well-executed, part of a plan with the clear intent of destroying our systems as we have known them and further empowering our enemies at home and abroad.
That’s not as funny as the late-night comedian jokes about our slumped, spray-tanned, reality TV windbag president. But it—the possibility that Trump is just the goofy, greedy, generally reprehensible superannuated hand puppet of others whose agenda he is being used to advance—is also, of all the possibilities we may consider for the off-the-rails performance of this government, by far the most likely.
Social media users are accusing President Donald Trump of photoshopping an image he posted of a tattoo on deported dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s hand that the president argued represented the MS-13 gang.
“This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday. “They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles.”
Trump argued that Abrego Garcia has “MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles.”Truth Social/Donald Trump
The post included an image of Trump holding up a photo of a man’s fist with four symbols, each accompanied by a tiny label: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull. Above each symbol appeared the characters “M,” “S,” “1″, and “3.”
Trump has defied orders from a federal court and the Supreme Court to bring Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland father of three, back to America after he was accidentally deported to a megaprison in El Salvador without due process. Trump has refused, pushing the unsubstantiated claim that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Now, online sleuths are pointing out that both the labels and the characters were digitally added to the photo Trump posted—they aren’t actually part of the tattoo. They argue that by leaving that info out, Trump was trying to mislead the public.
“Trump has posted a fake picture of Abrego Garcia’s hand where they have photoshopped letters spelling MS-13 on his upper knuckles,” wrote user @RachelBitecofer. “Here is the original. It’s spreading all over MAGA media.”
User @LindaIHiggins made a similar point, writing: “Hey Old Man, @realDonaldTrump, have someone teach you about Photoshop. This is an excellent example of altering a photo, in this case to make your illegal actions look good. But instead you look foolish.”
Trump did not say that the photo had been digitally altered. The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Some users defended Trump, arguing that it should have been obvious that the letters, which were slightly misaligned from the characters, were added to illustrate the president’s claim about what the tattoo represented.
Others, however, have questioned whether the tattoo actually represents MS-13. The president’s rationale for inferring this seemed to be that the first letters of marijuana and smiley correspond to “MS,” while the cross represents a “1″ and the skull’s three holes—two for the eyes, one for the mouth—constitute the “3.″
Tennessee MAGA Rep. Mark Green’s daughter says her family is suffering through “the loss of the person that we thought was our father” after he was accused of having an affair with a mistress 27 years his junior.
“My dad sells himself in politics as being a Christian, conservative family man,” Catherine Green told the Nashville Banner. “His actions in the last, whatever, year have not been that.”
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Green’s wife of 30 years, Camilla Green, accused the 57-year-old of carrying out an affair with a 32-year-old woman in a text message and email to his GOP colleagues. He filed for divorce last month.
“As this is a deeply private matter, I ask for privacy,” he said in a statement after the affair allegations became public. “I will continue to serve this district with all I’ve got, as I have the last five and a half years.”
In her text, Green’s wife warned of “readily available ‘predators’” that would tempt men like her husband and accused D.C. politicians who espouse family values as “having affairs and getting divorces, drinking, parties.”
Green’s daughter told the Banner she also believes “toxic” D.C. culture led to her dad’s affair, divorce, and a change in his behavior. “Over the last year and a half, two years, we’ve really noticed a difference in him,” she said. “So who knows if that’s just the toxic environment that is D.C., but something has changed. We’ve all had to basically grieve the loss of the person that we thought was our father.”
Catherine said the family became aware of Green’s affair, which began in fall 2023, in January after her brother found a letter from his alleged mistress. He denied the affair, but the family later found “additional evidence,” she told the Banner.
When the news site asked Catherine if she thought former president Donald Trump, who is alleged to have had several extramarital affairs and been accused of sexual assault or harassment by over a dozen women, was part of the negative influence on her MAGA father, she said: “Yes and no.”
“Trump doesn’t lie about who he is, you know, he’s upfront with you,” she added, contrasting the former president’s style with her father’s family values-based public profile. “You know [Trump’s] an ass, but he’s just good at what he does.”
Green announced he would not seek reelection in February, before changing his mind a month later. His daughter said his reservation was related to the family’s financially struggling equestrian farm. He is, nevertheless, likely to win in his heavily Republican district.
