In the day or two since excerpts from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House were published online, I’ve been seeing a much increased discussion of Donald Trump’s mental health (or lack thereof) in response to some of its reporting. And just yesterday, CNN had a story out that a group of mostly Democratic congresspeople received a briefing from a Yale psychiatrist about the president’s psychological fitness. But whether or not Trump is in psychological decline, the choice of his opponents to focus on his mental competence strikes me as a potentially dangerous cop-out for addressing the real dangers of the Trump era. Such an emphasis threatens to reduce our political crisis to the mental shortcomings of a single man, when in fact we face a multi-faceted democratic emergency.
While Trump-specific behaviors such as the president’s erratic public statements about North Korea can persuasively be argued to originate in the president’s damaged psyche, the larger harm he’s causing, from attacks on the free press to a tax bill that threatens to send economic inequality into hyperdrive, are more properly described as far right-wing policies. Trump is not primarily an enormous threat to American democracy and prosperity because he might be mentally ill, but because his words and actions propagate an authoritarian agenda. My personal take is that his authoritarianism is less because Donald Trump has a well thought-out political belief system, and more because his tendencies toward self-aggrandizement and the need to protect himself from the truth of Russian collusion push him in such an anti-democratic direction. Such inclinations are also clearly being shaped and encouraged by members of his staff.
But more than this, the president’s personal tendencies are finding common cause with an authoritarian mindset that has clearly been growing for some time both in the Republican base and in the Republican Party at large. Exhibit A is the fact that Trump has managed through his first year to retain a solid core of support from a significant minority of the population, and that Republican representatives and senators have nearly unanimously closed ranks around his presidency.
The dangers of overemphasizing Donald Trump's mental issues are greatest in the context of the Russia investigations, which at this stage have determined collusion between the president's 2016 campaign and the Russian government. It is quite possible that as more facts about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia enter the public consciousness, and a narrative of this collusion begins to take hold, the GOP’s protection of the president will begin to waiver. At that point, one path to saving their own skins would be to play the mental health card. By asserting that the president is mentally ill as a way of removing him from office, perhaps through invocation of the 25th Amendment, such a course would give them an opportunity to sleaze out of their own complicity with his corrupt behavior and endorsement of retrograde policies.
Again, I feel like I can’t say this often or emphatically enough: Trump is not the biggest problem our political system faces — the Republican Party is. I employ the term “political malpractice” a little too often even by my own reckoning, but at the risk of overuse, I’m going to deploy it one more time here: it would be political malpractice for the Democratic Party not to do everything it can to highlight to the public that the most egregious behavior and policies of Donald Trump are inseparable from the agenda of the contemporary GOP. This is a party that has gerrymandered and voter-suppressed its way into not only a House majority, but into control of statehouses across the country. Twisting the structure of democracy to perpetuate rule by a party with minority support across the nation is on a continuum with the more overt authoritarianism displayed by the president and indeed endorsed by the party at large.
For me, the nightmare scenario is for Republican politicians to be the ones to “save” the country from Donald Trump on the basis of his real or alleged mental incompetence, rather than for him to be felled on the grounds of political malfeasance and moral unfitness — grounds that would implicate and sully the GOP at large, and very deservedly so. The distance between these two possible outcomes is vast: either Donald Trump is scapegoated as a unique outlier, or he's branded as the failed avatar of a GOP in which authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism vie for pride of place as the most pressing reason for ending this party’s role as a major player in American politics.
