I was looking at the definition of insanity the other day to see if the symptoms might be a close match for Donald Trump but it turns out the term isn’t very precise or much used nowadays in psychiatry. The OED just says it is “a state of mind that impedes the ability to think, reason, or behave in ways that are considered normal, esp. one caused by mental illness.” Listening to Trump it’s pretty obvious that he never thinks, really thinks I mean, about anything and certainly doesn’t use reason to come to any conclusions. And to say he doesn’t behave in ways that are considered normal is simply to state a fact. Not only is he stunningly incompetent and dangerous by way of insanity, but he is also deeply corrupt. To use a Trumpism, nobody has ever seen anything like it before. He doesn’t even try to hide his grifting, in fact, he wallows in it.
David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has an article in the magazine trying to compare Trump with previous presidents who either left office in disgrace or were later found to be corrupt. None of them, not even Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, even begin to approach the level of blatant self-enrichment that Trump has reached - so far - and we're just over four months in. By 2028, he could overtake Musk as the world's richest man.
One of Frum’s reference points is about a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s administration in the 1950s. His chief of staff was forced out after it was found he had accepted an expensive coat and a valuable rug from a favor-seeker. A coat and a rug. It seems almost quaint by comparison. Trump is being paid millions of dollars, probably even billions according to Frum, and all in plain sight. A coat or a rug would be an insult to him.
Another revealing story concerns Trump in 2015 during the primaries when he openly admitted giving donations to Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi which clearly were bribes: "When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do" was his response when questioned about it.
"When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system."
It is a system that he is actively mending. Most voters assumed he was talking about the principle of bribes when it's clear he was only speaking about the lack of transparency. He knows exactly what these payments are for and now he's on the receiving end, all in plain sight.
How does he get away with it?
The problem with American politics is that it’s become incredibly tribal. Trump gets away with it because Congress is Republican-controlled at the moment and although some, perhaps a majority, in the GOP know what he’s doing is morally wrong, unconstitutional, and illegal, nobody speaks out. Some are terrified of him. Others can't see what he's doing wrong.
Instead, they are still trying to prove Joe Biden was corrupt despite years of effort producing no evidence whatsoever. Meanwhile, Trump and his family are taking $billions from Middle Eastern potentates and it's all over the media!!
In the next few weeks, we may discover the shocking extent to which the US justice system has also become incredibly tribal and partisan.
The legal challenge to Trump’s tariff policy is stayed (on hold) at the moment, pending an appeal and it will inevitably end up with the Supreme Court. The nine justices will then decide if it’s legal. One of the main arguments against the policy is that Trump doesn’t have and has never had the authority to impose these sweeping tariffs.
He has simply usurped it from Congress which is vested with the authority to set trade tariffs and impose tax-raising measures and can’t delegate it, according to legal scholars. The Supreme Court, in a ruling made in 2022 under Joe Biden, also introduced the notion of a ‘major questions doctrine’ meaning that no president can decide matters of great importance without first obtaining congressional approval.
During Biden’s presidency, the court’s 6-3 Republican majority ruled that the executive branch can’t decide weighty political and economic matters without clear congressional authority. That blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from setting significant limits on power station pollution and stopped the Education Department from slashing student loans for 40 million people at a cost of around $400 billion.
This doctrine is now central to the case against Trump’s unilateral imposition of worldwide import taxes which would raise around $1.4 trillion over the next decade. In any normal world, the SCOTUS would uphold the legal principle they created for the sake of consistency and their own reputation.
However, when the trade tariffs policy comes before the court, who would bet against some, if not all, of the Republicans sitting on it, finding a trade policy that threatens to impose tariffs - or import taxes - on millions of Americans is not significant enough to warrant triggering the major question doctrine. In fact I bet the chances are they will find arguments to support Trump setting trade policy,
In other words, it’s fine if a Republican president does it but not if a Democrat tried the same thing. The GOP is famously keen to have Congress restrain a Democrat president’s spending and tax-raising ability but has no problem when a Republican is in The White House,
The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, denies that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” - all one thousand pages of it - with its huge tax cuts for the wealthy (his supporters) will increase the national debt.
This little exchange is worth keeping for posterity because every reputable economist thinks the bill will add $3.8 trillion more to the $36 trillion that America already owes to its creditors. Trump increased the debt by nearly $8 trillion (about $23,500 in new government borrowing for every citizen in the country) in his first term and is set to add half as much again, despite campaign pledges to cut it.
You can't begin to imagine what Johnson and his Conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill would say if Kamala Harris had proposed exactly the same 1,000-page bill with the same huge increase in debt that economists are forecasting.
I don’t know how a country can be governed effectively when the two major parties have their own laws, their own judges, and even their own realities. It cannot work.
