The Madness of King Donald

We know. The GOP knows it. Does the media?

King George III was not well.

His daughter, Princess Mary, and Court Physicians Sir Henry Halford, David Dundas, and others kept detailed journals of the time in which the most powerful man in the world suffered from recurring bouts of mental illness.

Opinions vary widely on its exact origin and type, but the record of his slide from competence into long periods of insanity and delusion in which he raged, held conversations with “his imaginary company” of long-dead friends and family members, firmly believed various disasters had struck England, and lashed out, sometimes violently, at everyone around him.

The Royal Collections Trust has thousands of letters and documents from family, friends, doctors, and England’s political leadership related to what is popularly known in our era as The Madness of King George. (You're correct if you’re detecting another Rick Wilson Rabbit Hole.)

It was a problem the Royal Family and the British government vainly attempted to manage for decades. Still, it finally reached a point where the King’s decline was so marked and so permanent that his son, George IV, was declared Regent in the last decade of his reign.

The problem at the center of any monarchy was always this: if the King is there by the power of God, and if the King is mad, what can be done?

Source: https://ovoodocorvo.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-madness-of-king-donald.html

It’s time to talk about the Madness of King Donald.

The American media spent nearly 6 months in a feeding frenzy, unlike any other I’ve seen in my professional career, parsing every action word and step of Joe Biden and declaring his weakness, senility, and ill-health. They seized on his physical condition, his tentative walk, his voice growing more raspy and soft with age in hundreds of repetitive, breathless stories populated by anonymous concern trolls (always anonymous) whispering of his declining mental state, his faltering intellect, and his gaze turning toward the long night of death.

It was often one-sided and presented in an almost grotesque manner. Much of it followed the lead of The New York Times, whose coverage had all the hallmarks of senior editors (and a publisher pissed) off that Joe Biden wasn’t playing by their rules and had denied a sitdown interview.

One grim night in Atlanta ended Joe Biden‘s long and storied career.

Maybe it was time. Maybe it was unfair. Counterfactuals are to no avail.

But it happened, and Biden could not recover. He spent a few more weeks being relentlessly battered by the press and the Trump campaign. Through it all, Trump’s behavior seemed to get a treatment we’re accustomed to by now: “That’s just Trump being Trump.” “Everyone knows he’s crazy.” “It’s just his act.” The unspoken messages came through loud and clear: “Now it’s a campaign” “This is fun!” and “We need access to Trump, so we have to roll with it.”

The grim, hard truth of the media’s double coverage standard has returned to roost on the storied tower of Mar-A-Lago like a diseased and hungry vulture. Biden’s departure broke the bothsides model’s back. If the old frame was “Old vs. Crazy,” the new frame would be "Crazy vs. Rising Star.”

And Crazy is having none of it.

The last three weeks have broken Trump’s already disturbed psyche. He cannot process the political reality that Kamala Harris is more popular, running a better campaign, raising more money, drawing much bigger crowds, moving the polls, and that the culture is swinging her way.

Trump‘s own quite obvious mental collapse is playing out in real time in front of our eyes. The news stories in the Times, Axios, and elsewhere in the past few days hit at the dysfunctional wetware between Trump’s ears, but even those are mediated by a degree of campaign spin.

First, this piece:

To riff off the Simpson…the worst three weeks so far.

It goes on…and on…and on. Et tu, Rupert?

He’s in trouble. Nothing’s working. The moment he needs to settle down, he’s more manic than ever. More deranged. Throwing more bombs.

Do you want the pure, uncut, weapons-grade cray? Head over to Trash Social, Trump’s social media litter box, where his unhinged weekend accusations, including claiming Kamala Harris was faking her stacked-to-the-rafters with…wait for it…AI.

Oh, of course.

In the Year of Our Lord 2024 A.D., it’s perfectly plausible to believe that a major campaign rally for the Vice President of the United States of America would be faked, replaced by AI images and video. Dozens of members of the press pool were there. Thousands of event attendees posted contemporaneous photos and videos on social media. It was recorded and streamed by hundreds, if not thousands, of cameras.

This was a post by an insane person. There was no clever strategy, 47th-dimensional chess game, or droll trolling play.

It was, and he is, insane.

I’m told that word is fraught with politically incorrect baggage, but he’s insane. Mentally ill. Sick in the bone dome. Loco. Insane in the membrane.

This post sent ripples throughout the political ecosystem, on the left, right, and in the media this weekend. It was a stress test for the MAGA media faithful, knowing if they boosted it, they’d look like fools, and if they didn’t, they’d look like traitors.

All the more anodyne if accurate headlines fall far short of rivaling the best. Matt Novak at Gizmodo hit the headline jackpot:

Pathetic Old Man Claims Crowd at Kamala Harris Rally Was Made With AI Trump's conspiracy theories keep getting weirder as the latest polls show him losing to Kamala Harris.

Trump’s endless rantings, his alternating delusions of persecution and grandeur, his conversations with his own “imaginary company” of friends — Jim in Paris! Strong men with tears in their eyes! — are our own Madness of King Donald.

Almost every day in the last three weeks, America and, most importantly, America’s media class has been presented with Trump demonstrating behavior that is utterly disqualifying for the Presidency. In the event you’ve forgotten, it’s just our republic and representative democracy at stake. Oh, and to remind you, he’s asking to be put in charge of the nuclear arsenal, the entire military edifice, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and the intelligence agencies.

Would you let a person acting like Trump is acting use power tools, much less be President? I think not.

Any American family would recognize her as an elderly man no longer in touch with reality, incapable of managing the lives of himself or others, and deeply in need of mental health care.

And yet the enablers around him, the people who should be his caregivers, are all in for one last hustle, scam, and grab at power.

This weekend alone was a repugnant example of the grizzly choice Trump proposes upon Republicans. They remind me of competing siblings trying to stay in the good graces of a wealthy relative; Republicans are pretending everything is just fine and that Trump is normal, healthy, robust, and mentally present because the price of crossing him is excommunication and exile.

The deafening silence over Trump’s behavior reminds us of the fundamental rot inside the GOP. No one dares to go on the record. No one will say the emperor is buck naked and his nanoscale junk is swinging in the breeze. Not Mike Johnson. Not Mitch McConnell. Not any Governor. No media network in the MAGA system will tell Trump to shut up, leave the race, and get help.

If Joe Biden had at any point during his campaign claimed that Donald Trump was Photoshopping thousands of people into a rally that the mainstream media had covered with their own eyes and cameras, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times ed boards would have called for him to leave the race, and rightly so.

Frank Rich called Trump’s rantings “Political suicide notes.” I couldn’t put it better myself. His press conference, his Truthings, and the rest of his capering like a lunatic means the vaunted reset, the new tone, and the better Trump are the same lies and bullshit they’ve always been.

Tonight, the mentally ill former President will appear on Twitter at 8 pm East Coast time. Anyone expecting a new tone or a serious conversation with the Ketamine Kid is in for a shock. It’s fine by me: Harris keeps working to connect with America, and Trump keeps giving us visions of the

Aging is a cruel and unrelenting process, and until we reach either the singularity and can upload our best selves into the cloud biology, medicine, genetic engineering, and a host of other technological innovations that lead us to the longevity extension velocity, we will have to face the end with resolution.

Trump, his family, his team, and his movement cannot and will not face the reality of his departed sanity. They don’t love him enough to tell him to stop.

Until they do, the Madness of King Donald will define this campaign.

P.S. If you’re interested in the George III story in full, pre-and post-madness — he was King during a tumultuous and consequential era that shaped the modern world — the best bio is Christopher Hibbert’s King George III, A Personal History is granular without being pedantic.