Trump Is Cracking Up - On CNN, Senator Lindsey Graham chided the press for treating Trump like “some kind of kook not fit to be president,” which is some serious gaslighting from a man who previously called Trump “crazy,” a “kook” and “unfit for office.” Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. “Officials tell us Trump seems more self-assured, more prone to confidently indulging wild conspiracies and fantasies, more quick-triggered to fight than he was during the Wild West of the first 100 days in office,” Mike Allen reports on Axios. But now that Republicans are about to get their tax cuts, they appear to have decided that it doesn’t matter whether the president is sane. Less than a month ago Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, warned that it was a mistake to infer that what we’ve seen so far of the Trump administration will be “as bad as it gets.” As time goes on, he wrote, “Trump will find people who will empower him, instead of trying to contain him. But reports from the administration all suggest an increasingly unhinged and chaotic president. “One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as he recalled the conversation,” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin reported in this week. Indeed, whether Trump is mentally ill or simply unbound, his provocations can serve a purpose for the Republican Party, numbing the country to a tide of less flamboyant outrages.
