Those unhinged people in Washington

Syed Badrul AhsanSyed Badrul Ahsan
Published : 3 June 2017, 08:20 AM
Updated : 3 June 2017, 08:20 AM

Donald Trump is not the only man with an unhinged mind in Washington these days. You only have to observe the people around him. With few exceptions, most appear to have never grown up. Indeed, that is how John Kerry has looked at Trump's decision to take the United States out of the Paris climate agreement of 2015. He bluntly advised Trump, through a Christiane Amanpour show on CNN, to grow up.

The point is this — if you remain an imbecile at age seventy, there is the likelihood that you will remain an imbecile as the last breath escapes your lungs. Trump has never grown up. And he will not grow up, as all his acts since he entered the White House have so patently demonstrated. Stubborn ignorance is the bedrock of the man's character. The withdrawal from the Paris accord is the newest proof of how America's president — and he is president despite being three million votes behind his rival — refuses to grow into adulthood or is psychologically incapable of reaching that milepost.

If Trump is unhinged, look around for some other unhinged minds. There are loads of them around the man who would like nothing better than to grab women 'by the pussy'. Try as you might, you can never suspend disbelief even for a second when it comes to a study of the Kellyanne Conway character. She talks a lot but she does not know what she is talking about. Words lose meaning as soon as they escape her lips. It is a diseased mind that coats lies as alternative facts. Conway has done it, and has been doing so many other outrageous acts, all of which place a huge question mark on her mental capacities.

The White House is these days a place where men and women unhinged run riot. Try as hard as you can, but you will still fail to spot a single redeeming quality in Sean Spicer. He ties himself in knots as he tries to explain away the boulder-like flaws of the president he serves. He dissembles and lies and when the pressure of media questions begins to get under his skin, he becomes incoherent in his angry responses. And then he stalks out of the press room, piqued that those silly journalists could not see the wise points he had been making.

Take Steve Bannon. A man bearing a lot of hate for other men, he sees nothing wrong in pushing his president into formulating policies underpinned by an absolute absence of reason. The result is disaster and shame. Shame? Donald Trump and his tribe of unhinged souls have nothing to do with shame. They can peddle lies and they can get away with that kind of disorderly conduct. But nothing of shame or embarrassment touches them. This lack of shame glues them to their shameless tribal chieftain. The educated world may scream in protest, may hurl verbal but not vulgar abuse at such men, but it cannot do more. Not, at least, until this cabal of shameless people misgoverning America sinks a little more in infamy.

The Trump administration is certainly not the first to function through a working of minds that keep churning out ideas of no substance, in that bad psychiatric meaning of the term. But the difference between his team and that of any one of his predecessors is that while the latter were often embarrassed by the spectacle of a few unhinged minds within their corridor, Trump presides over an administration that seems hell-bent on self-destruct, and that in a broad sweeping way. Attorney General Jeff Sessions conceals facts at his confirmation hearings. And so he would like nothing more than for the Supreme Court to permit his president to keep Muslims from six nations out of the United States.

So President Trump is unhinged and there is no question about that. He reads nothing, he understands nothing, he behaves in the manner of a neighbourhood bully. At Brussels, he shoves a European prime minister aside as he takes his place in a photo-op beside NATO heads of government. The capacity for an offering of apologies for such misdemeanor is not in him. Nothing of humility will ever transform Trump and his men into people of reason. Count among this probable group the fawning Vice President Mike Pence.

Unhinged men holding power and abusing it have been quite a few in our times. There is the murderous Idi Amin of Uganda, who in his time amused the world with his antics in the way Donald Trump does today. And then think of Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic. Of course, Bokassa, through an excess of love for Napoleon, turned the country into the Central African Empire and himself into Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa the First. The empire was soon to come apart and the emperor would soon be without clothes. Adolf Hitler's mind was twisted. He had always been unhinged.

Emperor Trump has already begun shedding his clothes. He spends the better part of the night tweeting nonsense, like a child unable to go to bed without planning revenge for those who had earlier made fun of him. This American monarch does not sleep, does not read. Poor in intelligence, he seeks to make up for it through bluster verging on the criminal.

The world outside America, all of it, is Donald Trump's enemy. Like Sancho Panza, he battles the windmills.