“The Incoherent Jumble of Trump’s Own Mind”

Two pieces from the National Review website presented some ideas in ways that I agreed with.  That is, they distilled what I had been thinking a bit chaotically into statements I wish I had made.

One was “The Impeachment Train” by Yuval Levin that can be found here:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-impeachment-train/

This seems to explain something I’ve been wondering about:

But in the laying out of both the case against Trump and the case in his defense you find the pattern that has repeated in these last few years by which serious people end up backing themselves into conspiracy theories because they want the world to make sense. The incoherent jumble of Trump’s own mind, backed now with the enormous power of the American presidency, has the capacity to create a real world that doesn’t hang together. When we each try to explain it to ourselves and others, we naturally incline to fill in blanks and sketch connections that might make it all cohere, and so we end up painting perverse conspiracies, most of which are surely false. We can already see that happening in this case, as we all try to reason our way through an avalanche of unfamiliar figures and preposterous events and end up acting like we’ve always had strong views about how many people listen to presidential phone calls and the relative merits of different Ukrainian state prosecutors.  [Emphasis added]

Trump is his own reality distortion field and this warps all of us into trying to adjust.  I’ve felt that for a long time but hadn’t the words to describe it.

Levin also points out this:

My rule of thumb for how to think about the endless chain of outrages and counter-outrages that compose the Trump era is that every scandal will proceed in whatever way is maximally damaging to public confidence in our core institutions.

The farther down this road we go the likelier it is that something will fracture the Republic irreparably.  I hope I’m wrong and I don’t know what our Reichstag Fire might turn out to be, but I have trouble seeing us on a path to sunlit uplands.  Nor do I know what individual course to take except to support what laws and institutions I can by not cutting corners, by being nice to my neighbors and co-workers, praying, fasting and keeping a civil tongue.  And don’t be stampeded and don’t panic.

In “Prince Don” by Kevin D. Williamson at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/donald-trump-personal-flaws-led-him-here/ I found another summation of what I’ve been thinking:

And so that leaves at least one conservative simultaneously believing four things that are difficult to keep under the same hat:

1) I am glad that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not the president;

2) Based on what we know right now, I do not want to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office;

3) I do not want to see Elizabeth Warren being sworn in as president in January 2021;

4) Donald Trump cannot be gone soon enough.

In data processing terms, this leaves me thrashing: whipping between logical paths that are mutually exclusive.

I am beginning to wonder, though, if the best long term course might be for the impeachment process to remove Trump from office in early 2020, leaving Mike Pence to stabilize things and present a more temperate, constitutional alternative to whatever shrieking progressive the Democrats nominate.