From the New Yorker, A Hundred Days of Trump
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/a-hundred-days-of-trump
This is the brand that Trump has created for himselfthat of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. I am what I am, he has said. But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. His bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the worlds autocrats. When Kim In-ryong, a representative of North Koreas radical regime, warns that Trump and his tweets of provocation are creating a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment, does one man sound more immediately rational than the other? When Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referendum that bolsters autocratic rule in Turkeyor when a sullen and insulting meeting with Angela Merkel is followed by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypthow are the supporters of liberal and democratic values throughout Europe meant to react to American leadership?
Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill OReilly, late of Fox News, is a good person, blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment. A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that youve ever seen.
At times, it seems, unhinged. ya think?