At some point our nation's journalists are going to have to stop pussyfooting around the two central truths of the current Oval Office denizen. He is ignorant, and he is volatile. None of this is business as usual.
President Donald Trump questioned why the Civil War— which erupted 150 years ago over slavery — needed to happen. He said he would be "honored" to meet with Kim Jong-Un, the violent North Korean dictator who is developing nuclear missiles and oppresses his people, under the "right circumstances."
The president floated, and backed away from, a tax on gasoline. Trump said he was "looking at" breaking up the big banks, sending the stock market sliding. He seemed to praise Philippines strongman President Rodrigo Duterte for his high approval ratings. He promised changes to the Republican health care bill, though he has seemed unsure what was in the legislation, even as his advisers whipped votes for it.
This is just from the morning's interviews, as Trump struggled to respond to whatever the current interviewer was mentioning with a string of words presumably meant to convey to his listener that he know what the flying hell the other person was talking about—but which then proceeded to demonstrate that Trump had only the vaguest of notions what the flying hell the other person was talking about.
He is both contemplating nuclear war with North Korea and perhaps "honored" to meet with its dictator—depending on how you phrase the question. Someone asked him about a gas tax so he blustered that he indeed had been Considering That Next Thing You Just Said; the speed of the walkback demonstrated the extent to which his own staff considered it just another rogue statement. The only apparent knowledge he has about a man spearheading a government-sponsored campaign of terror is that the man's "approval ratings" are good. He could answer not a damn thing about the Republican repeal of Obamacare he himself is supposedly orchestrating and, when asked, spouted a stream of falsehoods that had nothing to do with the bill in question.
You could have interviewed a box of fortune cookies and gotten more insightful answers.
"It seems to be among the most bizarre recent 24 hours in American presidential history," said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. "It was all just surreal disarray and a confused mental state from the president." [...]
"They were not helpful to us," one senior administration official said. "There was no point to do all of them." [...]
"He just seemed to go crazy today," a senior GOP aide said.
His own officials know his behavior is odd. The historians, whose jobs are predicated on remembering what life used to be like in the before-times, know that presidents don't act like this.
There are two truths to Donald Trump. The first is that he operates from self-imposed ignorance, seemingly not just unwilling but unable to grasp any concept or issue that does not revolve around himself and his own ideas of self worth. This plays out in every interview, in every question.
The second is that this self-imposed ignorance and obsession with self-aggrandizement renders his decision-making volatile and, potentially, dangerous, as every choice from missile strikes to budget levels to a potential quickie nuclear war is gauged not from a standpoint of national benefit but from what he believes, in any given moment, to be the most flattering decision for him to be seen making.
In the best-case scenario, this will render him a figurehead—or, because even his personal word cannot be trusted, something even less than that. But there are a great deal of worse scenarios, and newspapers and networks attempting to normalize away his erratic whims and mood switches are, intentionally or not, steering Americans into accepting those worse outcomes as our potential new normal as well.