Trump's Unhinged Behavior In His First Week As POTUS

Click here for an article by Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post, entitled "Trump’s erratic first week was among the most alarming in history."

Marcus's article is not about Trump's policy enactments, which are scary in themselves, but just about his "erratic, even bizarre, behavior." She says: "In depressing retrospect, the dark inaugural address, with its invocation of 'carnage' and 'tombstones,' was the week’s high point."

The first thing on Trump's agenda on Saturday morning, the first full day of his presidency, was to angrily order the acting director of the National Parks Service to come up with other photos of the inauguration crowd size, in an effort to prove the false claim that his crowd was the biggest at any inauguration ever, including the one in 2008 celebrating the election of the first black president. Next, he ordered his hapless press secretary, Sean Spicer, to hold a "press conference" for the purpose of angrily berating reporters.



Then came a clownish performance in front of the CIA Memorial Wall, where he made a single eight-word reference to the wall (later claiming he had "paid great homage to the wall"). He boasted of his intellect, attacked the "dishonest" media, and "lamented that the United States did not 'keep the oil' in Iraq even as he dangerously observed, 'Maybe you’ll have another chance.'" He also tried a couple of lame jokes, which to the CIA, in that place, is kind of like doing a standup comedy routine at Arlington National Cemetery.

And so it went, each day feeling scarier than the one before, and Trump’s sycophantic aides modeling his own fact-free rants — press secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehood-filled briefing-room tirade, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway’s brazen defense of “alternative facts,” chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s brutish admonition to the media to “keep its mouth shut.”

Trump himself outdid his petty obsession with crowd size with his delusional obsession with popular-vote fraud, first behind closed doors with incredulous congressional leaders , then for all the world to watch in his ABC interview. What was once delusional ego-salving now appears headed for official inquiry.

This is ominous not only for the implicit threat of imposing new and unnecessary obstacles to voting, but also because it means that no one, neither American citizens nor foreign leaders, can believe the president of the United States when he makes an assertion. Meantime, the destabilizing cost of Trump’s behavior manifested itself with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s abrupt cancellation of his trip to Washington.