Back in the long ago, helium sphere days, when I was still married, and we were watching our best friend have his first bipolar breakdowns, one after the other for 3 years, with all the initial chaos, horror, disbelief, and being thrown head first into this whirl of madness.

I remember the moment he appeared at our door, it was just Genevieve and myself, as my ex who was a railroader wasn’t home yet. At first, neither of us knew what to make of his behaviour, this old friend of my ex’s, and much loved, with a huge circle of friends around him, and we all watched first hand as this person we knew slowly disappeared into the madness that was later diagnosed as Psycho-effective Disorder, as his manic phases began to explode into these grandiose delusions.

So I know loco, of that sort.

Now, and this is probably good experience now that I think on it, but I also lived with a Pathological Narcissist for 4 years, until his death by Pancreatic Cancer in the fall of 2012. I wouldn’t have termed him as such at the time, didn’t even really know the words for it, but I knew he wasn’t right, knew I was being manipulated, knew he lied like a rug, know how gaslighting feels, whole 9 yards, escaped only through his death, and that is the simple truth.

So I know something of loco, certainly, saw it firsthand, and was completely unprepared for the experience.

Yes, I know something of living in crazytown, or maybe crazystreet, crazylake, I’m an old hat.

Loco is a big songbook though, of mood disorders, personality disorders, of psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, of voices, delusions, and sometimes just old brains deteriorating, so when I ask what the heck is up with the 45th, I’m not whistlin’ Dixie, I’m truly asking.

Seriously though, it is incredibly hard to know where to look any more, as an American by birth, but growing up in Canada, from my perspective the U.S. has gone completely bonkers.

Yes, I agree with Obama, and the rumpTus is but a symptom of a larger loco, a loco that seeped over the border and brought Ontarians our very own, in Ford for Premier. Gag.

Perhaps one could call the 45th the engineer of the Washington loco train, whilst feeding off the gravy trains.

Basically, like he walked in off the street, and made Sarah Palin look like a scholar, and the mad Tea Party set fell for him hook,  line and sinker. See, he has his own special mix of loco, and that is what I am wondering at, what is his brand of crazy called? Does it have a name? Is it dangerous? Can you catch it?

Personally, I’m going with Malignant Narcissist, I think it fits the bill.

In a bid to warn the public, psychologists are publishing their diagnoses of Trump. Most recently, John D. Gartner said Trump “is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.

He believes Trump shows signs of “malignant narcissism,” which is defined as a mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism in Campbells’ Psychiatric Dictionary.
[ the independent ] Monday 30 January 2017 11:45

Now, people certainly respond to stressful situations in various and unique ways, and gawd knows the guy’s been hounded judiciously from day one, heck, before that, but I digress.

Deserved hounding, generally, and with every indictment, we see the case against him slowly revealed, plea deals here, immunity there, and what role he played in the Russian influence of the 2016 election, what he knew, when he knew it, now there is all to play for in that arena. So, one could certainly see that a guilty man would be walking on eggshells through the hallowed halls, and besides wondering at whether he is worthy, or rightfully suppose to be where he is, and now the question is, is he fit to be where he is?

In December, three leading professors of psychiatry wrote to Barack Obama expressing their grave concerns over Trump’s mental stability:

“His widely reported symptoms of mental instability – including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality – lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office,” the professors from Harvard Medical School and the University of California wrote to the then President, urging him to order a “full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation” of the then President-elect.
[ ibid ]

According to a growing course within that inner beltway, at the heart of the swamp, even the senior frogs appear to be croaking that he is not fit for office.

Trump’s team will only tell him what he wants to hear, thus pandering to his narcissistic and sociopathic ways.

The anonymous op-ed of September 5th in the New York Times said as much, no surprise, or shouldn’t be, that article from the Independent was written in January of 2017.

I can understand giving the guy a break the first year, cleaning up his messes behind the scenes so as to not start a constitutional crisis.

What has changed? Is this a recent change? A change at all? Or is it that after that first year, and after it was obvious that he had no intention of learning from his mistakes, take advice, not go off on a mad tangent for 30 minutes,  incapable, it became clear that he was unfit, anti-democratic, dangerous, amoral…

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
[ NYT anon Op-ed ]

Not surprisingly, Manafort is now looking at maybe getting some sort of deal, as reported by Bloomberg;

Paul Manafort’s lawyers have talked to U.S. prosecutors about a possible guilty plea to avert a second criminal trial set to begin in Washington this month, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I would be too if I were him, looking through the bars of his jail cell at the loco living at the heart of craz…oops…Washington, and thinking it possible the 45th maybe not really be going to be in a place to pardon him of anything.

The Washington establishment has not seen this kind of madness before, and I’m sure a number of them thought they’d seen it all.

Oh, but they haven’t seen nothin’ yet.

Ask Germany.