I settled in this evening to catch up on Trump’s utterly insane tweets from the weekend, and as usual shook my head at the clearly impaired mind and unbalanced personality behind them. This time in frustration I said, How is it possible journalists and pundits aren’t questioning Trump’s mental health and stability? I googled to see if it had come up this week, and discovered… it has begun.
Maybe Al Franken made it possible by saying it out loud, I don’t know. But here are excerpts from CNN’s Reliable Sources.
Note: Let’s please focus here on the subject of Trump’s mental health, and not one’s general opinion of Andrew Sullivan.
STELTER: Jake Tapper's interview with Kellyanne Conway from last Tuesday is already being taught in journalism classes and for good reason. Tapper challenged Conway about the White House's disregard for the truth.
And he's not the only one. I sensed a new tone on the nightly news this week. Watch how Scott Pelley opened his broadcast on Monday.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SCOTT PELLEY, CBS EVENING NEWS WITH SCOTT PELLEY: Today, President Trump told a U.S. audience that there have been terrorist attacks that no one knows about because the media choose not to report them. It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STELTER: Divorced from reality. My next guest, Andrew Sullivan, a pioneering blogger, now a contributing editor for the "New York magazine" is taking it a step further, questioning Trump's mental health, with this provocative article, "The Madness of King Donald."
Your thesis is this is a national emergency. You used the word "emergency" in your column. Why? What's your case?
ANDREW SULLIVAN, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Because any liberal democracy, any constitutional democracy, relies upon something we call the objective truth. Now, some politicians fib and lie, in fact, almost all of them do to some extent, but they always do it in a way that pays some deference to reality.
And what I've discovered is that in the last three weeks, this president, rather like he did on the campaign trail, simply insists that black is white, that things that we can see with our own eyes, like the size of his inauguration crowd, are not exactly what we're seeing. And he's able to command his underlings to actually go out there and say things that are empirically untrue.
This is about politics or ideology, like there are some things that Trump believes in, for example, a more restrained America around the world, immigration controls, for example, that I'm sympathetic to. It's about the ability for the president to tell the truth and for us to believe it. And to have such an unstable figure incapable of accepting reality at the center of the world is an extremely dangerous thing. And I --
STELTER: You said unstable. In your column you said mentally unstable. Why do you think it's appropriate to be describing the president that way?
SULLIVAN: I'm not a shrink, and if I were, I wouldn't say this, anyway, because you can't diagnose someone. But I'm a human being, and I can tell if someone is saying things that we know not to be true and never corrects it.
For example, that the murder rate, which is a very solid statistic. You know, there are dead bodies we can count. When he says the murder rate is as high as it's been in 45 to 47 years, what are we supposed to do, Brian? I mean, what is anybody supposed to do? This is simply completely bonkers.
He's saying things that do not exist. When a president is saying things like that and doesn't correct himself, has no one correct him, we have fact checkers now every day of the week compiling lists and lists and lists of things he's saying that are empirically untrue, false.
Now, I don't know whether he knows they're false, but if he doesn't know they're false, then he needs to be informed. If he knows they're false and still saying it's true, then if he doesn't know, then he shouldn't be in that office.
STELTER: ... I wonder why you think that's not been said more often on television or in columns like your own. Do you feel like you're a bit alone on this issue? And if so, why?
SULLIVAN: ... sometimes we don't want to say that in public. We can't. But look, we're journalists and we're trying to understand what's happening. And if we don't just simply say what's in front of our eyes, what use are we? I mean, how are we supposed to do this when someone keeps telling us untruths every day?
STELTER: Are you describing a failure of journalism, do you think, that it's not being addressed more publicly?
SULLIVAN: Well, I think the journalists have been doing a fantastic job in many ways of fact checking. But fact checking doesn't really capture the extent of what's going on...
STELTER: Do you worry, though, that talking about this, about his psychology, you're calling him mentally unstable and delusional, do you worry that it further causes division in the country, makes it impossible for the people who voted for him to want to hear you out?
SULLIVAN: Of course, I do, and God knows, I wish I weren't here having to say this… But at some point, being a writer or a journalist requires one to simply say what one is seeing in front of one's eyes. And sometimes, you have to say that in plain English...
STELTER: Andrew, you calling this an emergency is going to have them saying you're being hysterical. Your reaction?
SULLIVAN: Yes, sure. Say that. I mean, I'm happy to be called hysterical if people want to call me that.
I'm just -- I would ask them instead, how do you explain the constant barrage of untruths, falsehoods and lies coming out of this person? How do you explain that?
And when you talk about hysteria, I'm not tweeting in the early hours of the morning in all caps. I'm not out of control in terms of tweeting every morning, noon and night about things that are not true, violating established norms of responsible behavior in the office of the president. If there is anybody who is actually exhibiting hysteria, panic and out-of-controlness, it's coming from the Oval Office, not from the rest of us.
Liberal democracy requires some consensus, some common facts, some common reality for us to have a really good fight over. We can -- we should have bare-knuckled fights, ideologically, politically, everything, but we have to relate it to reality at some point, our interpretation of reality.
And when the central figure in our political system is creating an entire world of unreality, how are we supposed to respond?
And I think we have to respond. We have to respond by saying, excuse me, Mr. President, with all due respect, you keep telling us things that are not true. Can you please stop this?
And if you can't stop it, if you simply keep asserting the world is one way when it really isn't because everybody else can see it, then we have a serious problem at the very heart of our government. And denying that or tiptoeing around it or not saying it plainly is a failure of our duty as journalists, as writers and reporters to say and call it as we see it.
...
STELTER: ... I want to bring in Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax Media, who was with the president on Friday night at Mar-a-Lago… I know you were all talking about fake news, among other topics.
Why does the president call outlets like CNN fake news?
RUDDY: Well, look, if you just watched the last half-hour you have spent on this show calling him a pathological liar and then, beyond that, saying he's mentally crazy and unstable, I mean, is that really -- are you guys really connected to reality? I just -- I sort of almost have to wonder.
I personally think the president -- the president has been in a campaign mode since he got into office. He's been a showbiz guy for many years, very successful. I do think he needs to throttle back some of the Twitter messages.
And I think you are going to start seeing that over time. But people like him. One of the reasons he's been so successful is, he tells people what he -- what he thinks.
To believe, as Andrew claimed, that, because he got the murder statistic rate wrong, that therefore he's a pathological liar, and therefore he's mentally unstable, I really think that's over the top. And that's why millions and millions of people are turning off the big cable news networks, because they really do feel -- I don't know if it's fake news as much as it's biased news.
...This is a man, if he's crazy, he's crazy like a fox. So, I would not underestimate his abilities. And I do think we need to give him a little slack. He's the first non-politician as president. Give him six months. Let's then really come on.
You -- you -- we could pick apart -- I think Barack Obama is a good man, but we could sit here and pick apart all of his personality quirks...
STELTER: ...people are shocked by how many misstatements he's made, right?
When he says on Twitter that all negative polls are fake news, Chris, he knows that's not true.
RUDDY: Well, maybe he's just having a little fun with you too.
(LAUGHTER)
STELTER: That's true. We have got to think about that.
...You mentioned cable news ratings. You said they were down.
The numbers are through the roof for all the big cable news channels right now. And, obviously, the president is watching. Do you think he should be watching less cable news? Would it help him to actually watch a little bit less?
RUDDY: I think he's extremely well-informed.
...Look, no matter what the president says, look what he does.
STELTER: OK.
RUDDY: Foreign policy, this is not a guy mentally unstable. He's reaffirmed NATO. He's issued caution to Iran. He's supported South Korea. He's reaffirmed the special relationship we have with Britain. He's reaffirmed the one China policy with China.
This is signs of a stable, sensible world leader.
You can see how his president has allowed Ruddy to feel perfectly comfortable baldly lying himself.
Robert Reich posted excerpts from Sullivan’s article on Facebook, ending only with “what do you think?”
When will serious, credible people start being brave enough to say what they’re all thinking?