The President’s ever more bizarre behavior raises a question I’ve long wanted to ask. How do his handlers keep him going? I mean the whole circle of handlers, including his physicians. What cocktails of psychotropic drugs have the psychiatrists been creating for him? We can surmise it contains Ritalin, his old drug of choice, but what additions have they made to get him over the breakdowns of his presidency? The present messes Trump is making and the countless messes he has made for the last four years and over the span of his life make it plain that the man is mentally ill. 

Whom should we blame for making a madman President? I wouldn’t blame all who have voted for Trump. Some Trump voters are, I’m sure, people of good conscience and good faith. But his calculated appeals to American racism, anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, anti-feminism, selfishness, and swaggering ignorance have been so effective that they must describe the character of very many who voted for him. They love him, because he shares their hatreds. They love him, because he never makes them feel embarrassed about their willful ignorance. They love him, because he has heard their cry “Please don’t make me change! Please don’t make me think!”.

But more sinister, in my view, are the Republicans in Congress. All but a few of them have been absolute Quislings, traitors to democracy. They have exploited Trump’s cancerous popularity for their own selfish ends, and have let the world believe that America is finished, because our President is mad and much of Congress is mad, or considers it advantageous to pretend to be mad.

So the mindless, by voting for him, his handlers, by cajoling him, his physicians, by drugging him, and the politicians, by fawning on him, gave us four years of maniac rule. They have put on display how lazy, feeble, and hypocritical America really is.