It all might make more sense if he actually were drinking. By all accounts, President Trump doesn’t touch the stuff. So when his own chief of staff said that he has “an alcoholic’s personality,” she was talking about his larger-than-life nature rather than his consumption.
Yet in some ways, it may be an apt description for a president who seems even less inhibited than ever in a way that has many in Washington and beyond shaking their heads or even wondering if the leader of the free world has lost it. The word often whispered by Republicans and shouted by Democrats and Never Trumpers is “unhinged.”
It was one thing when Mr. Trump called a reporter “piggy.” Or casually threatened to put a half-dozen members of Congress to death for accurately stating the laws of war. Or labeled all Somali immigrants “garbage.” Or declared that daring to question his physical energy level at age 79 was “seditious, perhaps even treasonous.” But when Mr. Trump cavalierly attacked the Hollywood icon Rob Reiner just hours after his body was found in a grisly murder scene, it sickened even some of his own political allies.
He followed that no-he-didn’t-just-say-that-did-he performance this week by adding a series of plaques underneath portraits of past presidents on the wall of the Colonnade at the White House that brazenly denigrated some of his predecessors. In effect, he bronzed some of his cartoonish social media juvenilia and bolted it to the taxpayer-owned building where two Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan once lived.
“He’s just lost it,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on social media after the president lashed out at Mr. Reiner. After seeing pictures of the new White House plaques, Mr. Murphy added, “He is such a sad, damaged person.”
