Trump's Big CON: His Mental Fitness is Our Greatest Threat

UPDATE:  "During a national security panel at last week's Aspen Idea Festival, retired general David Petraeus offered what the panel's host labeled perhaps the most robust defense of the Trump administration's foreign policy yet.

Then Petraeus was asked about Trump personally, and things took a turn.

As political affairs scholar David Rothkopf noted in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday, he asked Petraeus — after Petraeus argued that Trump had surrounded himself with a solid team that was instituting a measured, continuity-based foreign policy with plenty of successes — whether Trump himself was fit to serve as president.

Petraues's response was decidedly not 'yes.' Instead, he said Trump's fitness for the office was actually 'immaterial.'

I went back to the video to see if some context was missing from Rothkopf's op-ed. There isn't: It's as damning as it sounds. Here's a guy whom Trump considered nominating for secretary of state putting a pretty good face on the Trump administration — and then being unable to say whether the president is a mentally fit commander in chief. . .

This is a dance that many a Trump defender has been forced into — arguing that things aren't as bad with Trump as some would have you believe, and then punting when being asked to vouch for Trump personally. The latter is a much more difficult thing to do, because it means you are attaching your expertise to Trump's unpredictability and whatever he might do in the future.

But it's also important to emphasize just how low a bar this is. The fact that Petraeus can't even say that Trump is a fit commander in chief speaks volumes. And Petraeus seemed to be going out of his way on the panel to argue that U.S. foreign policy and national security are on the right path. He said repeatedly that we shouldn't get bogged down in Trump's 'discordant' tweets and public comments and should focus on actions. . .

[T]he argument from Petraeus seemed to be that Trump himself can only do so much damage and that the people around him would keep him in check — implying that Trump was, to his credit, allowing them to keep him in check. This is what some of Trump's biggest critics have hoped would be the case, and Petraeus suggested their wishes were coming true.

Then he was offered the chance to come out and say what he really meant. His nonresponse spoke volumes."

Read the Washington Post, David Petraeus’s damning nonresponse on Trump’s fitness to serve.

"Last week, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I moderated a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era. On the panel, former CIA director David H. Petraeus offered the most robust defense of President Trump’s foreign policy that I have heard. Central to his premise were two facts. First, he argued that Trump’s national security team was the strongest he had ever seen. Next, he argued that whereas President Barack Obama was indecisive to the point of paralysis, such as in the case of Syria, Trump is decisive.

Toward the end of the conversation, we turned to Trump’s erratic behavior and I noted that for the first time in three decades in the world of foreign policy, I was getting regular questions about the mental health of the president.

I asked Petraeus, a man I respect, if he thought the president was fit to serve. His response was, 'It’s immaterial.' He argued that because the team around Trump was so good, they could offset whatever deficits he might have. I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense.

That is where we are now. The president’s tweeting hysterically at the media is just an element of this. So too is his malignant and ever-visible narcissism. The president has demonstrated himself to have zero impulse control and a tendency to damage vital international relationships with ill-considered outbursts, to trust very few of the people in his own government, and to reportedly rant and shout at staff and even at the television sets he obsessively watches.

Whether he is actually clinically ill is a matter for psychiatric professionals to consider. But when you take the above behaviors and combine them with his resistance to doing the work needed to be president, to sitting down for briefings, to reading background materials, to familiarizing himself with details enough to manage his staff, there is clearly a problem. Compound it with his deliberate reluctance to fill key positions in government and his wild flip-flopping on critical issues from relations with China to trade, and you come to a conclusion that it may be that Trump’s fitness to serve as president is our nation’s core national security issue.

Not only does the president diminish the office with his pettiness; he also shows disregard for constitutional principles including free speech, freedom of religion and separation of powers, and he operates as though he were above ethics laws. Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States."

[T]he stark reality is that objective analysis reveals that we have never before seen a president so unfit for office. Even President Richard Nixon at his moments of darkest paranoia was a professional public servant who understood the office and the stakes associated with it. One might, on this Independence Day week, have to go back to King George III to find a head of state who so threatened America. But there is no precedent for one whose character is so obviously ill-suited to the presidency."

Read the Washington Post, The greatest threat facing the United States is its own president.