Post #192: The President Must Go

25 March 2026

“Culture is the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters that most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

—Matthew Arnold, Preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869)

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

—President DONALD J. TRUMP on “Truth Social” (21 March 2026)

     Who would say such a crazy thing in public, let alone broadcast it to all the world, as if petty peevishness and a mile-wide vicious streak were something to be proud of? Who else but the 47th President of the United States (note the lower-case lettering beside the bombast of the all-caps), and we are so accustomed to his wretched antics that by now they are perhaps only good for a tired cringe. Some may even laugh, but it is not very funny to be reminded that a madman is calling the shots in a war that will blight much of the world for years to come, dragging us all towards the edge without knowing what he is doing, and without anybody able to stop him.

     This is no mere matter of “taking insensitivity to a new level,” as I just saw in a CNN headline; it is not even doing so with idiocy or obnoxiousness. Mr. Trump’s comments aren’t objectionable for having failed the endless sensitivity training that the politely educated have been forcing upon us these past thirty years; they are alarming, like much else coming out of the White House these days, because they are plainly insane—so far beyond the bounds of appropriate or even merely defensible conduct among reasonably civilized human beings that it makes one’s head spin, vertigo set in, and words fail.

     Never mind that speaking ill of the dead is base and odious unless there is the strongest justification for doing so; or that the deceased was a Marine decorated for wartime valor and the straightest of arrows, by all accounts other than the President’s; or that he was he appointed as FBI director by a Republican predecessor, back when the once-grand old party could still be counted on for a bit of probity. The late Robert Mueller crossed The Don by doing his job as duly appointed Special Counsel, and that alone sufficed for turning him into a bad man by a perverted rule-book in which conscientiousness does not figure. Have you no shred of decency at all, sir, at long last?

     Let us pause over this, for it is as remarkable as it is appalling: the current President of the United States does not seem to grasp the first thing about what it means to do a job simply as a matter of responsibility. It bears repeating: the man with the nuclear codes at his command not only lacks a reliable sense of responsibility and propriety himself, he does not understand it in others. He plainly has no conception of what it means to carry out public duties, or to put an office first, not oneself. Instead he thinks that doing so, at least in anyone who happens to disagree with him, is the mark of a low character. Thus is the world turned upside down. Who can tell whether anyone could really be far enough gone to believe truly something so delusional, nay demented, or whether perhaps Mr. Trump does recognize, however dimly, that the inferiority is all on his side in fact. (There would not be much consolation in the latter, so long as he keeps carrying on like a badly brought-up pre-teen with glaring behavioral problems.)

     Yet, every time Mr. Trump plumbs another record-low of boorishness or descends further still into loud-mouthed rambling and incoherence, some of our contemporaries are sure to cheer him on for his blathering big-talk, because raw power is apparently enough to satisfy them. We live in an age of pornography, that of obscene power included. What gives? Sanity itself, I fear, my own included.

     One often hears that there might be something refreshing about someone saying what he really thinks, warts and all, in our over-scripted and over-sensitive age. I quite agree. Alas, what an unmitigated jackass the loose talker is revealed to be in this case (Donald J. indeed), and how little he cares to think before he speaks his mind, such as it is! Aye, there’s the rub, not in wishing for more anodyne characters in public life.

     Public service has been called by that name for a reason, however much of an empty conceit it may too often be. Political office calls for a level-headed, sure sense of responsibility, above all else, and we must face the terrifying reality of having at the helm of the USS Constitution someone who is not only devoid of such a sense altogether, but also unaware of lacking anything.

     Someone who does not scruple to sell copies of the revered document under his own name (along with an even more eminent book to which he can lay even less of a claim) while proving himself quite indifferent, at best, to the rule of law and other core principles of limited and divided government.

     Someone who sees no wrong in declaring himself King (over congestion pricing in New York City, of all thing!), or in tearing down a wing of the White House when he feels like it, because neither the law nor politics can catch up with him quickly enough to stop him.

     Someone who sees no problem with changing as if it were a vanity license plate the name of a cultural center already dedicated to the memory of someone else (far worthier despite his own grave hypocrisy issues).

     Someone who plays around with tariffs and world trade as if in a video game, or a clown show (motley fooling of the scary kind having become the hallmark of the second Trump administration); who bullies other countries as if it were a matter of sandbox fun, as well as a matter of course; and who wages war in the same spirit—unimpeded by the least understanding of the rules and realities that govern either economics or warfare (see asterisk below).

     Someone, not least, who does not think twice about making such disgraceful displays of himself at international gatherings that he not only shocks and stupefies, but fills with revulsion witnesses from around the world who, even if they may have to dissemble their distaste (or kowtow before the powers that be), cannot fathom how someone so obviously and mortifyingly unfit for the most powerful job in the world could have risen past all the safeguards to such heights. (Was not the electoral college once designed to prevent precisely this, before it was reduced to a bizarre randomizing device?)

     I grant that this is not what everyone sees; there can be no view from everywhere. But it is nonetheless a widely-shared perception among those not easily dismissed just because they are better people than Mr. Trump (as if it could ever be a distinction to outdo others in vulgarity, rather than to outshine them on the ascending paths of the true, the good, and the beautiful). Mr. Trump knows little and does not wish to know more—nay, he positively prides himself on his wallowing. Thus he stands before us as the age’s anti-Plato, the negation of philosophy and humanism personified, and the hoofs of the swinish multitude clamor on his behalf precisely for that reason, as Burke prophesied they would, treading everything into the mire that cannot or will not be reduced to their own diminutive stature.

     To be sure the noise is deafening, but before we allow ourselves to be swayed by it, we should consider who these enthusiasts are and what it is about Mr. Trump that pleases them so. On which side of the great incorruptible scales do the Trumpian hordes throw their considerable weight? Is it the good and the admirable of all classes lining up behind him, or rather their opposites, brimming with delight at seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of high office? A fierce class war is raging here, indeed, but it has little to do with social stratification, and everything with cultural divides in Matthew Arnold’s sense of making sweetness and light prevail, or not. That we must all pick our sides according to what we see, not what simply is, does not mean that we all see equally well, equally clearly, or equally far. Lord have mercy on our blindness, for we know not what we do.

     The President, awful to say, looks categorically unfit to be holding the high office he does—this not politically so much as personally. In his current state more than ever, he does not even begin to measure up to its demands, whether at the level of intellectual capacity, good character, or sound mental and moral judgment (though he is far from alone in this deficiency, it must be admitted, and not only on his side of the house either). It is not a question of picking teams anymore, but of how long to look on while a man patently, perniciously, and preposterously incompetent lays waste to fundamental principles once thought inviolable. The writing has been on the wall, quite unmistakably, since at least the well-poisoning aftermath of the 2020 election, if not from the very outset of this sorry saga. In anyone else one would dismiss talk of a third term as a silly publicity stunt, to say nothing of presenting it as a “reward” for a “stolen” election. But in this case, who could be sure that the self-promoter in chief does not mean every word? Must the very walls, nay the ceiling itself come down before the loyalists too realize that a monster is in charge and that the mad King must go?

     (His understudies look no better, you say? Maybe so, maybe not, as a matter of opinion and political preference; but that is not my point. Any of the heirs apparent, if ever it came to that, may be good or bad, right or wrong, preferable in their positions on the issues of the day or not. But at least they appear to be by and large in command of their faculties, which is more than can be said of the current officeholder—and therein lies all the difference for my purposes. The rest is ordinary politics, and I have said my good-byes to all that (no. 175).)

     It was one thing to dread, in the run-up to the 2024 election, what a Harris presidency would have meant; or to question one’s own long-running prejudices (dating, in my case also, to long before The Donald changed hats) in a desperate effort to find some bright spots in him somewhere, not just blind or blighted ones; above all, to guard against hysteria on so collectively divisive and deranging an issue, since nothing is more vital in staring down madness than keeping a cool head (no mean task). I have wrestled at length with all three over the past two years, not least on this blog (see “Trump” in the Index of the main site). All this, then, is one thing, I say; but it is quite another to close one’s eyes to the truth, horrible but inescapable, that a man always erratic and inchoate has crossed over into unhinged territory.

     So many decades of making himself and others believe his endless tall tales have long left Mr. Trump with a precarious grip on reality. But we have lately entered a new stage: whether on account of too much power going more and more to his head, or too many yes-men reinforcing his crazy ideas, or simply a deteriorating brain, he seems well on the way to losing it completely. Thus we face no longer a political challenge in the narrow sense, but an existential crisis, with our very safety and sanity at danger, and this not only within the confines of the United States, which would be bad enough, but wherever the President’s baneful influence reaches, which is very far indeed.

     Further cognitive decline, along with the loss of whatever traces of coherence and inhibition could still be found in Mr. Trump before, will not make him any more amenable to reason or to better counsel from others. Quite the contrary, it will further strengthen his resolve to stay put no matter what, until the bitter end, and even beyond January 2029, if he could make his madman’s vision prevail. Nor can I imagine anyone in the inner circle, or anywhere else in the corridors of power, embarking on the suicide mission of trying to tell the greatest leader and statesman the world has ever seen that the time has come to step down because he is manifestly not up to the job. Not until hell freezes over; and before it does so, things will get a lot hotter for all of us, including the guiding genius himself, who may at last have gotten himself into a bind he cannot wriggle out of. Let the better angels of our nature cry out ever so loudly for someone to save the ship of state from the raging elements, storms of steel included, with a sub-Ahab in command—it will not happen. Instead we will all go down together, and not in a noble cause either.

     Let the lost soul before us be hailed by ever so many as a secular savior, he remains a puffed-up buffoon with no resources in defeat whatsoever. Even at the best of times, in the meridian splendor of the most prosperous success, he seems barely capable of acting graciously towards anyone, in public at least, for more than a few moments at a time, lest any ray of the limelight be deflected. What generosity he can muster requires triumph on his side, complete outward submission on the other. A T-Rex, he has been called—either mate with him or face his maw—and the image is not made any less repulsive by the suspicion that he might not mind it too much, as bespeaking power.

     Trump’s star has risen far higher than anyone would have thought possible a decade ago; but it too must come down at last. And when it does, our self-appointed Sun King will not be able to handle losing, except by trying to talk and imagine it away. Just what depths he may sink to as his losses mount is anyone’s guess. Perhaps the Iranians will prove his undoing, not on a level field, but in a protracted asymmetrical struggle for which our man has neither the stomach, the stamina, nor the strategic brains. (I grew up on images of the Teheran mob and adolescent “martyrs,” and the fall of the Islamic would find me cheering; but first it must fall, and things are not looking good.*)

     More predictably, it will be the midterms that catch up with Mr. Trump—never a happy moment for a sitting President, let alone one with approval ratings like his. Even were he to clear all other hurdles against the odds, survival artist that he has so often proved himself, he is sure to be undone a little more every day by advancing old age and by seeing the final limit to his power drawing near. Neither the ravages of ageing nor the melancholy retirement from great power is easy for anyone, no matter how graceful and good-natured; what convulsions of nastiness will accompany someone on the way down who is neither the former nor the latter, can only be darkly guessed at. We got a bitter foretaste after the 2020 election of what a sore loser and recalcitrant retiree we must expect Mr. Trump to be; his last laps may turn out the worst yet, a truly frightful prospect.

     Whether the hull of the good ship can survive three more years of battering under such a captain, I no longer dare to foresee. We can only hope. I used to urge calm and caution, insisting that the Constitution was, after all, designed to withstand precisely this kind of stress-test (no. 157). I am no longer so sure. There will be a Republic still in three more years, and it will bear the same name; but whether it will still be recognizable to its friends by the end, is another matter altogether. Too many guard-rails have been taken down for too long (not only by Mr. Trump, and not only in this century), too many time-honored conventions invalidated, too many red lines crossed. I look with horrified wonder at how bleak and alien the picture has already turned. I dread to find out what will remain of it when Mr. Trump is done.

*There is an art of politics and war, with a set of guiding principles behind it that are not mere sentimentalities, but tools of the trade, even for the most hard-nosed practitioners (think Machiavelli the actual thinker, not the debased caricature). By those principles, one should never threaten what one is not willing and able to carry out, and watering down deadlines after they have barely been issued destroys all credibility in future threats.

     The law does not fall silent in war, as has been said since Roman times. (Cicero excelled at turning a vicious phrase and twisting a verbal knife, but he was not nearly as good at politics and came to a bad end.) The law merely gets drowned out by the roar of the explosions temporarily, but it never disappears, from the books or from the hearts of men. I hope to God that it is sheer craziness on Mr. Trump’s part to imagine that his soldiery would forget all about their military codes and resort to terrorist tactics such as destroying electricity plants just because the imbecile notion has struck an unstable character’s fancy.

     But he is the commander in chief! Indeed he is, heaven help us. What next? What if he started thinking aloud about nuking Teheran to test the potency of his thunderbolts, or just because he enjoys striking terror into the hearts of friends and foes alike? Crazy talk, you say. Of course it is: but whom do we have to thank for that? Meanwhile any remaining good-will on the ground in Iran gets dissipated and a notoriously nationalistic population will rally in the face of an existential menace to all, not just a loathsome regime. Who could blame them?

     As Geoffrey Cox thundered in the Commons in a very different context, on 15 January 2019, as Theresa May’s Attorney General, defending her Brexit deal: “It would be the height of irresponsibility to contemplate with equanimity such a situation. What are you playing at? What are you doing? You are not children in the playground, you are playing with people’s lives!” Where children play with dangerous toys, there must be adults in the room. That used to be taken for granted; apparently it no longer is.

PS (31 March): In our topsy-turvy World of Trump, the most bizarre ironies cannot be ruled out. Where a more responsible executive might find it very difficult to extricate himself—from the current war, for example, in which Mr. Trump has embroiled us all, directly or indirectly—the wonder-man alone may be able simply to walk away, deciding that he has had enough, declaring victory irrespective of inconvenient facts on the ground, and discarding without a thought all considerations of sunk costs and reputational damage that might constrain more grounded characters (not always to more rational effect, sad to say). Most galling of all, for believers in leading a well-examined life by the lights of any kind of reason, however dim, the best hope for a relatively quick end to the imbroglio in Iran may now lie in precisely such erratic behavior on the President’s part.

     But perhaps I am still failing to take the proper measure of Mr. Trump, and he is not the confused soul I depict above, but a lifelong student of the dark arts who has been staying true to what he learned from Roy Cohn. To wit:

     Attack, attack, attack!

     Admit nothing, deny everything.

     No matter what happens, no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are—you claim victory and never admit defeat. Never admit defeat!

     It’s an advantage not to care what people think of you.

     Play the man, not the ball: this is a country of men, not laws!

     You create your own reality: truth is a malleable thing.

     You have to be willing to do anything to anyone, to win.

     (Summary courtesy of Federico Ferrara.)

[Written a week before the gross vulgarities of Easter Sunday, April 5th, and the even viler obscenities that followed before the pseudo-denouement and its bizarre twists and turns ever since.

     Appalling as they are, Trump’s verbal flirtations with mass murder must be discounted somewhat—part bluster, part bluff, part flailing desperation, rather than expressions of settled genocidal intent. Even so, the abominable words were not only spoken, but proclaimed in writing for all the world to see and remember with mortification. Further evidence, if any were needed, that things have indeed reached such a fever-pitch as I lamented in my text, and that we are adrift on a ghost ship—not completely rudderless, but getting jerked now here now there by a wraith at the helm and a crew of hollow men posing as sailors, with all nautical principles cast overboard. The surrounding atmosphere of farcical rapacity and imbecile cruelty resembles nothing so much as Charlie Marlow’s reports from up the Congo River. For the ring of ivory in the air, substitute oil;** for Kurtz read Klutz (see my Interlude on the fairy tale by H. C. Andersen, after no. 122). For the roles of station master and accountant the casting competition is so fierce that no determination can be made here, to say nothing of the countless voracious pilgrim extras. Exterminate all the brutes. The Horror.

     Admittedly the terrible edges of having to win at all cost do get softened somewhat when, against all demands of logic, someone may simply declare himself triumphant no matter what. However scary the Iranian interlude looks under the current dispensation, it is no joy to consider what an icy realist like Putin, with terrifying blind spots of his own, would have done once his plans for a swift victory had miscarried. The example of Ukraine, where untold hundreds of thousands had to die or be maimed because there could be no backing down from a fatal miscalculation on the one hand, and no ceding of sacred ground on the other, is surely even more melancholy than what we have been witnessing around the land of lions and mullahs. Alas, to allow that Mr. Trump’s fantasies and inconsistencies may have at least this thin silver lining does not make it any easier to watch him playing so recklessly for high stakes with less than a full deck, inventing at will cards that he wish he held, and otherwise acting as if the game had no rules at all, save for what catches his fleeting fancy from one moment to the next.

     Might we console ourselves, as the programming keeps getting crazier, that “at least it’s good television,” as The Donald crowed after the ugly spat with Zelensky before running cameras at the White House? Entertainment has its place, granted; but it’s not very funny when we are amusing ourselves and others to death. (Neil Postman’s analysis, forty years on, is as timely as ever, and looks dated only in its relative quaintness.) This is not a soap opera, dark comedy, or a game show we are watching, but globalized big-power politics that comes at a bitter price to many millions around the world, and one would have to be callous in the extreme not to be disconcerted at such perilous gambling, literally within reach of the nuclear buttons. The fact that there are still those who can look upon these shocking scenes with complaisance, or enjoyment even, is not the least wretched aspect of the mess we have gotten ourselves into.

     Copious crocodile-tears have been shed of late by some of the loudest apologists for Mr. Trump’s antics over the years—as if their man’s fundamental untruthfulness and unreliability (see especially my no. 147) could come as a revelation to anyone. This from individuals who proclaimed most vociferously, when it still suited them, that Mr. Trump’s glaring personal defects could be safely overlooked in light of the supposed soundness of his political instincts—though all the while these false prophets called themselves conservatives and never tired, in more convenient contexts, to pontificate about the cardinal importance of character in public as in private life (if only). What strange bedfellows politics makes. Now the disenchanted Friends of Donald are down to confessing their indelible “shame” before the crowd. It remains to be seen whether theirs goes much further than that of the false idol they have abandoned at last—or maybe it would be safer to say, for the time being. After all, Iran could still turn, reversing the stampede once more and making him a savior again, to some…

     All that said, I still cannot see a Hitler in Trump (my text on Amusing Ourselves to Death, no. 158, combines both themes). A bit of Mussolini, perhaps, but more Nero—another inveterate showman with adolescent tendencies (as opposed to a trench-hardened hater like Hitler), out of his depth on a stage far too vast for his immodest talents. (Nero had the partial excuse of his youth, at least: he came to the throne as a teenager and was ignominiously dispatched at thirty.) The degenerate emperor too loved gold to excess and indulged in vanity projects on the grandest scale: witness his sprawling Golden House and the colossal statue of himself that he left behind (it did not long survive him). For Nero too, Rome’s majestic heritage was little more than a stage set, and although he probably did not have the worst conflagration in the city’s history started deliberately, neither did he scruple to appropriate the precious real estate once the opportune destruction had occurred. (Nero was not in Rome when the fire raged, and the fiddle had not been invented; he favored singing to the lyre.)

     Some things even Nero got right, however: his famous Baths, for example. (“What could be worse than Nero, and what better than his Baths?” Roman wits quipped.) Trump’s presidential library will not fully deserve the name, but it may well turn out more fun than all the others as an entertainment venue. If only we could jump ahead and skip the sorry rest.

**I am reminded of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s meditation on oil in his celebrated book on Iran, Shah of Shahs (1985): “Oil is above all a great temptation: the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money… The concept oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident, through a kiss of fortune and not by sweat, anguish, hard work. In this sense oil is a fairy tale and, like every fairy tale, a bit of lie. Oil fills us with such arrogance that we begin believing that we can overcome the most unyielding obstacles, but it has its defects: it does not replace thinking or wisdom.”

(Continually pondered and revised throughout the month of April)]