How to defuse the 'ticking time bomb' in the White House

“The president is bonkers,” declared Contrarian editor in chief Jennifer Rubin on Wednesday. But while she asserts that President Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior poses risks to the country, she also thinks something can be done to defuse “the ticking time bomb in the White House.”

“We should not be surprised that Donald Trump is mentally and emotionally imploding under the cumulative effect of plunging poll numbers, his disastrous Iran war… and an increasingly irritable Senate Republican caucus,” writes Rubin. As she explains, Trump has seen plunging support among his base, met several major legal setbacks, and encountered “multiple legislative losses unprecedented for a president with majorities in both houses.” On top of that, he’s watched his name get scraped off the Kennedy Center, had nearly all the performers for his birthday party cancel, and is met by a torrent of boos anytime he attends a sports event, resulting in “the pathological narcissist’s worst nightmare: public humiliation.”

While “Trump’s mental and physical disintegration has been on display for many years,” in the face of his onslaught of embarrassments, Rubin suggests that the “velocity” of his decompensation has increased.

“As a group of 36 mental health professionals recently explained in a stinging written statement, Trump’s outbursts are not ‘momentary lapses nor political theater’; they instead ‘reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline,’” writes Rubin. “And this was before Trump’s explosion on Meet the Press, among the most cringeworthy presidential media appearances ever.” What’s more, says Rubin, “you do not have to be a medical professional to conclude Trump is getting much worse much more quickly.”

Faced with such deranged leadership, argues Rubin, voters must “demand a robust debate in public, in Congress, and on the midterm campaign trail about the gravity of leaving a patently unfit, raving lunatic in the Oval Office.” She asserts that “pro-democracy forces must educate the public, compel legacy media to cover his breakdown as vigorously and consistently as they did Joe Biden’s health after his 2024 debate, and pressure Republicans to remove or at least restrain him.”

She admits that there are difficulties with this as Democrats are currently the minority in both houses of Congress, but suggests a three-stage plan of action.

First, she argues that Democrats should leverage “so-called shadow hearings” like they have to expose other urgent issues, such as ICE brutality, writing, “A serious, sober subcommittee… with professional staff should conduct methodical public hearings and assemble a comprehensive report documenting Trump’s deterioration. In the laying out the circumstances and frequency of his mental/emotional breakdowns, the public should receive ample evidence that Trump’s increasingly severe meltdowns are not a function of simple aging or odd personality quirks… but of dangerous mental and emotional dysfunction.”

Next, she says Democrats and any patriotic Republicans should “present a series of specific, feasible recommendations, including legislation to compel the release of all presidential medical records and to require independent medical evaluation of presidents and vice presidents. They should spell out rules to implement the 25th Amendment. They also should make clear that once they have subpoena power after the midterms, they will supplement findings by calling witnesses to testify under oath as to his observable behavior.”

Finally, she says, lawmakers “must undertake a focused and robust push to present their findings to the press and the voters. If the president’s emotional and mental competency is not the most compelling issue of the moment, it is hard to imagine what would be. Republican House and Senate candidates need to be put on the spot in every public encounter: Do they think the president is of sound mind? What do they intend to do to, for example, protect nuclear codes? Why shouldn’t the public have full visibility into the health of a president whose conduct has been so obviously aberrant? Democrats should pound away at the issue in floor speeches, media spots, op-eds, and public forums.”

Rubin asserts that the very survival of American democracy depends on a willingness to challenge Trump and his loyalists, and that by following the course she’s laid out, “voters might well become convinced that extraordinary action is required to defuse the ticking time bomb in the White House.”

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