OPINION:
Merely three weeks into his presidency, and the left is already questioning President Donald Trump’s mental health.
Of course, it’s an effort to delegitimize the new president, and, quite frankly, isn’t very original. Hillary Clinton made her entire campaign about Mr. Trump’s temperament and fitness for office. Politico ran a story in October titled: “Could America elect a mentally ill president?”
And Mr. Trump still won.
Nevertheless, Democrats are at it again, desperately trying to convince the people who elected Mr. Trump that they were wrong, that he really, truly is unfit for office. They’re doubling down on their crazy, determined to set us deplorables straight.
The latest attack was spearheaded by Sen. Al Franken this weekend, when he told HBO’s Bill Maher that Democrats aren’t the only ones questioning Mr. Trump’s mental health — it’s his Republican colleagues as well.
“There’s a range in what they’ll say,” Mr. Franken said of what he’s heard from his GOP colleagues behind closed doors. “And some will say that he’s not right mentally. And some are harsher.”
It got great laughs on the anti-Trump entertainment program. But then he ran the punchline into the newsier Sunday morning shows.
On CNN’s State of the Union, Mr. Franken clarified, saying it was only a “few” GOP senators who thought Mr. Trump was crazy and continued to hold fast to his notion that Mr. Trump is out of his mind.
“We all have this suspicion that — you know, that he’s not — he lies a lot,” Mr. Franken said on CNN Sunday. “And, you know, that is not the norm for a president of the United States, or, actually, for a human being.”
Liberal online blog Vox picked up the narrative Monday, printing an article titled: “Inside the debate therapists like me are having over Donald Trump’s mental health.
The author, therapist Sherry Amatenstein, penned: “The other day I added my name to a petition signed by thousands of mental health professionals calling on Trump to be removed from office due to his apparent mental illness.”
She called Mr. Trump’s supposed disorder “Malignant Narcissism,” which has “four toxic components: narcissism, paranoia, anti-social personality disorder, and sadism.”
Last week, the Huffington Post ran an article depicting Mr. Trump’s own team was alarmed by his erratic behavior, and quoted Never-Trump Republican Eliot Cohen as saying, “I’ve been in this town for 26 years. I have never seen anything like this. I genuinely do not think this is a mentally healthy president.”
And Ruth Marcus, a columnist for The Washington Post, declared after Mr. Trump’s first week in office that it was “among the most alarming in the history of the American presidency,” which left her “rattled to the core by his unhinged behavior.”
My question to the left is: Where do we go from here?
The mentally ill claims about Mr. Trump are so outrageous and so partisan that they went ignored before the election, and they will go ignored again.
As a Trump supporter told me last week: “We voted for Trump knowing he was going to crack and scramble some eggs in Washington and we don’t mind if in the process, there are a few eggshells.”
Yet the media has failed to recognize this simple truth: That Trump supporters wanted change.
That they really want Mr. Trump to drain the swamp, and are thrilled he’s mixing things up in Washington, D.C. That they don’t give a darn about what Mr. Cohen has to say, because he is the establishment — he’s a swamp creature that after 26 years in power needs to go.
None of Mr. Trump’s actions in his first three weeks should come as alarming. They’re exactly what Mr. Trump promised he’d do on the campaign trail: build a wall, thoroughly vet refugees from terror prone nations, shut down sanctuary cities and enforce national immigration laws. If the media was listening, they’d understand this.
None of his executive actions have come out of left field, nor did his Supreme Court pick.
So how is any of this “unhinged” or “deranged?”
It’s not. The left and the mainstream media just doesn’t like the policies Mr. Trump is putting forth — or the fact that he was elected on them.
So instead of going to battle on ideological issues, they’ve resorted to calling him names. To challenging his mental health. To attempting to convince the American public they made a mistake.
They’ve done it before and it failed. Yet they’re doing it again.
Isn’t that the very definition of insanity?
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