There are a lot of people who think that Donald Trump is crazy like a fox. That he is much cleverer than he appears to be, and that one should never underestimate the man.

Don’t count me among this group.

I think he’s just plain crazy, as in mentally unhinged.[1]

Which is not to say that I don’t think he has talents. He’s clearly a master salesman. He’s an extraordinary showman. He has exceptional talent for self-promotion. But he’s still mentally unhinged.

As we watch Trump’s first week in office, he is behaving pretty much as one would have expected, especially for anyone who has read any of the several very excellent biographies of Trump that have been available for some time.

The New York Times noted that Trump had a very “rocky” first weekend. As the Times reported, Trump seemed to swing back and forth between celebrating his Presidency and wallowing in self-pity over the fact that there were many more people who came out for the Women’s march than for his inauguration. The times wrote:

“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” he posted on Twitter in the morning. “Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

Kellyanne Conway, his counselor, contributed to the combative mood in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd when she described the falsehoods that the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, had told reporters Saturday night as “alternative facts” — an assertion that lit up Twitter.[2]

Then, a few days ago, Trump renewed his allegations that “3 to 5 million” illegal aliens (or at least illegal voters) cast ballots in the November presidential election, and called for a “major investigation.”[3]

Trump has been so erratic in his short time in office that, as reported in the New Yorker magazine, “Trump aides keep leaking embarrassing stories about how he can’t handle embarrassment.” In that article, the magazine noted that:

The president is a 70-year-old child whose TV time must be closely monitored — because any news story that upsets his ego will trigger a temper tantrum followed by irrational demands that his indulgent, overwhelmed guardians will be helpless to refuse.

Or so Donald Trump’s aides keep confiding to the nearest available reporter.

On Sunday, one of the president’s confidantes told Politico that his staffers have to “control information that may infuriate him,” a task made difficult by the fact that the leader of the free world “gets bored and likes to watch TV.”

Other commentators have suggested that it’s only a matter of time until the Donald just snaps.  For example, a blogger named Richard Willmsen from Sheffield, England (who has also lived in Ireland, Portugal, China, Spain, Mexico and Italy) wrote a long and interesting piece entitled “Donald Trump is going to snap very soon, and here is how I know.” As Willmsen wrote:

These first two days of his ‘Presidency’ saw paranoid and recriminatory tweets, a speech to the CIA in which he ranted bitterly about media reports of his coronation, and his press spokesperson being sent out to deliver another paranoid self-pitying rant. People are mercilessly taking the piss out of the piss-poor attendance at his pitiable inauguration, and Trump appears to be following every single one of them on Twitter. It’s clear to me that whatever means he’s used to survive up until this point aren’t going to work in his new role. There’s simply too much scrutiny and ridicule, and it’s going too deep. He’s too much of a shallow narcissist to ignore it. Trump is going to learn the wisdom of Jacques Lacan: “the madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king”. Whatever monster he has buried in his mind is going to rise up to bite huge chunks of him from within. . . And it’s getting worse. People are laughing louder. He’s now put himself in a position where the entire world knows that he is venal, insecure, stupid and deluded.[4]

Others have suggested that Trump is clinically a malignant narcissist.  For example, John D. Gartner, a registered psychotherapist from the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical School, has said that we’ve seen enough from Trump to be able to diagnose him in this way.[5] It would explain a lot about Trump, starting with the question of why he is so angry. For a guy who seems to have had virtually every advantage in the world, this guy is remarkably and unusually angry, with a set of needs that are clearly unquenchable.

If I have some sympathy for Trump because he is mentally ill,[6] I have none at all for Überhypocrite Mitch McConnell, Turncoat Paul Ryan, Kellyanne “Propaganda Barbie” Conway and Steven “I really am an Asshole” Bannon. It was Bannon, of course, who recently opined to the media that they are the “opposition party” and should “keep their mouths shut.”

The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. I want you to quote this, the media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

Bannon’s war against the legitimate media is, as anyone familiar with this sort of thing knows, straight out of the propaganda playbook. They keep calling the mainstream media the “dishonest” media. We should all start calling them the “honest media,” because they are the only ones who are not lying to us right now. The Donald, as has already been proven multiple times by now, is a serial liar who is incapable of telling the truth.

As long as he doesn’t start a nuclear Armageddon, I think it will be fascinating to watch the Trump presidency implode like a slow-motion train wreck. Of course, train wrecks can have serious consequences. A lot of people can get hurt. But all these smug assholes running around Washington D.C. right now . . . they’re eventually going to get theirs.  It could take a long time. But be patient, my friends. What goes around comes around. They are eventually going to get theirs. And I will enjoy that so much. Schadenfreude is alive in this part of town.

[1] I do think that a lot of the Republican leadership, including Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, are very clever indeed. They have certainly outfoxed their Democratic counterparts for a very long time.

[2] Our dear favorite female campaign manager will therefore forever be known as Kellyanne “Alternative Facts” Conway.

[3] This renewed allegation caused Lindsay Graham to snap, saying that the Donald “was undermining confidence in both the American democratic system and himself with the continued claims of voter fraud.” It would also be remarkable if all of these alleged 3 million votes went against him. Even if there were 3 million illegal votes and 2/3rds went against him, he still would have lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. So there, Donald.

[4] A few days later Willmsen also wrote a rejoinder to the various people who had been commenting on his blog, in which he concedes that “it’s not inevitable that Trump will break down. . . However, the events on Sunday at the CIA suggest that he’s unable to cope without a cheering or baying crowd. He got that at his rallies and he gets it on Twitter but being President doesn’t work like that.”

[5] Technically, psychologists and psychiatrists are not supposed to “diagnose” public figures without having examined them personally. This is what is known as the “Goldwater Rule” defined as “the informal term for part of the ethics code of the American Psychiatric Association saying it is wrong to provide a professional opinion of a public figure without examining that person and gaining consent to discuss the evaluation.”

[6] Please note that the sympathy I have for Trump is very limited and pertains only to his mental illness. I don’t want my friends to think that I’ve gone completely soft in the head.