Up to now, Trump’s behavior has been analyzed as political inexperience, everyday insecurity, lack of attention span, calculated disruption, autocratic eruptions—even relished as a type of diversion that can be satirized by comedians. Whenever the question of his mental fitness is explicitly raised, the professionals are brought in to declare the issue unethical.

The most frequent argument is that calling Trump mentally ill, and deriving from that judgment the conclusion that he is therefore unfit to serve in the White House, will stigmatize mentally ill people. Yet every sane person knows that there are as many varieties of mental illness as there are varieties of what passes for mental health—and that sometimes the line between the two is blurry, arbitrary, or downright illusory. And who among us is so certain of his or her own sanity not to doubt it from time to time?

As cavalier as this may sound, mental illness does not need to be professionally diagnosed. We don’t need to be told by a doctor that the guy who is coughing and sneezing at the other end of the train car is probably sick, though we don’t know if it is a cold, the flu, bronchitis, pneumonia, or an allergy. All we know is that the safe thing to do is to stay away from him. When someone is compulsively lying, continuously contradicting himself, imploring the approval of people even as he is attacking them, exalting people one day and abusing and vilifying them the next, then the question of his mental state is moot. The safe thing to do is not just to stay away from him, but to keep him away from situations where he can do harm.

In a different set of circumstances, it would be better for the press to ignore the question of a president’s mental fitness altogether. But this is not a normal set of circumstances. There is not necessarily, to use what has become an obnoxious buzz phrase, a “new normal.” There is either a shift from what we are used to that occurs within the boundaries of what is rationally and morally acceptable, or there is a shift from what we are used to that occurs outside those boundaries. We are now in the latter situation. It is new, but it is anything but normal.

If you watched Trump’s news conference last Thursday and thought, “This is Trump talking” then you would not have been sensitive to the profound transformation in the country that has occurred beneath all the distracting upheavals. But if you watched from a distance, as it were, thinking, “This is the American president talking,” then you would have been alarmed in a new kind of way.

It’s the way bullies who are used to not being contradicted talk.
And its the way people who want to be led by bullies like to be spoken to. I knew this man was unfit to be President when I heard how he insulted the other Republicans who opposed him in the primaries, and how he said things (like Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination) that were obviously false. But what really scared me not was that he said those things, there is after all, no shortage of mean, crazy and stupid people in the world. No, what really scared me was how many people really ate this up, cheered him on. They saw it as honest, refreshing, direct, “cool”.

He makes me ashamed of my country–not because he’s crazy, stupid and mean, (lots of people are born that way) but because that’s what so many Americans actually want in a leader. They elected a President just like them, or just like what they wanted to be if they ever achieved power: white trash with money.