Donald Trump’s Week, The Best Pundit Reactions: ‘Madman,’ ‘Outright Lunacy,’ ‘All Crazy,’ ‘Sick And Dangerous’
In just the first three days of this week, Donald Trump has engaged in a series of actions and made numerous statements that were “bizarre,” even by his standards, as Vox chronicled. Trump’s week included an off-the-wall plan to purchase the autonomous island of Greenland from Denmark, and calling Danish Prime Minster Mette Frederiksen “nasty” when she unsurprisingly confirmed that Greenland was not for sale.
Trump also made anti-semitic remarks on Tuesday and again in Wednesday, accusing American Jews who do not politically support him of “great disloyalty,” as The Inquisitr reported. And as The Inquisitr also covered, he declared his support for reinstating Russia into the G7, claiming falsely that Russia was expelled because Vladimir Putin “outsmarted” Barack Obama.
In perhaps the most over-the-top moments, Trump approvingly retweeted a conspiracy theorist who declared him the “King of Israel,” and during an exchange with reporters, Trumped looked to the sky and announced, “I am the Chosen One,” during a 40-minute back-and-forth in which, in the words of The Guardian, Trump set “a new benchmark for incoherence.”
Trump, in the exchange with reporters, “swept away all previous Trumpian benchmarks for incoherence, self-aggrandizement, prevarication and rancor,” The Guardian’s national affairs correspondent Tom McCarthy wrote.
But McCarthy was far from alone in his alarmed reaction to the outlandish and over-the-top statements emanating from Trump this week. Republican strategist Rick Wilson, in an op-ed published by The Daily Beast, wrote that Trump had proven himself a “madman.”
While Trump’s supporters once claimed that his often strange and outrageous public pronouncements were actually part of a masterful political strategy, “only idiots and zealots believe that now,” Wilson wrote. The Republican strategist added that Trump’s “lies” are not in any way “strategic.” Instead, “they are a roadmap of his pocked and scarred mental landscape.”
Lawyer and author Jeffrey Toobin, a legal commentator for CNN, as quoted by Raw Story, called any attempt to pass of Trump’s statements as strategic “crazy,” blasting what he called Trump’s “narcissistic approach to life” that led him to declare himself “the Chosen One.”
Investigative reporter Michael Tomasky, also penning a column for The Daily Beast, declared Trump’s latest rant, “sicker and more terrifying than ever.”
Longtime Atlantic Monthly essayist James Fallows, who has also won a National Book Award, called the actions taken by Trump this week, “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting.” Fallows noted that if an airline pilot had publicly declared himself “the Chosen One,” the airline “would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.”
“If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role,” Fallows wrote.
