Much of America's capital has entered a state of near-panic. In recent days, U.S. President Donald Trump has been acting more bizarrely than ever, and the question raised in the mind of politicians and civilians alike, though rarely spoken aloud, has been: What can be done with this man? Can the United States really afford to wait for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to wrap up his investigation (on the assumption that he'll find the president guilty of something)? That could still take quite a while.
The question of timing has become increasingly urgent, given the heightened danger that the U.S. will deliberately or accidentally end up in a war with North Korea. That risk, coupled with Trump's increasingly peculiar behavior, has made Washington more tense than I've ever known it to be, and that includes the dark days of Watergate. To put it bluntly: the worry is that a mentally deranged president might lead the U.S. into a nuclear war.
In just the past week, evidence of Trump's instability has piled up. During an Oval Office ceremony to honor Native-American heroes of World War II, he offended them by issuing a racist comment. He picked an unprecedented and unnecessary fight with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, supposedly America's closest ally, by retweeting a British neo-fascist group's anti-Muslim posts. In an effort to win a Democratic senator's vote for his pending tax cut bill, he traveled to her state and told lies about her record (though the tax bill was so tilted to the richest 1 percent of Americans that no Democratic senator voted for it). And he continued to bait North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who seems equally unstable.
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