The fading baseline for basic sanity

By now you've surely heard about former Trump aide Sam Nunberg's very public meltdown over the course of his five television appearances yesterday, the crescendo of which was CNN's Erin Burnett saying she could smell alcohol on his breath. He flamboyantly badmouthed various people. The one exception was Roger Stone, somebody who warrants badmouthing if anybody does, but is apparently a buddy and an object of admiration for Nunberg. He asked Jake Tapper if he should comply with the Mueller investigation's subpoena. It was quite a spectacle.

Jim Geraghty at NRO steps back to get some context, and I can't argue with what he comes up with:

Tuesday morning brought furious accusations that the cable networks had exploited a man undergoing a breakdown by putting him on television when he was not well.

But how, exactly, is anyone supposed to tell the difference between “genuine mental problem” craziness and garden-variety nuttiness in a political environment such as this? It’s not even certain that Nunberg’s bizarre performances and pledges marked the craziest day of a crazy year for the Trump administration.

With his performance, Nunberg probably pulled ahead of Carter Page in the category of “former Trump advisers pursuing a bewildering strategy while interacting with a special counsel.”

Page is the strange kind of man who is smart enough to get a master’s degree from Georgetown University and become an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch, but not smart enough to bring a lawyer with him when he testifies to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, or Mueller’s grand jury. In October, Page agreed to appear on the program of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes — light-years away from being a “friendly interviewer” — and his answers were so breathtakingly forward that Hayes was left in disbelief: “I genuinely hope, Carter, that you are innocent of everything, because you are doing a lot of talking.”

Perhaps we could push aside Nunberg and Page and give the award for most self-destructive former Trump adviser to Steve Bannon, who invited Michael Wolff into the White House to gather material for his book Fire and Fury and seemed to think he could trash the president’s children on the record and live to tell the tale.

Just missing the medal platform would be Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who we are to believe paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 out of his own personal funds as part of a nondisclosure agreement that ensured she would not speak about an alleged 2006 affair with Trump — an affair, Cohen assures us, that never occurred. Presumably he edges former Apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault — who once boasted that everyone would have to “bow down” to Trump. She had a key staff position for a year, was summarily dismissed, and then reinvented herself as a Trump critic on another reality show, declaring, “I was haunted by tweets every single day.”

President Trump keeps attracting advisers who feel tempted to stick metal forks in electrical outlets just to see what happens. Perhaps they rub off on him, or he rubs off on them; the result is the same: a president who announces new trade tariffs without informing his own staff, runs an ongoing campaign of public humiliation against his own attorney general, tweets furiously about what he sees on cable news, publicly fumes  in the morning about Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live. It’s as if the White House mess is serving Tide Pods.

He goes on to demonstrate that "insanity is a bipartisan malady":

Does Nancy Pelosi really believe that a $1,000 bonus given by a corporation to an employee after passage of the tax cuts amounts to “crumbs”? Yes, she literally lives on “Billionaire’s Row” in San Francisco, and she snippily dismisses questions about her net worth, among the highest in Congress — but has she really reached the point where she thinks a thousand dollars is chump change? Or is she so mentally fixated on every Republican act being “Armageddon” that she has to believe that $1,000 is a measly sum in this context?

Perhaps Chuck Schumer wasn’t crazy to vote against Marvin Quattlebaum, Trump’s nominee for a long-vacant South Carolina federal judgeship. But it doesn’t seem terribly sane to argue out loud that Quattlebaum is too white for the job: “The nomination of Marvin Quattlebaum speaks to the overall lack of diversity in President Trump’s selections for the federal judiciary,” Schumer said. “It’s long past time that the judiciary starts looking a lot more like the America it represents.”

Just how sane is it for Congressman Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat, to defend a longstanding personal relationship with Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam? Is it entirely rational to blow off Farrakhan’s long history of anti-Semitic comments? Davis said, “The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question and his position on that and so forth. For those heavy into it, that’s their thing, but it ain’t my thing.” 

The question of how sane any of these people are is not flip. It must be taken seriously, if one has the stomach for it.