It’s not just his lack of understanding of health-care policy. It’s not just chaos and competing power centers in his administration. It’s not just flamboyance and flame-throwing in his public statements. He is not competent, at least nowhere near the degree that clears the minimum bar for public power. His leaked conversations with foreign heads of state are only the most recent example. He doesn’t understand anything. And his lack of comprehension is undergirded by a completely malformed and deteriorating emotional substrate.

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Yet you read, and I read, story after story attempting to fit this bizarre personality into conventional discussions of governing and policymaking — day after strange day after stranger day. And this is what is causing our severe cognitive dissonance. How is it that so many people around the president seem to be pretending that things are somehow in regular order? That they don’t seem to be toting up the accumulating risk and damage?

The story that you expect to see is something like this: Congressional leaders are urgently discussing the most humane but expedient method to remove the president from power, approaching him at a time when he is not holding a golf club in his hands. Because you know that they will get to this eventually, and that when they inevitably do, he won’t go quietly.

Yes, here we are, and here are how things stand: Either you are crazy, or the situation is.