In the future, assuming there is one for this country or this species, we will look back and marvel at how the White House press corps questioned our King Lear of a president as if he were Otto von Bismarck. Over and over again, reporters sit through an incomprehensible deluge of various phrase-like objects and unfinished sentences and then stand up, one by one, to ask this guy about his China policy or whatever. It's a kind of collective suspension of disbelief, where everyone in attendance at one of these nationally disgraceful press conferences agrees to pretend that the president is not, in fact, an old man whose brain is rapidly atrophying due to a debilitating level of cable news consumption.

Does that seem harsh? Is it untoward to state the obvious—that the President of the United States is a Fox News Grandpa who gets the lion's share of the modicum of information he actually retains from the various blabbering heads that praise him all day through the teevee? Check out Our Fearless Leader's explanation of how he got it in his head there is a "national emergency" at the southern border—or at least, that he should declare one.

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Now we know what Trump does during “Executive Time.” He knows all the ins and outs of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. He listens to 3 hours of Rush Limbaugh. He loves Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. But as for Ann Coulter: “I hardly know her.”https://t.co/nWMSelgr1H — Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) February 15, 2019

The president is an experiment: he is a low-information voter, a talk-radio caller jumped up on confusion and resentment towards a changing world—not to mention ill-gotten gains—whom We, The People saw fit to make the planet's most powerful man. Sean Hannity is briefing the President of the United States on what's happening in the world. God help us all. Don't ask him about his budget, for Christ's sake. Ask him what the three branches of government are.

But he wasn't done. It is quite simply impossible to wrap your head around the vast depths of the paranoid delusion and public display of non compos mentis that was on show in the Rose Garden this fine February Friday. So just concentrate on this part, here, where the president admits—while announcing he's declared a national emergency—that there is no national emergency, he just felt like speeding things up.

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Likely to be used in future lawsuits: Trump on his national emergency declaration: "I didn't need to do this. But I'd rather do it much faster ... I just want to get it done faster." Via CNN pic.twitter.com/HcPrQdhRJ9 — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 15, 2019

This is insanity. It's not a "national emergency" if you don't really need to declare a national emergency, you're just mad that Congress didn't give you more money for your Big, Beautiful Wall. It's time we all stopped pretending that the president is merely ignorant or rude or even crooked, and start to process the fact that he ain't all there. How much more will he be allowed to destroy as he thrashes about on the border between his long history of skirting the law and his growing romance with the phantasmagorical as the lights begin to dim in his creaky attic?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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