"When he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics."

—Voltaire

They never anticipated this, the Founders, I mean, with their delicate orrery of checks and balances and the finest paper barricades available in the 18th Century. They anticipated bad presidents and good presidents, criminal presidents and incompetent presidents. They may even have anticipated a barking mad president, but they never anticipated that, with the consent of the governed, the whole system could break down and allow an unhinged man to run rampant from the most powerful office on earth.

In Federalist 77, Alexander Hamilton assured the country there was nothing to worry about.

If by influencing the President be meant RESTRAINING him, this is precisely what must have been intended. And it has been shown that the restraint would be salutary, at the same time that it would not be such as to destroy a single advantage to be looked for from the uncontrolled agency of that Magistrate.

By the end of Thursday's press conference, at which the president*'s trolley left the tracks far behind, Jake Tapper of CNN was saying that he'd gotten a text from a "Republican senator" who'd observed that what the president was evincing was behavior best left to a psychiatric clinic with very soft walls. Of course, this senator remains anonymous because, contrary to Hamilton's giddy optimism, they have no interest in taking the wheel from Toonces the Driving Cat until they get their tax cuts and their deregulation and their privatization and, if the car goes plunging off the cliff altogether, it's a small price to pay.

Otherwise, how do you sit still for this?

This morning, because many of our nation's reporters and folks will not tell you the truth, and will not treat the wonderful people of our country with the respect that they deserve. And I hope going forward we can be a little bit—a little bit different, and maybe get along a little bit better, if that's possible. Maybe it's not, and that's OK, too.

And this?

And then coming to Washington and pursuing their own interests which is more important to many politicians. I'm here following through on what I pledged to do. That's all I'm doing. I put it out before the American people, got 306 electoral college votes. I wasn't supposed to get 222. They said there's no way to get 222, 230's impossible. 270, which you need—that was laughable. We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan. In other words, the media's trying to attack our administration because they know we are following through on pledges that we made and they're not happy about it for whatever reason.

And this?

He didn't have to do that, because what he did wasn't wrong—what he did in terms of the information he saw. What was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information that was given illegally. That's the real problem. And, you know, you can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a—you know, fake news, fabricated deal, to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats and the press plays right into it. In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this—that they know nothing about it; they weren't in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call. It's all fake news. It's all fake news.

And , finally, this?

Well the leaks are real. You're the one that wrote about them and reported them, I mean the leaks are real. You know what they said, you saw it and the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake. So one thing that I felt it was very important to do—and I hope we can correct it.

The leaks are real but the news is fake.

This is nuts.

There is no manual for dealing with this situation if the congressional majorities decline to write one. But the President* of the United States is showing his arse on worldwide television a couple of times a week now, and judicious people are now regularly speculating if he's utterly unstrung. How long can this go on? Nobody ever asked that question before, either.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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