Is the 45th president of the United States becoming unhinged?

I don’t mean this in a casual, conversational sense — like Donald Trump is a “wing nut” or a “serial narcissist” — even though he has appeared to be precisely that for decades.

No, I mean it in the more formal, Oxford Dictionary sense, defined as “mentally unbalanced, deranged” or, to cite some of Oxford’s synonyms, “demented, unbalanced, out of one’s mind, crazed (and) mad.”

In other words: Is the so-called leader of the free world, who controls the nuclear codes that could blow up the planet, mentally unfit for the job?

That is a question increasingly being debated by many of America’s political and media leaders as they try to make sense of this disturbing week in the high-stakes Trump soap opera.

The latest flashpoint was Trump’s angry, rambling 75-minute rant last Tuesday night at a rally in Phoenix. Speaking without a TelePrompTer and sometimes incoherently, he lied about his response to the Charlottesville violence, accused the news media of being “bad people (who) don’t like our country,” threatened to shut down the government if funding for his proposed border wall isn’t approved and ridiculed Arizona’s two Republican senators, including John McCain who is currently suffering from brain cancer.

Immediately after Trump’s speech, former U.S. national intelligence director James Clapper said it was the most disturbing performance he had ever witnessed by a U.S. president: “I really question … his fitness to be in this office. I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it. Maybe he is looking for a way out.”

Clapper’s criticism came only a few days after similar criticism from Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who chairs the foreign relations committee. Trump, said Corker, “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” needed in a president.

Last Sunday, CNN’s influential weekly media show Reliable Sources explored whether Trump is actually fit for office. Its host, Brian Stelter, said it is time for the media to start publicly asking the “upsetting, polarizing questions” being asked privately among family and friends, and in many newsrooms: “Is the president of the United States a racist? Is he suffering from some kind of illness? Is he fit for office? And if he is unfit, then what?”

Carl Bernstein, one of the famed Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, said that many of his Republican sources have been “raising the very question of (Trump’s) stability and mental fitness to be president.”

Hiding presidential illnesses from the public is not unknown in modern America. Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, five years after he left office. But some journalists and historians — and even Reagan’s son Ronald Jr. — have suggested he showed signs of the disease in his second term, but this was never disclosed to the public.

Both Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson suffered from mental health problems that were kept hidden while they served as president, and President John F. Kennedy suffered in secret from Addison’s disease that kept him in constant pain.

For a president, these hidden issues are obviously most problematic during periods of crisis. And in terms of Trump’s recent behaviour, it is noteworthy that the pressures on him from the Russia investigations are increasing by the day.

Several news reports this week revealed how obsessed Trump has become about the Russia probe, angrily berating several Republican senators for failing to stop the investigation. Politico quoted one senior Republican aide as saying: “It seems he is just always focused on Russia.”

Last Tuesday, the same day as Trump’s angry speech in Phoenix, the head of a Washington research firm that produced a dossier of sensational allegations about Trump met behind closed doors for 10 hours with Senate congressional investigators.

Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, also gave an estimated 40,000 documents to the investigators. Potentially explosive, these documents will be shared with special counsel Robert Mueller. The Senate committee will vote on whether to release the full transcript of Simpson’s testimony.

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If Trump doesn’t resign beforehand, will he ever be found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours?

Until recently, only Trump presumably knew what he had done — with Russia and for Russia.

But now, as his angry mood this week perhaps reflected, Trump may be realizing that he will no longer be able to keep that secret to himself.

Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com .

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