At this point, we can safely say there's something blindingly obvious about the president's bouts of public lunacy. It is so overwhelmingly clear that the world's most powerful man is not well—that he is behaving erratically and speaking nonsense and possibly suffering from some form of cognitive decline—that few people even seem to acknowledge it. His aides, obviously, say nothing. They've got jobs in the White House! The press corps sits through each successive deluge of sentence-like objects and volcanic bluster and then asks Donald Trump whether he's going to invade Iran, or whatever. We are engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief, where we treat our King Lear of a president like Otto von Bismarck with a bad haircut.

The latest example comes to us Thursday morning, one day after we learned the White House asked the Navy to hide a warship from the President of the United States because he'd go intergalactic if he saw whose name was on it. It's the day after we were served a press release from his Department of Energy that referred to natural gas as "freedom gas," a testament to the notion that things can always get more insultingly stupid. And it comes the day after now-ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller spoke publicly for the first time in two years, repeating the two great refrains of his Report: the Russians attacked our democracy to get Donald Trump elected and he welcomed it; and the president repeatedly broke the law to block the subsequent investigation, and only Congress can hold him accountable through impeachment.

The response from our fearless leader was to hold a ChopperTalk in which he went absolutely batshit insane, stalking around the reporters' scrum howling at people about Mueller and McCain and Russia and impeachment. Everybody pretty much acted like this is normal, as they do during every one of these exhibitions near Marine One—a tactic clearly designed to limit reporters' ability to ask follow-up questions over the din of the rotors.

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Trump calls members of Robert Mueller's team "some of the worst human beings on Earth." 😳 pic.twitter.com/dg2uVw5tXV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2019

"Some of the worst human beings on Earth."

Whatever happened to MS-13? We used to hear a lot about those guys. Now a group of career federal prosecutors that Trump's people quite clearly failed to dig up any real dirt on are the worst people on the planet. This is an addendum to the president's talk of "treason" against him, his baseless claim that Mueller is "conflicted"—a brazen one considering Trump runs an administration where the business model seems to be conflicts of interest—and his 18 Angry Democrats bullshit. We are routinely treated to matinees where the United States president rattles off, in broken sentences, whatever he heard on Hannity last night.The desperation is palpable, the logic is pathetic, and everybody nearby just nods along and waits to ask their question, which will be greeted with another bout of lunacy.

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Trump flatly denies a tweet he posted just an hour earlier, now claims "Russia did not help me get elected." pic.twitter.com/vao8kFQcZQ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2019

Not only does the Mueller Report flatly state that Russia intervened in the 2016 campaign expressly to help Donald Trump get elected, but also some guy agreed with that finding in a since-deleted tweet just this morning.

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He doesn't know what he said an hour ago. He doesn't care. It's irrelevant. The strategy is lie and bluster and yell until you get your way, regardless of whether it makes a lick of sense. The president certainly does not care about what foreign interference might mean for American democracy, which he finds inconvenient at best, or the prospect that foreign actors from Russia or beyond will likely try to meddle in the next election.

And then the president started raving, face shining tomato-red even as he's backlit, about how it was really Hillary who was colluding with The Media, and the Russians. And then he started skulking around the scrum, talking about how nobody talks about Russia, Russia, Russia anymore. Never mind that the report did not weigh in on whether there was "collusion" because it's not a legal term, but it found his campaign manager was sending an associate linked to Russian intelligence regular updates on the key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Never mind that there was evidence of a criminal conspiracy, but it was not sufficient for the special counsel to file charges.

And then the president happily admitted he "fought back" against the investigation—that is, that he meddled in and obstructed the investigation. He seems to think that's not illegal if investigators can't prove an underlying crime. If that were the case, then only unsuccessful obstruction would be charged as a crime. If you successfully obstruct and investigators are blocked from proving your underlying crime, you're off scot free.

Then it was time for some Impeachment Talk.

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Trump reveals he has absolutely no clue how impeachment works, says, "I can't imagine the courts allowing it." (The courts have nothing to do with impeachment, which is the domain of Congress.) pic.twitter.com/EUCI688QD7 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2019

"To me it's a dirty word, the word impeach," says the President of the United States. "It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word. And it had nothing to do with me."

This is considered normal. So is the fact that, as Vox's Aaron Rupar points out, the president quite clearly has no idea how impeachment works. It's in the hands of Congress, not the courts. His brain is permanently stuck in the 1980s real-estate world and the grotesque wisdom of Roy Cohn—a place where you can sue yourself out of anything and bleed your enemies to the death in civil court. That ain't it, chief.

"I've exposed corruption like nobody knew existed," the president added. He's right, but not in the way he's blustering. It's never been more apparent to the public just how deep the ethics problem in Washington goes—a problem his crew has slapped in giant gold letters on the side of a building for all to see. The gall of this guy.

Then Trump addressed the USS McCain story—and trashed a dead man.

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Asked about report that Navy was asked to move a ship named after John McCain during his recent trip to Japan, Trump denies involvement, but goes on to trash John McCain pic.twitter.com/vDYthPxUIC — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2019

A little while later, he continued to trash a dead man.

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For the second time in a matter of minutes, Trump trashes John McCain pic.twitter.com/hWYCtN2PIh — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2019

Thanks, Mr. President.

And then it was time to flex the Constitutional Knowledge.

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TRUMP: "Some day you ought to read a thing called Article 2. Read Article 2. Which gives the president powers that you wouldn't believe. But I don't even have to rely on Article 2. There was no crime." pic.twitter.com/t0xeta8R7A — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2019

Do you notice how the president switches topics and trains of thought almost constantly, often without finishing a sentence? He jumps around to points of attack and defense, some related and some not, trying to drown the audience in a disorienting swell of misinformation and nonsense. After all, he can scarcely keep track of all of it. His only hope these days is to flood the zone with bullshit and snake oil, the currencies he's traded on his whole life, so that the truth about what he's done might be obscured in the public consciousness, too deep for enough people to find.

I had nothing to do with Russian meddling to help me get elected!

Russian meddling didn't help me get elected!

It was Hillary who did the colluding!

There was no collusion! No obstruction!

Of course I "fought back" against the investigation!

Robert Mueller spent yesterday largely in defense of The Regular Order of Things. He believes the institutions of the republic can withstand this concerted attack—not just on the rule of law or the mechanisms of democracy, but the concept of truth that undergirds all of it—by relentlessly observing norms and moral rectitude and civility. The press, too, has mostly treated Donald Trump as a particularly eccentric president who still exists within a functioning system of democratic accountability. It's time we all admit that his behavior is not transgressive or even clownish or disgraceful, but uniquely dangerous to the American republic. He is unstable, and destabilizing our society every time he makes his instability public, which is constantly. It's time to behave like the house is on fire and he's holding a gas canister—because he is.

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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