Our own kind of prison

Guaranteed. The scariest two minutes and 14 seconds of video you'll ever watch. This is the man in charge of the globe's largest economy and who's the commander in chief of a world superpower, intercontinental ballistic missiles and all.

Some of Trump's gibberish requires interpretation. Not mine, because I haven't the vaguest notion of what, for starters, this means: "We started with the movie making, it will end." He was clear about one thing. "[Alcatraz is] right now a museum, believe it or not." Bet you didn't know that. But Trump is full of trivia — for instance, the lesson on Abraham Lincoln he delivered to the nation in 2017: “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Does anyone know? Lot of people don’t know that."

But Alcatraz. Think about it. It's "horrible," it's "beautiful," it's "strong" and it's "miserable," said Trump. It's not every day you encounter the horribly beautiful and miserably strong. The latter, however, did appear in impressive abundance in the above video — those poor two people forced to stand next to Trump, looking as though they were inmates sentenced to the brutal confinement of a despot's mental dishevelment and personal hell.

The disorder is everywhere, as you know, there was nothing one-off about his unintelligibility and disconnected Alcatraz thoughts. Consider this bizarre example from 25 April, Time magazine's interview.

You recently signed memos calling for an investigation of Chris Krebs, a top cybersecurity official in your first term. Isn't that, though, what you accused Biden of doing to you?

I think Chris Krebs was a disgrace to our country. I think he was—I think he was terrible. By the way, I don't know him. I'm not—I don't think I ever met him. I probably saw him around. You know, I have people come in, like the other one. He came in, and he's on CNN all the time as like an expert on Trump. I have no idea who he is. And Chris Krebs the same thing. I guess he probably said he knows me, but I have no idea.... I know very little about Chris Krebs, but I think he was very deficient.

On the day before Time's interview, Trump sat down with The Atlantic and added clinical paranoia to his mind's disarray.

Should people be concerned that the nature of the presidency is changing under you?

Look, in history, there’s nobody that’s been gone after like me. It may be harder for you guys to see because you’re on the other side of the ledger. But nobody’s been gone after like me. I didn’t realize it for a little while. I was told—when I fired [former FBI Director James] Comey, I was told that was a terrible, terrible mistake to fire him, that it’ll come back to haunt you. When I fired him, it was like a rock was thrown into a hornet’s nest. The whole thing went crazy in the FBI. And that’s where we found the insurance-policy statement. You remember the famous statement, “Don’t worry, he’s gonna lose. But if he doesn’t, we have an insurance policy”? The insurance policy was what they were doing.

I could pull out dozens of other instances in which Trump responded to direct questions not with misdirection — a deliberate, common ploy among politicians — but rather with Captain

Queeg-like responses not even remotely connected to the queries. Interviewers are sitting right in front of him, but quite vividly he is somewhere else, his brain engaged in unassociated hand-wringing, self-defensiveness and utterly unfounded charges of others' wrongdoing.

It's easy to poke fun. And it's precisely because of the ease that I must remind myself with no little regularity that there is nothing funny about Trump's freakish ruminations. Indeed, in historical fact they're a case study in what the Framers saw as grounds for impeachment and removal from office — no high crime, no misdemeanor needed. He's mentally unfit, emotionally erratic and perilously unstable, characteristics every bit as hazardous to the nation's welfare as Richard Nixon's criminality was.

Yet there's one punishing difference. We were able to rid ourselves of Tricky Dick.