Canada should monitor genius-in-chief

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/01/2018 (2851 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Speculation about the mental powers of U.S. President Donald Trump reached a crescendo on the weekend after publication of Fire and Fury, a compendium of White House gossip by New York reporter and celebrity-watcher Michael Wolff.

In response to the book’s numerous reports of White House insiders saying the president was inattentive or erratic, Mr. Trump issued a Twitter message Saturday morning saying, inter alia, “I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius …. and a very stable genius at that!”

This reply did not, however, deal directly with the issue. At age 71, facing the unfamiliar pressures and burdens of the presidency, Mr. Trump may not be functioning as efficiently as he once did.

His pattern of immediately lashing out with tweeted insults against those who criticize him, his rambling and barely coherent press conference appearances and his increasing reliance on a few simple words and phrases all raise a question about his mental powers.

The accusation of mental decline can be a cheap insult, always available to people who dislike Mr. Trump’s policy. But if Mr. Trump is in fact losing the capacity for rational decision and action, Congress and the executive department heads will need to find ways to work around his weaknesses and keep the United States government operating efficiently.

The 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, provides a mechanism by which the cabinet secretaries, acting as a group, can depose an incapacitated president and put the vice-president in his place.

That is not much help in the present circumstance, where the president, though inattentive and erratic, believes he is a very stable genius. Moreover, people in mental decline can easily have lucid intervals during which they are perfectly rational.

If we are entering a twilight period where the president is erratic but not certifiably incapacitated, that period may continue for many years. Canada will have to watch closely to see who is minding the store in Washington and how decisions are being made.

Canada is trying to renegotiate its trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico, without much success so far. This country is bound to the U.S. more closely than any other country on Earth on account of proximity, shared language and culture, migratory flows, trade and joint defence. Since power is widely distributed among federal government branches and between federal and state levels, it can be difficult at the best of times to know who is in charge of what. But Canada really does need to know.

The logical thing for leaders of Congress, the Republican Party and the executive departments to do at this stage is to quietly organize informal networks of reporting, decision-making and accountability to ensure that the taxes are collected, the bills are paid and the machinery of government continues to run, regardless of emanations from the Oval Office.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland should keep her eyes peeled for shifts in the structure of power in Washington. She should not assume that President Trump is still in charge just because he says he is. It would be a shame to misplay Canada’s hand in the trade renegotiation through failure to notice how the game has changed.