The unpredictable Donald Trump has just surprised us again.
Given the sheer incredulity raised by his recent statements about massive voter fraud in November’s election, the record-breaking size of the crowd at his inauguration, and Mexico’s willingness to pay for a wall along its northern border, President Donald Trump has just declared himself certifiably insane.
It has finally become obvious to the president himself that he is utterly blind to all facts, including photographic evidence as well as testimony from reliable sources.
He now knows that there is absolutely no evidence to support his claim of massive voter fraud in November–a claim that even leading Republicans like Lindsay Graham find incredible.
He also knows that as confirmed by photographic evidence, the crowd at his inauguration numbered only about half a million, less than one-third of the 1.8 million drawn by the inauguration of President Obama.
He knows, too, that Enrique Peña Nieto, the President of Mexico, has flatly refused to pay for a border wall. But since candidate Trump repeatedly promised to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it, he now feels bound to spend our tax dollars doing so while pretending that Mexico will “absolutely” pay for it.
According to Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, the cost of building a border wall of roughly 1300 miles (covering only the miles that need protection) would be somewhere between 15 and 25 billion dollars, and the cost of maintaining it could run as high as 750 million per year.
For all this, Trump firmly believes, we will be cheerfully reimbursed by Mexico.
He also believes that this hideously expensive wall will keep out illegal immigrants, drug traffickers, and terrorists. But anyone who wants to climb over the wall can do so with a ladder, and drug traffickers can send their loads right over it with ultra-light planes that can carry up to 300 pounds. They can also build a first-class tunnel under it for one million bucks–and pay for the tunnel with just one shipment of drugs.
Given his blindness to facts like these, given his incurable addiction to “alternative facts,” President Trump has declared himself insane.
But he has also declared that he will “absolutely” remain our president.