It was a message that might as well have been written in crayon. A day after Donald Trump announced new tariffs on several European countries — economic penalties that would remain in place, he said, until his demands to acquire Greenland were met — the president sent a truly ridiculous message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, in which the Republican suggested part of his Greenland crusade is rooted in his failure to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, according to Trump, because Norway hurt his feelings by failing to give him an award he wanted but did not earn, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
In a written statement, Støre said that he’s tried to explain to Trump “on several occasions” that the Norwegian government is not responsible for the decisions made by the independent Nobel Committee. The American president, however, continues to insist that Støre is lying, that the Norwegian government is secretly in charge of the honors, and that all of this has something to do with Greenland, which is a territory of an entirely different Scandinavian country.
One Republican member of Congress, retiring Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, described Trump’s unhinged antics as “very embarrassing conduct,” which is true, although several congressional Democrats went considerably further. Indeed, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut raised concerns about the president’s mental stability, describing Trump’s message to Støre as “the ramblings of a man who has lost touch with reality.”
The senator added, regarding the American president, “He isn’t OK. He’s degraded significantly in the last year, and he’s about to get us into a war with our allies.”
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii sounded a similar note, adding, “I don’t see how you can be a serious person and not find this extremely worrisome. He is not stable at all, and his reality is warped.”
One senator, however, took an additional step down the same path. HuffPost reported:
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is calling on President Donald Trump’s Cabinet and Vice President JD Vance to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution over his latest threat to Greenland. […]
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‘Invoke the 25th Amendment,’ Markey replied, referring to a constitutional process by which the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can declare a president unable to perform his duties. If the president contests that declaration, Congress would ultimately decide whether he remains in power.
The last time Trump confronted public chatter about the 25th Amendment, it was in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol amid concern about what else the Republican might do to remain in the White House despite losing the 2020 election. Evidently, there’s at least some evidence to suggest the topic has returned to the public conversation.
If the American president is aware of such concerns about his mental stability and fitness for office, he’s not showing it. On the contrary, hours after his bonkers message to the Norwegian prime minister reached the public, Trump leaked a private message from French President Emmanuel Macron and used his social media platform to promote weird images, including one that showed a map of the Western Hemisphere in which Greenland, Canada and Venezuela are under American control.
Lars-Christian Brask, deputy speaker of the Danish parliament, told Sky News, “If I could come with some advice, it would be for the Senate and the House to start to take control of the political power in America, because with this mad and erratic behavior, you have to ask the question: Is the president capable of running the United States?”
Under the circumstances, that need not be a rhetorical question.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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