VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Is Trump Really Crazy?

Of course, any president lax enough to let a Wolff through the door inevitably would be embarrassed by the results, given that all administrations can be petty, even gross.

Lyndon Johnson had a repulsive habit of referring openly to his sexual organ as “Jumbo”—and occasionally displaying it to startled staffers—a felony in our present culture. Worse still, he often gave dictation while defecating on the toilet.

John Kennedy crudely seduced dozens of his own female staffers. One, Mimi Alford, who came to work a 19-year-old virgin, wrote an entire memoir of her mechanical trysts inside the White House with JFK, including his inaugural seduction, which, by any contemporary definition, would now qualify as sexual assault. She lamented that he once had pawned her off to fellate one of his aides. A perverted rapist as our beloved commander-in-chief? No need to imagine a Wolff version of the Clinton White House.

I could an imagine a Wolff in FDR’s White House circa early 1945 having a field day: jazzing up the clandestine nocturnal trysts between the wheelchair-bound president and his mistress Lucy Mercer. His daughter Anna would be exposed as the go-between, the upstart young proto-Ivanka who had moved into the White House and became virtually a ceremonial First Lady.

All the while the Roosevelt team would struggle to lie to the press about the president’s sky-high blood pressure, chain-smoking, martini drinking, and growing feebleness. In place of Steve Bannon’s shoot-from-the-hip notions of geopolitics, a Harry Hopkins or freelancing and estranged Eleanor Roosevelt could offer mini-interviews on the administration’s successful politicking with good old Uncle Joe at Yalta. The difference is that FDR had the press in his pocket and even was too crafty to trust any of his “friends” with unfettered access. . . .

Wolff’s ogre purportedly sloppily eats Big Macs in bed, golfs more than Obama did, has no hair at all on the top of his head, and at 71 is supposedly functionally illiterate. OK, perhaps someone the last half-century read out loud to Trump the thousands of contracts he signed. But what we wish to know from Wolff is how did his trollish Trump figure out that half the country—the half with the more important Electoral College voice—was concerned about signature issues that either were unknown to or scorned by his far more experienced and better-funded rivals?

Why did not a well-read Marco Rubio or later Yale Law graduate Hillary Clinton focus on unfair trade and declining manufacturing, illegal immigration, unnecessary and optional overseas interventions, and the excesses of the deep administrative “swamp” state?

Who discovered these issues or knew how to develop them? Was it really the feisty Corey Lewandowski? The genius Paul Manafort? How, then, could Wolff’s idiot grasp that these concerns were the keys to flipping purple swing-states that had previously been written off as reliably Democratically patronized clinger/irredeemable/deplorable territory by far better informed and more tech-savvy campaign operatives?

Once Trump was in power, how does Wolff explain the near phenomenal economic turnaround in the latter part of 2017? Does he not see that the stupider you make Trump in his successful first year, by inference the even stupider you make the supposedly smarter actors in their many failed years?

Yeah if Trump’s really that much of a dolt, how much worse is Hillary for losing to him — and Barack for failing to govern as well?