MSNBC’s Deadline: White House is known as being a hub for those willing to do or say anything to slime President Trump. On Monday’s edition, they proved that to be true yet again when they dedicated the first segment to the suggestion that the President’s weekend tweetstorm was somehow an outward symptom of some sort of “crisis level” “psychological duress” brought on from a mental “spasm” due to fear.
Neither fill-in host John Heilemann nor any of the MSNBC analysts on the panel were licensed psychologists but that didn’t keep them from making their armchair diagnoses.
When first addressing former Republican campaign advisor Mike Murphy, Heilemann wondered: “I want to think first about just the totality of it and no one understands the process of mental breakdown better than Mike Murphy. So Mike, when you're looking at what you saw coming out the president’s fingertips over this weekend, what did you think?”
Despite admitting he was “not a clinical expert,” Murphy claimed his thought over the weekend was “crazy times demand a crazy president.” He then surmised that “if you were to go back in time and on one day switch to this kind of presidential behavior in normal history, people would instantly think he lost his grip.”
Murphy proceeded to complain about how no one was taking Trump’s deteriorating mental state seriously:
There are these spasms he has where he starts tweeting this crazy stuff. I'm not sure what the cause is but we have become so dulled to Trump's madness, I don't know what it will take. Does he have to go run around for an aluminum foil hat? He is clearly under psychological duress here. And it, I think, is a crisis level event.
Heilemann turned to Associated Press White House reporter Jonathan Lemire to discuss what caused these supposed flare-ups of Trump’s poor mental condition.
According to Lemire, “it seems these are triggered by impending bad news, pressure being applied.” He argued that last weekend’s outburst was caused by multiple factors. Chief among them: fear of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Lemire also suggested that it was merely Trump’s “estimation” that he was being “unfairly blamed for what happened in New Zealand.”
On the New Zealand topic, during that segment, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude blamed Trump for the massacre, while claiming he wasn’t doing that:
And so, part of what New Zealand represented and represents, right, is in some interesting sort of way in my view, a wholesale attack on what Donald Trump has enabled and his legions have enabled. I'm not trying to blame what happened in New Zealand on President Trump but he has helped create an environment for this sort of carnage to happen.
Moving on to have former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance postulate about the “kind of damage you think this kind of behavior does to kind of the social and democratic norms that we're supposed to live under,” Heilemann wanted to correct the “false binary” he created earlier in suggesting that Trump was either going crazy OR panicking because the of the Mueller report. “[H]e could be both losing his mind and panicked for good reason,” Heilemann declared.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
MSNBC’s Deadline: White House
March 18, 2019
4:02:20 p.m. EasternJOHN HEILEMANN: Ladies and gentlemen, this is an extraordinary thing that we witnessed over the weekend. And I think it’s worth—rather than taking these tweets apart and looking at the one by one, we can talk about individual examples. I want to think first about just the totality of it and no one understands the process of mental breakdown better than Mike Murphy. So Mike, when you're looking at what you saw coming out the president’s fingertips over this weekend, what did you think?
MIKE MURPHY: You know, I thought oh, here we are crazy times demand a crazy president. I mean, if this isn't nuts, and I'm not a clinical expert, but if you were to go back in time and on one day switch to this kind of presidential behavior in normal history, people would instantly think he lost his grip. There are these spasms he has where he starts tweeting this crazy stuff. I'm not sure what the cause is but we have become so dulled to Trump's madness, I don't know what it will take. Does he have to go run around for an aluminum foil hat? He is clearly under psychological duress here. And it, I think, is a crisis level event.
HEILEMANN: Psychological duress, Jonathan Lemire. You cover the President on a regular basis. You have seen -- This is not the first time the President has gone on a crazy Twitter tweet storm. We see these things as Mike said regularly, number one. Number two, it's not the first time people questioned his cognitive state and his mental fitness. Just talk a little bit about what it is normally and do some pattern recognition here, what normally brings about these kinds of outbursts?
JONATHAN LEMIRE: In the past, it seems these are triggered by impending bad news, pressure being applied. And in this sense, according to people that I’ve talked to in the last day or so around the President, it’s a few things at once. He is, just like we all are, waiting for the Mueller report. They don’t know when it’s coming. I spoke to Rudy Giuliani late last night, who said their guess is as good as ours. They think soon. They have not been given's heads-up as to when that could be. That’s number one.
Secondly, of course, you have the ongoing pressure being applied by the House Democrats with investigation after investigation after investigation. Third, the President has complained to people around him, and we saw this a little bit of this on Twitter too, that he's being, in his estimation, unfairly blamed for what happened in New Zealand.
The shooter in his manifesto did have a single mention of the President, suggested he was key to white identity, I'm paraphrasing, and the President feels that he's being sort of put up as someone who's responsible for this violence. No one, of course, is saying that directly, but the President has had time and time again to condemn white nationalism and white supremacy. He has not done that.
And the last one, we sort of mentioned it, it’s sort of amusing aside but I talked to somebody who said it was real, Fox News tweets where he in the past, where he had felt like he was under siege, Fox News provided sort of a safe harbor and he felt like this weekend that was not the case. Judge Jeanine Pirro, who is one of his most loyal backers, was suddenly taken off the air and to have these weekend anchors deliver criticisms of him, he had lashed out at them too.
(…)
EDDIE GLAUDE: And so, part of what New Zealand represented and represents, right, is in some interesting sort of way in my view, a wholesale attack on what Donald Trump has enabled and his legions have enabled. I'm not trying to blame what happened in New Zealand on President Trump but he has helped create an environment for this sort of carnage to happen.
(…)
HEILEMANN: I want to ask Joyce Vance right now, I kind of raised the notion in the intro to this segment that you’re kind of choosing between the question of, is Trump kind of losing his mind or is he just in the state of panic if you go by past precedent as Jonathan Lemire suggests, he sort of knows or suspects something bad is coming down the path at him from Robert Mueller? Of course, that could be false binary, he could be both losing his mind and panicked for good reason. What do you make of it? And talk a little bit about what kind of damage you think this kind of behavior does to kind of the social and democratic norms that we're supposed to live under.
JOYCE VANCE: So the President had a bad week. This is the first time that he's really faced significant pushback. It was the first time he's had the veto of a bill after the Senate voted against his national emergency. Then he faced these additional problems where, as you put it, his safe harbor Fox News wasn't quite as safe this weekend. And then he had to deal with allegations that he was at least in part responsible for the terror attack in New Zealand.
You know, it would have been easy for Trump to stand up and say, “I completely disallow terror, and if my words have been misconstrued, let me be clear, I don't support it.” But he didn't do that either. He spent the whole weekend in siege mode. And it's hard to know is this just his reaction to a very bad week where for the first time in his presidency he's under attack from a number of different positions or does he really expect to see a shoe drop in this upcoming week, whether it's the Mueller report, news reports that his buddy Elliott Brody was also the subject of a search warrant last summer, and the fact that the Michael Cohen search warrant materials are going to be released tomorrow? Take your pick, but it's a bad week for the president.
(...)
