Donald Trump is losing his mind

Imagine it was someone other than President Donald Trump. Suppose a different leader were posting deranged rants in the small hours, insulting the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics, threatening entire civilizations with annihilation, and comparing himself to God. What would be the reaction?

We all know the answer. Both parties would be rushing to bundle him out of office before he did irreversible harm to the republic. Yet, as we all also know, different rules apply to Trump. Democrats, having had their fingers burned by two failed impeachment attempts, are reluctant to try again, for they know that there is no surer way to boost his support. Republicans, who privately despair at the electoral damage he is doing, let alone the constitutional damage, are paralyzed by fear of upsetting their primary voters.

Harold Macmillan, the suave British postwar leader, liked to quip that there were three institutions that no sensible man challenged: the Brigade of Guards, the National Union of Mineworkers, and the Roman Catholic Church. Yet Trump, in one of his nocturnal forays, decided to conjure a fight with the Bishop of Rome out of thin air, calling him “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy,” and adding that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”