POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Presidents should be required to have a minimum of self-awareness. I don’t think that this expectation should require a constitutional amendment or even a great deal of perception on the part of voters.

Critics of President Trump focus on his ineptitude as a diplomat, his apparent ignorance of and even disinterest in many of the important issues before the nation, his apparent ignorance of and even disinterest in the mechanisms of governance and the politics involved in creating and passing legislation, his disinterest in reading anything lengthier than a tweet, his very obvious narcissism, his consistent misrepresentations of the truth, and so on, and so on.

While watching cable news, I myself have repeatedly wondered aloud how someone who is more than seventy years old and who has apparently been watching more television than the average person for all of his adult life—and who has therefore seen every President from Eisenhower to himself onscreen—cannot have acquired some visceral sense of how a president acts. And not have noticed that he is not acting that way–at all!

But, two small things this week are even much more basic than all of that.

This week, as the Far Right media outlet Newsmax reported in a headline, “Trump Set Decorum Rules for the White House” (I’ve changed the verb tense).

Even for someone who is an obvious narcissist and who consistently misrepresents the truth, this stance illustrates a truly astonishing lack of self-awareness. I admit to being baffled, when I truly thought that I had moved well beyond any further capacity for bafflement. (In my much more humble station in life, the equivalent that comes most immediately to mind would be for me to start lecturing people about the need to lose weight—and to do so without the slightest indication that I was being ironic.)

The second item that caught my attention this week was Trump’s offer to find GOP votes to insure Nancy Pelosi’s election to the Speakership of the House. This offer was reported in this morning’s Politico’s Playbook newsletter:

THE PRESIDENT SAYS HE’LL HELP PELOSI — @realDonaldTrump at 6:37 a.m.: “I can get Nancy Pelosi as many votes as she wants in order for her to be Speaker of the House. She deserves this victory, she has earned it — but there are those in her party who are trying to take it away. She will win! @TomReedCongress”.

— TRUMP, via a pool report from from Linda Feldmann of the Christian Science Monitor: “I’m not saying I’d get any [votes from] the super conservative side, but maybe I even get them from there. But I don’t imagine she’d need too many. But whatever number of votes she needs, if it’s 50 or 10 or 2 or 1, she’s got em from [me], automatic. So tell her opposition, they’re wasting their time.”

PELOSI RESPONDS … DREW HAMMILL, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff: “Leader Pelosi will win the Speakership with Democratic votes.”

Yes, the co-author of The Art of the Deal thinks that he can forestall House investigations of his campaign and his administration by very publicly and simplemindedly offering to secure Nancy Pelosi the votes that he thinks that she needs to be re-elected to the Speakership. Why? Because FOX News commentators have been exaggerating the potential challenges to Pelosi’s leadership and the “disarray” in the Democratic caucus.

In U.S. politics, demonization of a political figure, such as Nancy Pelosi, is almost always paradoxical: that is, the level of demonization reflects not only the ideological animus toward the figure but also an unstated level of respect for the figure, a recognition of the threat that the figure poses to one’s very different ideological agenda. Occasionally, someone—Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon come immediately to mind—is demonized for violating political and ethical norms to a degree that can no longer be ignored.

And although many people feel that President Trump is the second-coming of McCarthy and Nixon and that he deserves to be demonized for precisely those reasons, I think that there is also a different element involved in his case. He has turned just about everything on its head, even the most basic and timeworn truisms—to the point that many commentators have wondered aloud about the lasting consequences of his presidency on just about every aspect of American political life. His admirers perceive him as genuine because, in contrast with Hillary Clinton’s seemingly calculated and carefully calibrated political persona, he is very openly a cynical huckster. Indeed, when they are asked, a large percentage of his admirers will readily acknowledge that you cannot take most of what he says very literally or all that seriously.

What hit me this week is that for all of the media attention to his political and ethical limitations, the media continues to believe that the fact that he has not yet been impeached or indicted confirms that he is, indeed, a political genius. At a certain level, that underlying assumption makes the media more gullible than even many of his most ardent supporters. For nothing in his personal history suggests that he is even above average at anything. In fact, I think that his appeal has been based on the amazing disconnect between, on the one hand, his ostentatious display of wealth and his celebrity and, on the other hand, his actual chronicle of abysmal business sense and his consistently gauche personal behavior.

Without discounting his impact on national or world affairs, Trump is essentially playing a president on TV, much as he played a corporate honcho on The Apprentice. (One must ask how long he would have lasted as the CEO of a publicly held corporation who was accountable to a Board and to shareholders.) In contrast, Mueller is a career investigator with an impeccable record, and Pelosi is acknowledged as one of the most adept political figures of the last half-century. If the GOP has any sense of political survival, as individual politicians and as a political party, this contrast should be keeping them up at night.