The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Tweets About Mental Stability Fuel Conversation About Fitness

Episode Date: January 9, 2018

President Trump spent much of the weekend at Camp David with other Republican leaders, talking about their agenda for 2018. But the headlines, instead, have been dominated by Trump's assertion that he is "a very stable genius." This episode, host/congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, editor correspondent Ron Elving and a special guest - science correspondent Jon Hamilton. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, I'm Scott Detrow, host of the NPR Politics Podcast, here to tell you about an opportunity to see our podcast live, in person, in Washington, D.C. We're headed to the Warner Theater on Thursday, January 18th, and you can find tickets at wamu.org slash events. We can't wait to see you there. How much would you pay to avoid morning traffic? Why are plane tickets to Boise so expensive? I'm Cardiff Garcia, co-host of The Indicator. In every episode, we take on a new unexpected idea to help you make sense of the day's news. Listen every afternoon on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, this is David calling from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, where I'm writing out the bomb cyclone. This podcast was recorded at 110 Eastern on Monday, January 8. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump spent much of the weekend at Camp David with other Republican leaders. They were there to talk about an agenda for 2018, but that was not the headline from the weekend. Instead, we're talking about the fact that President Trump is, in his words, a very stable genius. Trump's defense of his mental state brought that debate to the

forefront. We'll talk about that. And we will also, yes, get to some of the other government news it overshadowed. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Good Monday to both of you. I suppose. I suppose you could say that. Tam, there's a lot of stuff to talk about from Camp David, but I want to start with the fact that House Speaker Paul Ryan wore a shirt, then he wore a fleece, then he wore a blazer over the fleece. Sloppy Paul. So here's my theory. I have a thought. My thought is we know it was cold there. We also know that they were supposed to be on a retreat. So Paul Ryan probably thought he could wear retreat

clothes and then all of a sudden he shows up for this avail and everybody's put on their blazers and their ties and stuff and he's like So take the fleece off. I'm pro fleece. I'm pro casual blazer mix you know but you know. My only thing is just zip the fleece. Make it a quarter zip and you

could have gotten away with it but like the unzip down to just zip the fleece, make it a quarter zip and you could have gotten away with it. But like the the unzip down to your belly button fleece doesn't work. By way of actual explanation, Wisconsin, Paul Ryan, he's from Wisconsin and people in Wisconsin learn to dress in layers. Let's get let's let's table this conversation. I don't even know where to start on the rest of it. Tam, why? Let's just's table this conversation. I don't even know where to start on the rest of it. Tam, why? Let's just start with this. Why was President Trump feeling the need in tweets and in statements at a press conference to tell us all that he's a very stable genius who went to the best colleges or college we could go on? Like set the stage for why this is a thing we are talking about right now. There are two reasons that this is a thing. One, there's this little book that came out on Friday that people have been talking about a little bit. Oh, wait, people have been talking about it nonstop.

It is called Fire and Fury. It is written by a man named Michael Wolff. There are lots of questions about this book that we can get into later and that we've gotten into before. But there was a Fox News, Fox and Friends segment about that book and in particular about parts of the book where Wolf calls into question President Trump's stability and sort of ability to do the job

of President of the United States, quoting as sometimes by name and sometimes not by name members of the Trump administration. And then this tweet came very quickly after that segment aired on Fox and Friends. And we should say the book Fire and Fury did bring a lot of this stuff up. But this has been a lingering conversation for a while. Let's go back to this summer when Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee. This is one of the first things that Corker said that was really critical of President Trump. Of course, he has said many more critical things of President Trump. But this was Bob Corker this summer.

The president has not yet has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful. Stability and competence. So again, this is something that critics, especially Democratic critics, have been increasingly loud about. And we should say it's something, when it comes to stability and Trump's temperament, that was a big part of the 2016 campaign. But Ron, President Trump made a decision to defend himself on this front. And

of course, when he does that, it becomes all we talk about. Can you walk us through what specifically Trump said this weekend? Let the record reflect that I am reading the verbatim tweet of our president. As noted. Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from very, all caps, successful businessman to top TV star to president of the United States on my first try. I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius, and a very stable genius at that. So he says that this is something he goes on to talk about at the press availability

he had at Camp David. But this morning you were tweeting about your mental state. Why did you feel the need to tweet about that this morning? Well, only because I went to the best colleges of college. I went to a, I had a situation where I was a very excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars, became one of the top business people, went to television for 10 years, was a tremendous success, as you probably have heard, ran for president one time and won. And then I hear this guy that does not know me, doesn't know me at all. By the way, did not interview me for three, sitting interviewed me for three hours in the way.

That didn't exist, OK? It's in his imagination. There's a broader conversation here, and that is a lot of people in the political system and observers saying the president is not mentally stable and that's a problem because he's the commander in chief. It's a serious conversation and it just so happens we have someone here at NPR who recently wrote an article called Why Mental Health is a Poor Measure of a President. Seems like a good person to talk to. That is John Hamilton, NPR science correspondent. John, thanks for coming to hang out with us. My pleasure. Hey, John. Hey.

So you made a lot of good points in that, and let's work through them one at a time. One is that there is a lot of skepticism in the professional mental health community about the idea of diagnosing someone based on what you see on TV and what you read on your Twitter feed. That's absolutely right. It's more than skepticism. It is considered unethical to do armchair diagnoses of public figures. And one of the reasons, of course, is that if you're really going to diagnose somebody with a mental illness, you need to have sat down with that person and talked to them for a very long time. And there's been sort of a longstanding tradition of not doing that. But in the last six months or so, it seems like the mental health community,

some members of the mental health community have said, we're making an exception. That's exactly right. In fact, the professions have kind of stayed out of this since Barry Goldwater back in the 60s. And that was because a number of mental health professionals weighed in on his mental status and it ended up in a lawsuit and it was pretty ugly. And so ever since then, both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association have had policies that say you won't do this. And you do point out, though, that aside from those policies being in place, this is kind of a semi-regular conversation or armchair diagnosis or analysis of a lot of different presidents throughout history. Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, you could go on.

Yeah, there seems to be a little less hesitance to talk about previous presidents than current ones. And indeed, you know, there was somebody who did a study a few years ago that looked at all the presidents up until I think it was 1974 and concluded that about 40 percent of them, a little more than that, actually had some sort of diagnosable mental disorder. So this is not necessarily uncommon. This is sort of fascinating because there's been a move in American culture and in medicine to have parity between mental health and like physical health and to and to say that mental health challenges are not a disability, that it should be treated just like, you know, diabetes or other health care problems. And yet there's this stigma that exists around mental health and politics. Politics could be said to be the last bastion of prejudice on this as so many other subjects. But John or Ron, you make the point that it's a waste of time and it's unethical to try and

diagnose someone based on your news consumption or based on what they post on the internet. There's a real argument that using it as an insult or a concern, he's mentally ill, raises a stigma for people in the mental health community. But what is the right approach if you're a policymaker, if you're in Congress, which has the job of oversight, and you see the president saying things, taking actions that take mental health out of it, make you question his approach to the job, his seriousness of the job, the erraticness of his behavior? Well, I would say that one of the reasons that people bring up mental health is because they're trying to think of some way to explain his behavior, which otherwise is so far outside the

presidential context. We haven't had a president who communicated in this way. And so as a result, because so much of this takes so many people by surprise, including his own staff, it looks erratic and that begs an explanation. John, you talked to a lot of experts about this. What's the best way to think about this and talk about this? Well, what a lot of the people in mental health professions say is they say, why make this about mental health? You can have a president who is completely unfit to be in office yet has no diagnosable mental health problems. So why make this sort of leap to saying that if somehow you could get a panel that decided he

had a disorder that you could put a label on, that that would somehow qualify to remove him from office? And you talk to a lot of experts, but you also talk to people in the mental health community who frankly are kind of insulted by the tone of this conversation. Walk us through their concerns. Well, you know, so understandably, this kind of talk is really pretty disturbing to people who have mental disorders, mental illness, because to them, it looks like you're saying, if you diagnose me, that gives you the right to remove me from my job. And that's not a message they think is fair or is one they want to have out in public. Is there a different way to make

the same point that they would suggest instead of the president is mentally ill? I think what they'd say is that the 25th Amendment goes to fitness. It does not talk about whether you have a diagnosis of a mental illness. It talks about whether you are fit for office. And I think people in the mental health community would like to keep the conversation on, do your words and actions show somebody who is fit to be in that office or not? All right. Well, John Hamilton, thank you very much for talking to us about this for a few minutes. My pleasure. John's a science correspondent at NPR, and he wrote a story on this exact topic. You can find it online. It's

why mental health is a poor measure of a president. Definitely worth reading or listening to as this conversation continues. Hope you enjoyed the podcast, John. I did. All right, we'll talk to you soon. All right. Tam, tapping into the thousands of hours of your life that you spent following Hillary Clinton around in 2016, which you know what, is not last year anymore. I just realized that.

In 2016, Tam, you were there for most of the Clinton campaign. Trump's approach to governing Trump's stability was a big part of her campaign, wasn't it? Yeah, in particular, as she made the turn from the primary to the general election, began making this very much an issue of the campaign, head on talking about President Trump's stability as she did at the Democratic Convention. Imagine, if you dare, imagine, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. And here we are two years later. And a week ago, President Trump tweeted about nuclear exchanges. I mean, this is exactly what she was talking about.

And you can make the argument. She made that argument. A lot of Democrats made that argument. Then he was elected president. Within like a week before the election, maybe two weeks before the election, she actually had this campaign event where she brought in a man who worked with nuclear weapons, who was one of the people who if the president had said it's time to push the button, he would have actually made it happen. And I mean, talk about dark and grim and and laying out the stakes in the clearest way you possibly can. And that event was in Ohio. Hillary Clinton lost the state of Ohio and handily.

So, Ron, again, what steps can you take if you're someone in a position of power who is worried about this? Or do you just have to accept the fact that America voted President Trump president, he's president for four years, and part of being president is making these decisions? Those things are clearly true. He is president. He is going to be president for four years unless he is impeached. There have been quixotic efforts to have some sort of an impeachment vote on the floor of the House. They are not realistic in any sense. Perhaps if the Democratic Party were to recapture control of the House in November, that would be a different conversation. But as things stand now, that is the only way that someone could actually interfere with the president's authority, unless, and you do hear people talking about the 25th Amendment to the

Constitution, it does have a provision whereby the executive branch, with the cooperation of the vice president and the president's cabinet could move to have in some sense or another restraint or a removal even of a sitting president who was deemed by that group of people to be in some sense unfit. But that would be of his own cabinet and vice president. So, Tam, as is often the case, when Trump tweets about something, when he defends himself in an extended way, that becomes the focal point of the conversation. But he was responding to the claims that came out of this book over the last week. That's what started this latest wave off. And in the book, Michael Wolff says that it's a near universal concern among Trump advisers. But the fact is, we did have a lot of Trump cabinet members, Trump advisers on the air this weekend saying they

don't actually view it that way. And I guess that's what you would expect them to do. I mean, they certainly, whether they were saying it privately or not, like publicly, they're going to go out and support the president, which they did in a big way. You had Stephen Miller, who's an advisor, talking on CNN about how President Trump as a candidate was totally sharp and, you know, they'd find out some news item and in 20 minutes he'd have a whole new section of his speech sketched out and deliver it perfectly. You had the CIA director, Mike Pompe Pompeo out on television as well. My observation is that my dealings with the president on some of the most important issues that the president has to face are as professional and as thoughtful as the American people deserve.

The president's handling these duties in a way that I'm incredibly proud of to be part of his team. So last point on all of this, let's take the mental health issue out of it, because we have talked just now about the ways that that can be misleading or troubling. But let's just talk about President Trump's approach to the job and his statements. I think the fact is that this book and a ton of other reporting that there continue to be more and more questions and more and more blind quotes from advisors making their way into the news, at least about Trump's approach to the job, about the seriousness he takes of the job and about, you know, the way he spends his day

watching TV and tweeting as opposed to working all the time. What comes next? Because this seems to keep being ramped up and it seems to be a unique point to be in just a year into anyone's presidency. So there does appear to be and this was observed in National Review. This is a little bit like those comparisons that were made during the campaign of taking Donald Trump literally or taking him seriously. seriously, that his opponents were trying to take him literally but not seriously, whereas his supporters took him seriously but did not hold him to the exactitude of every little thing that he said. This is probably true of this Wolf book as well, that there are errors, there are inconsistencies, there are things that don't stand up to fact-checking. There is, however, the possibility that there is an overall cast to what he is saying

about the White House. The book carries with it a certain amount of weight in the media community, a certain amount of weight in the political community, in part because it does not come from nowhere. It does not come into an unprepared consciousness. Everybody has heard things to this effect before. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will talk about the rest of what happened at Camp David beyond the unfortunate fleece blazer combination and beyond the conversation about President Trump's mental health. Each and every morning, there are a whole lot of places you can look for news. Try this instead, though. Listen to Up First. Up First is the morning news podcast from NPR. One tap and 10 minutes later, you have started the day informed. Find Up First on the NPR One app and wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we are back. And as we said at the top of the show, there was actually a lot of conversation this weekend about policy, about what Congress is going to spend the rest of the year

doing, things that are really important and have a big effect on the government of the United States that were, of course, overshadowed by Twitter, as is often the case. But let's walk through, first of all, what happened at Camp David this weekend. Tam, what was interesting to me is that Republicans are coming off this big legislative accomplishment, passing a tax overhaul, but they're not quite sure what they want to do next. And it seems like this weekend did not fix that problem. So last week, we speculated about possible trust falls and other team building exercises that could possibly happen at this retreat. And in some ways, it sounds like that's the biggest thing of what it was not necessarily that there were trust falls, we have not gotten

confirmation on that. And we don't think it actually happened. But the Republican leaders and the president watched a movie together, they spent time together, and they talked about what they wanted to be on their agenda. They didn't come out and say, and here's exactly what we've figured out. But we got a few clues that some of the priorities may be shifting a little bit. So so so, for example, what is happening with the idea of poverty reform, as Paul Ryan sometimes calls it, or what other people might call welfare reform and what the president sometimes calls it, or what other people might call welfare reform. And what the president has called welfare reform. And what before this retreat,

President Trump in the last few weeks of the year was saying, as soon as we do taxes, when taxes are done, it's on to welfare reform. And he said it at rallies and there'd be big applause, at least one rally. There was huge applause. Well, not so much anymore, is basically the answer. And does that also mean that they won't be going after entitlements that people might not consider welfare, such as Social Security and Medicare? I think Social Security and Medicare have fallen way off of the agenda. And something like, you know, food stamps or maybe like the temporary assistance for needy families program

could still be something that they would consider maybe trying to go after. But what the president said, and he was pushed on it because he didn't bring it up himself, which is generally a sign that is not a priority for you. What the president said was that all of this is going to need to be bipartisan. The remarkable thing about this retreat is that he went in sounding like President Trump and he came out largely sounding like Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader on policy and on things like whether he would support challengers to Republicans in primaries. Right. Suddenly he was he was like it was like all hugs and and channeling Mitch McConnell.

So there's the big picture stuff for the rest of the year that they were talking about that. But they were also walking through their approach to a much more short term issue. And that's what to do about DACA. It expires in early March. But there's been a push on both sides for some sort of fix in the next few weeks. What did they decide on their approach for DACA? Well, so there are bipartisan negotiations that are underway, well underway, as we've talked about on the podcast before. What did they decide on to do a DACA fix. But nothing is done until it's done. And at the moment, the wall could be a movable object.

Donald Trump is very good at negotiating this kind of thing. You insist on exactly what you want until exactly the last minute, and then you take something a little less and you say you won. And in a real sense, you would be winning. Is that negotiating or is it framing what you negotiate? I think it's both. You frame the negotiation as something that has to be all or nothing. You get a little bit less, maybe a lot less, but then you say you won and you say you got your wall. And who's going to actually go down there and inspect what gets built? It's going to be less probably than what Donald Trump wants. Certainly overnight it will be less.

And in the meantime, both parties would really like to have some sort of a solution to the deferred action for childhood arrivals. DACA, the dreamers. And the framing is important on the Democratic side, too, because Democrats all along have said they'd be willing to vote for increased funding for border security, beefing up what we already have. But anything that looks like Trump getting his way on expanding a wall, they're not going to vote for, they're saying. And they will say they didn't. And Donald Trump will say, I got my wall. OK, so there's other stuff going on, too. We should say that this meeting with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell came right as Trump's relationship with his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, totally blew up. That's something we talked at extended length about in our Thursday roundup.

But over the course of the weekend, Steve Bannon tried in a little bit of a belated way to walk things back. What he said about Donald Trump Jr., praised President Trump. Ron, is Steve Bannon, if he doesn't make a comeback, if he is off the scene in terms of the conservative movement, does that make much of an impact? Or was Steve Bannon really more hat than cattle when it came to his influence? It may now seem as though he was more hat than cattle. But what he was, indubitably, was a threat to certain Republican incumbents in states where they might have been challenged from their own right, if you will, challenged by populist conservatives, a little bit the way Roy Moore shot down Luther

Strange in Alabama with the help of Steve Bannon. Now, it's a lot more difficult for Steve Bannon to do that if he is not seen as being a kind of out-of-the-White-House wingman for President Trump. That was the true source of his power. The other source of his power, aligned with Donald Trump, was the money that he was getting from the Mercer family. That's Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebecca. They seem to have cut him loose at this moment, at least temporarily, as you say. If he does not get that source of funding back or a substitute for it, he's not really in a position to run a lot of candidates in those red states that are reelecting a Republican senator this year to threaten that Republican incumbent.

Last question about this retreat. Historically, some big pieces of legislation have passed in even-numbered years. In midterm election years, Obamacare is a great example. But that's something that had been worked on for much of the preceding year. Historically, if you don't have an agenda going into the second year of a congressional term, if you don't have stuff you're already working on, does much tend to happen in it? No. Historically, the second year of a congressional session, the even-numbered year, as you say, is about the election. And so people don't want to take on something like entitlements, Social Security and Medicare. People probably don't even want to take on popular programs that

might be called welfare by some people. One of the things we would expect them to do would be to not shut the government down on January 19th. So some sort of a negotiation there between the Dreamers, the DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and Donald Trump's wall on the southern border. Those kinds of things we do expect to see, but some big new initiative of the kind that the president has talked about, maybe not so likely in an election year. All right, we need to talk about one more really important thing that happened this weekend. And that thing is Oprah. Let's first of all, let's take a listen.

Oprah Winfrey won the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes last night. And she went up on stage and gave a barn burner of a speech. I've interviewed and portrayed people who've withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you,

but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon. In a world where Donald Trump is president of the United States, we have to take the possibility of Oprah Winfrey running for president of the United States seriously, just in general. But she got all this buzz last night. She's been mentioned as some sort of outsider candidate before, and her partner Stedman tells the L.A. Times last night, it's up to the people.

She would absolutely do it in the world of power rankings of who would or would not run for president. How seriously would you have to think about Oprah for president? As seriously as she does. If she decides she really wants it, really wants to get into it, really wants to try to put something together, she would be obviously a highly unconventional candidate. But as says for itself, as speaks its own name, the comparison to would Oprah Winfrey. Very hard to imagine anyone else eclipsing her in that regard in the Democratic field or as an independent or in any other way that she might choose to do it. So if she really means to do this, and she's been highly ambivalent about it, to put it mildly, if she really means to do this, then I believe we will be talking a great deal about Oprah Winfrey.

Tam, she has a lot of favors to cash in with, among other people, President and Michelle Obama. We're talking a great deal about Oprah Winfrey. to support Barack Obama. And I think that she does raise this other idea and talking about Obama raises this other idea that, you know, we've had now two presidents elected in a row who do not have what you would traditionally consider the resume of someone being elected president. President Obama came in after, you know, he was running for president after he'd only been senator for two years. That is not very long. And then America elects President Trump. And it is an interesting concept that the reaction to Trump would be to run to another celebrity. And Oprah is not the only person who's been discussed.

You also have like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Mark Cuban from Shark Tank and the... And the Dallas Mavericks. And the Dallas Mavericks. How about The Rock? Talk about temperament. How about The Rock? Anyway, and The Rock. You guys are ignoring The Rock.

But there's a broader... I mean, you can make the pendulum argument of there would be a really compelling argument for someone with a lot of government experience in the steady hand. But you know what, Tam? You make a point that we elected two people in a row without the traditional experience they've also uh if you go through the list of presidential losers most of them actually did have the on-paper resume experience to be president and found that used against them really effectively john karen election Yeah, you voted for this, you voted for that. Mitt Romney.

Yeah. So the point is it's going to be a very unknown next couple years, and I guess that's why, among other things, we podcast multiple times a week to try and sort it out. I'm going to end on that. We'll be back in your feed Thursday. In the meantime, you can catch our coverage on NPR.org, on your local public radio station, and on the NPR One app. There are still a few tickets available for the live show we're doing at the Warner Theater on January 18th.

You can go to NPRpresents.org to check that out. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Hoving, editor-correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.