'He's going to set our house on fire': Ex-GOP rep. warns about Trump's erratic behavior

President Donald Trump is “going to set our house on fire,” warned a Republican congressman who once supported him, in the midst of a Substack post on Tuesday. His concern is that Trump is quite literally insane.

“When I do media in Europe, I feel like I'm speaking to the world, and I often say 'world, former congressman here, a proud American here,’” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said in his rant. “‘Hey, world, listen up,’ I said last night, ‘he's a madman. He's not only a bad, horrible guy — he's lost it. He should be removed from office. I don't think that will happen, world, but hang on.’”

Adding that “Trump is going to set our house on fire, he's making his way to setting the whole world on fire,” Walsh speculated that Trump is a “madman who is losing it more and more every day. And this is really scary and really dangerous, because he is the leader of still the most powerful country in the world.”

Walsh is not the first public figure to speculate about the president’s mental fitness. From his arbitrary wars against Venezuela and Iran and his unprovoked belligerence toward Canada and Denmark to a noticeable deterioration in the quality of his speech, it seems Trump is both on the decline and allowing that decline to impair his leadership.

“The other day, President Donald Trump claimed he’d had a conversation with a former president who endorsed Trump’s ill-considered war against Iran,” wrote journalism professor John Krull, the director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism, for The Statehouse File earlier in March. “According to Trump, the unnamed former president even said that he wished he had done what Trump had done.”

Krull pointed out these alleged conversations never actually happened and therefore Trump is either deliberately lying or, more troublingly, “that the president of the United States—the person controlling the most powerful arsenal on earth—finally and fully has come to believe his own con and no longer is in firm contact with reality.”

Speaking to this journalist for Salon Magazine shortly before the 2020 presidential election, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist who has taught at Yale and authored the new book “Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul,” profiled Trump psychologically and used that analysis to predict he would reject the result if he lost — which actually happened.

“Those with pathological narcissism are abusive and dangerous because of their catastrophic neediness,” Lee said. “Think of a drowning person gasping for air: a survival instinct just may push you down in order to save one’s own life. In the manner that the body needs oxygen, the soul needs love, and self-love is what a toxic narcissist is desperately lacking. This is why he must overcompensate, creating for himself a self-image where he is the best at everything, never wrong, better than all the experts, and a ‘stable genius.'”

Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, warned on Tuesday that the mainstream media is imperiling democracy by refusing to call out Trump’s clear signs of mental decline, regardless of whether it is caused by a health issue or his personality. When they fail to do this, people are hurt.

“His about-faces on such issues as tariffs and Iran have created chaos in the financial markets,” Froomkin explained. “How about interjecting some skepticism when he says something absurd in the first place, so that people won’t overreact when he says it – and again when he takes it back?” He urged journalists to exhibit “self-respect. One of Trump’s most consistent messages to his supporters has been to mistrust the mainstream media and its ‘fake news.’ But the primary source of ‘fake news’ in the mainstream media is news reports based on Trump’s lies. So stop doing that.”

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