Commentary: Are Trump’s critics crazier than he is?

AP

When MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski hears that President Trump has passed his cognitive abilities exam with flying colors, she says “the word evil comes to mind.”

Which is interesting, because watching the reactions of Trump’s opponents to everything the president says or does, the word “crazy” comes to mind.

Could it be that the only people crazier than Donald Trump are the people who are trying to diagnose him as crazy on cable TV?

A tip for the anti-Trump media: If you want to make sure he keeps his political base strong and motivated going into the 2018 elections, have more events like the presser with the White House physician on Tuesday. The press corps spent an hour confirming every stereotype my fellow conservatives hold about the mainstream media. 

Imagine what the media’s treatment of White House physician Ronny Jackson—a Rear Admiral in the Navy who served in Iraq and treated both Presidents W. Bush and Obama—looked like to Trump-leaning voters at home.

They watched Dr. Jackson say explicitly that he has “absolutely no concerns about [Trump’s] cognitive ability or his neurological function,” only to see the issue raised again and again by reporters in the room.

They watched Dr. Jackson report Trump’s perfect score on a cognitive assessment test, only to listen as reporters asked if President Trump is “mentally fit,” showing signs of Alzheimer’s, or—no joke—addicted to drugs.

(“No, he has no drug addiction,” Jackson replied.)

Tuesday afternoon, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked if President Trump has heart disease.

“No, he does not have heart disease,” Jackson responded, adding “the one that stands out more than anything to me is [the president’s] cardiac health. His cardiac health is excellent.”

The next day, Dr. Gupta—who has never examined Donald Trump—went on TV and declared that the president does, in fact, have heart disease. His network posted a graphic claiming Trump is “at a high risk of heart attack or heart disease in next 3-5 years.”

Imagine how all that looks to someone who is not predisposed to seeing President Trump as evil, crazy or on drugs?  The roughly 40 percent of Americans who, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, approve of the job he’s doing—what do they see? Objective reporting, or people out to get the president?

This isn’t a conversation about media criticism or allegations of liberal bias. To people like my Evangelical parents who reluctantly voted Trump, or the movement conservatives who are more than happy to admit his personal failures and foibles, attacks like this look, well, unhinged.

Even without Trump’s perfect cognitive test score, making the case that he’s mentally ill was always going to be a tough sell. After all, Americans have been watching Trump on TV for more than a decade. They’ve seen him speaking extemporaneously on the stump for hours at a time. The things Trump says may be nutty in the “My crazy Uncle Bobby thinks laundry pods are a CIA plot” way, but to many Americans, Trump’s brain appears to be operating just fine.

Telling those same people again and again that Trump is deranged doesn’t persuade the audience. It raises suspicions about the speaker.

And keep in mind that these over-the-top attacks on Trump are occurring at a time when individual Americans feel pretty good about their own lives. The Dow just broke the 26,000 mark. Millions of Americans are getting bonuses and raises in the wake of the Trump tax cut. Even North and South Korea are talking again.

It’s true that Americans appear reluctant to give President Trump credit, as the recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed. Trump’s personal behavior, from ugly comments about immigrants to new allegations of extramarital affairs, make it hard for people who support his policies to project that support to the president himself.

But when the attacks on Trump are so personal, so passionate and so beyond the pale, the “any enemy of my enemy” instinct kicks in. Right-leaning voters who aren’t big fans of the president rally around him just to oppose what appear to be unfair partisan attacks.

Now imagine how those same persuadable voters might respond if Trump’s opponents avoided the “crazy” talk (in every sense of the word) and instead focused on the many legitimate criticisms about his performance as president. Imagine if, instead of comparisons to Stalin and Hitler, they stuck with facts, policies and math. Such criticism would be harder for the Trump White House to refute. But in the current din of “Donald Trump is a crazy, Russia-loving racist!” it’s hard to find.

The Trump White House is completely happy for that hysteria to continue. It’s easy to see how Trump’s biggest partisan enemies could end up being his best political friends.