Trump round up: Is he senile? Will he ignore the judges? Plus, the FBI and Congress

Your guide to this week's important news

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For as long as the Trump administration keeps doing crazy things at a crazy pace, I’ll keep doing these weekly round-ups.

So that’ll be for the next four years, then. Let’s dive in.

Is Trump senile? How would we know?

Donald Trump is 78 years old. That’s older than Joe Biden was when he started his term. By the time his second term is over, Trump will be the oldest president ever. He also behaves in incredibly erratic ways.

Look at his handling of an issue that has mostly flown below the radar: California water. There were recently massive fires around Los Angeles, and Trump responded by reviving an old criticism of California’s water management policy. The state, he claims, hoards water in its northern reaches in order to protect an endangered fish species, the delta smelt. This meant not enough water was available in the southern part of the state to fight the fires.

In response, Trump in recent days ordered federal authorities to release a massive amount of water from dammed reservoirs. About three billion gallons flowed out, and if the White House hadn’t been talked down, it apparently would have released much more - enough to flood local communities.

There’s just one very big problem. The water was released in the Central Valley, hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. There is literally no way for the water to flow from there to LA, and the fires were by this point mostly contained anyway. The act was, as Chris Hayes wrote, “like pouring a glass of water down your sink in order to water your houseplants”. All it did was deprive Trump-supporting farming communities in the Central Valley of water that they will need as growing season begins in the months ahead. It was a pointless waste of California’s water - exactly the thing that Trump accuses the state of doing.

This is so detached from reality that we should question the mental capacity of the person who wrote it

This sequence of events is not just surreal - it is indicative of a complete detachment from reality. It is so ignorant of cause and effect that if someone else did it, we would question their mental competence. But Trump does things like this all of the time, so we just shrug it off.

But we shouldn’t. And we should also worry about what happens if Trump’s mental state deteriorates further. Put simply, even if he’s not senile now, he sure often acts like he is. He long ago crossed a threshold that in any other leader would be disqualifying. So how would we know if he declines further? And what could be done about it?

Will Trump ignore the judiciary?

The most important plot line in the new Trump administration is one that isn’t being talked about much. The reason we’re not talking about it much is that it’s one norm that Trump is yet to thoroughly barge through. But if he did, it would turbocharge America’s growing constitutional crisis and perhaps lead it past a point of no return.

I’m talking about the administration’s attitude towards the federal judiciary. So far, a number of illegal and unconstitutional things that the administration has tried to do have been blocked by judges. This includes its order against birthright citizenship, its “delayed buy-out” for federal employees, and Elon Musk’s access to some sensitive government systems.

One way to look at this is that it’s a fairly common presidential tactic: do something that you know to be illegal but that you think is politically popular, and then wait for the courts to stop you. Then you can spend years fighting court battles which make you look like you’re trying hard to accomplish whatever that thing is, without having to bear the consequences of actually doing it. Presidents of both parties have done this.

But I’m worried that Trump is building up to something else: ignoring the courts. He might do it openly, or he might pretend to comply without actually doing so, something that may already be happening with the order which unblocked federal grants and loans.

The problem is that federal courts actually have remarkably little power to enforce their own edicts. The executive branch has (almost) all of the guns, and it has the ability to create facts on the ground faster than the courts can react. If Trump makes this move, the last check on his power will be gone. This would clearly constitute the sort of “high crime and misdemeanor” that is supposed to lead to impeachment, but good luck getting this Republican-controlled Congress to impeach.

It would also be, for all intents and purposes, the death of the constitution - or at least its transformation into something radically different, in which the president was essentially an elected dictator, bound by no outside authority.

So watch how the administration reacts to the courts - a lot is riding on it.

Trump is a product of decadence

I’ve also been alarmed by the way that the administration is moving to dismantle the FBI. Trump appointees have sacked dozens of the agency’s senior leaders whose only crime appears to have been that they were senior leaders at a time when the agency was prosecuting Trump for his numerous crimes. The Trump people also appear to be trying to make the FBI take on a much greater role in immigration enforcement, reassigning dozens of people to work on it.

You might think of the FBI as an agency which tries to solve serious federal crimes, but it also has a major role in keeping Americans safe in other ways. The FBI is America’s main counterintelligence agency, meaning it tries to root out foreign spies. It also has a huge role to play in counterterrorism. The Trump people are taking agents off these vitally important missions and assigning them to deport immigrants instead.

This got me thinking about how even though Trump’s whole political persona is built around the idea that he will protect the United States from threats, he’s actually the product of a deeply secure time in the nation’s history.