There is a joke on Twitter that no matter what it is that Donald Trump just said, or his administration just did, there is always a weirdly on-point tweet lurking in Trump’s archives.
Take today, for instance.
There was a minor furor Wednesday morning after NBC News reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called Trump, his boss, a “moron” over the summer. It subsequently emerged that the precise term Tillerson used was, er, more vivid:
Just now, @SRuhle: "My source didn't just say he called him a moron. He said he called him an f-ing moron."
— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) October 4, 2017
Tillerson subsequently gave a press conference in which he did not deny the report but called it “petty nonsense.” And that might have been the end of it, save for a tweet Trump sent in October 2014:
An interesting cartoon that is circulating. pic.twitter.com/OPG2R2ytkr
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2014
There are two things to say about this.
Thing the first: How is there literally a tweet for everything?! Is Trump secretly a time traveler who just enjoys punking us?
Thing the second: Though Tillerson has dismissed his past comments as nonsense, I think 2014-era Trump has the better of this argument. If the president of the United States is an, ahem, moron, that seems like a big deal, and one that our system of government — which has few remedies for a mentally unfit executive – is ill prepared to handle.
Impeachment is meant to address high crimes and misdemeanors. The 25th Amendment exists to deal with a medical emergency. But electing a moron to be president? The founders didn’t give us an easy remedy for that, presumably because they expected we wouldn’t do it.