(Illustration: ‘A Wall Made of Fruitcakes,’ by Dave Whamond, and found here).

In the context of T-Rump being mentally unstable — i.e., the whole Gen. Milley affair — here’s another instance of assholes in high places knowing the orange turd was nuts, but said nothing and allowed shit to happen.
Prior to even the 2016 election, Paul Ryan knew the T-Rump was bent — via BusinessInsider yesterday:

Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan started studying how to interact with people with narcissistic personality disorder after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, according to a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

Insider obtained an early copy of “Peril,” which is set to be released next week.

According to the book, Ryan was caught off guard when Trump won the election in an enormous upset over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Republicans controlled the House and Senate, and Ryan, realizing that he would have to work with Trump, started researching how to deal with someone who is “amoral and transactional,” the book says.

A wealthy doctor in New York, who was also a Republican donor, contacted Ryan later and told him, “You need to understand what narcissistic personality disorder is,” according to the book.

“What?” Ryan asked, at which point the doctor sent the Wisconsin Republican an email detailing his “thoughts on how to best deal with a person with anti-social personality disorder,” Woodward and Costa reported.
The email also included links to articles about the topic in The New England Journal of Medicine, and information from the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th edition.

The book said that “Ryan studied them for weeks, convinced Trump had the personality disorder.”

Duh! Ryan and T-Rump hit the shits after the racial riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, of which T-Rump loved all his people, but Ryan called a racist, a racist:

“We must be clear,” Ryan tweeted after the riot.
“White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”

According to “Peril,” Trump called Ryan afterward and blew up at him over the statement, shouting, “You’re not in the foxhole with me!”

“Are you finished?” Ryan reportedly yelled back.
“May I have some time to speak now? You’re the president of the United States. You have a moral leadership obligation to get this right and not declare there is a moral equivalency here.”

But Trump refused to back down, saying,
“These people love me. These are my people. I can’t backstab the people who support me,” according to the book.
…
The two men also found themselves at odds in early 2018 after Congress sent a $1.3 trillion omnibus package to Trump for his signature. The president wanted to veto the bill and, according to the book, shouted at Ryan during a White House meeting that “this is a terrible deal!”

“Who signed off on this piece of shit?” Trump asked, the book said.
“This is a piece of shit, a bad fucking deal.”

Ryan eventually got Trump to sign the bill by dispatching then Defense Secretary James Mattis to the Oval Office, saying,
“If you’re standing there, he’ll do it.”

Why didn’t these assholes in high places — not just Ryan, but a way-shitload of others — get the word out T-Rump was a fucking psychotic monster and shut down the whole show?
Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post, also yesterday, asked and answered that with five related questions:

First, what guarantees must be put in place to prevent an unstable president from setting off a nuclear war? Milley is right that, as chairman of the joint chiefs, he is to be included in a decision to authorize a nuclear strike.
Beyond that, Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, explains, “No one can countermand [a nuclear strike order from the president]. But the commander of STRATCOM could say ‘this is an illegal order and I am not bound to follow it.’”
Nichols adds, “[The president] can then start relieving people until he gets to someone who will follow the order.”
…
Second, why did Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet not invoke the 25th Amendment to relieve a president who was clearly unfit for office? The short answer is that they are cowards who could not bring themselves to uphold their oaths of office even to prevent potential nuclear obliteration.
The more generous explanation is that they thought they could contain him. On this one, we plainly need some statutory authorization and guidance on the 25th Amendment to lay out step-by-step instructions for the vice president and the Cabinet.
Given that a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans might actually go along with clarifying legislation that would, among other things, provide for a panel of medical doctors.

Third, how could former White House officials — including former chief of staff John F. Kelly, former national security adviser John Bolton, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats (among others) — not inform the country (before the election even) of the president’s unfitness for office? Again, the short answer is that they are cowards, or at least thought they would not be believed.
It might not do any good, but Cabinet-level national security officials should have to affirm in their confirmation hearings that they will report to Congress if they suspect the president is not emotionally and mentally capable of performing his duties.

Fourth, how could Republican officeholders then and to this day pay homage to, take direction from and support for reelection someone who was clearly unstable? Well, we know they are cowards from their refusal to impeach him, efforts to block the Jan. 6 commission and continued reiteration of the “big lie” that the election was stolen.
Their reticence to defend the country against an unconstitutional coup remains the most grotesque moral and political failure in memory.

Finally, why did the media consistently underplay President Donald Trump’s incoherence, and why do they still resist confronting Republicans about their blind loyalty to a crackpot?
I do not have a good answer for that one.
Perhaps they need to rethink their role. They are not custodians of the myth of moral equivalence between the parties. They are truth-tellers whose prime obligation is to democracy.
They might start taking that obligation seriously, beginning with asking every Republican if the 2020 election was stolen, if the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were justified and how they could continue to heed the direction of someone whose lunacy has not abated since he lost the election.

Dream on, girl. The MSM is a sometimes useless lot — Eric Boehlert at his PressRun, also from yesterday, and the astonishing failure of mainstream journalism to call Republicans what they are — lying assholes.
Main point:

Yet news outlets like the Times played word games in order to avoid honest and blunt descriptions — the Times never used “lie” in an article that was all about GOP election lies.

The stilted language the Times used in order to avoid telling the truth represents the kind of unnatural word choices journalists make when they want to whitewash deeply disturbing Republican behavior. (Who, in everyday life, uses “false claims” when they’re talking about obvious lies?)

We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election defeat and major news outlets are still peddling “falsehood” gibberish in the face of the Republican Party’s increasingly undemocratic behavior?

Money and power. Same reason Woodward didn’t furnish details of how all these people felt about the T-Rump, but waited until publication day, months/years after the known fact. Although Woodward presented a lukewarm response to the same matter in “Rage,” the last T-Rump book, and his knowledge of how serious COVID-19: ‘“the biggest problem I had, which is always a problem with Trump, is I didn’t know if it was true.”‘

Call bullshit.

Nuts is nuts especially if you’re obviously consumed by a mental divergence:

And once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: ‘President Trump,’ by Jonathan Bass, found here).