News Tday

Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury（怒火）, is an unforgettable ringside（拳击场） view of the reckless and undignified spectacle of the Donald Trump presidency so far. It will not surprise anyone that the US president comes across as a vain, delusional（妄想的） and unstable character whose public utterances（表达） could mostly be disproved（证明是假的） by provable facts. Unable to master the presidential mien（风采）, Mr Trump has chosen to defile（污损） it. Without experienced advisers and consiglieres, Trump’s White House was divided into two camps: one led by his daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the other by Steve Bannon, a Mephistophelian（恶魔） figure credited with （归功于）channelling passions that more conventional politicians have been careful not to exploit. Mr Bannon, once Mr Trump’s chief strategist, is the book’s unkempt（紊乱，粗野） star. It is through his rise and fall that we learn how unsuited（不合适） Mr Trump is to the world’s most demanding（苛求的） job.

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Mr Bannon’s view is that Mr Trump is not likely to make it to the end of his first term. Either the president is brought down（颠覆） by the “treasonous” and “unpatriotic(不爱国的)”meetings held by his son and a group of Russians or by federal prosecutors（检察官） who unearth（发觉，发现） serious financial crimes. On this analysis Mr Bannon gave Mr Trump equal chances of（平等的机会） staying in office, being removed by Congress or being declared mentally unfit for office.
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The last option seems far-fetched, but the US constitution’s 25th amendment allows for a president to be removed if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. Such is Mr Trump’s divisiveness（分歧，不和） that a social movement of mental-health professionals has sprung up（兴起，雨后春笋般） which argues Mr Trump suffers from incurable malignant narcissism （无药可救的恶性自恋症）and this renders （表示）him unfit for office. This is a break with conventions adopted in the wake of the failed rightwing US presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s successful legal action against a magazine after it published a story in 1964 saying medics declared him so “severely paranoid（狂想症）” that he should not be able to become president. Since then psychiatrists have largely refrained（防止） from giving opinions about figures they have not personally examined.