Growing Chorus Questions Trump’s Mental Health

The Toronto Star reports:

There is an elephant in the election. It was tiptoed around for a full year by Republicans and Democrats and the media alike. And then, on Wednesday, Michael Bloomberg hoisted it onto the stage of the Democratic National Convention.

His plea for Hillary Clinton: “Let’s elect a sane, competent person.” The compliment barely disguised an extraordinary allegation. The billionaire former mayor of New York City was suggesting that Donald Trump is not sane himself.

Bloomberg’s remark was a sign of a quiet shift over the last month in the mainstream discussion of the Republican presidential nominee. Once unmentionable, questions about Trump’s mental health have started to bubble into respectable American forums as he has inched closer to the nuclear codes of the world’s mightiest military while behaving stranger than ever.

It’s a delicate thing to ask, but the fate of humankind is at stake. Is Donald Trump … OK? “We can gloss over it, laugh about it, analyze it, but Donald Trump is not a well man,” Stuart Stevens, chief strategist to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote last week on Twitter.

Stevens, the most prominent political figure to persistently broach the subject, conceded that he is “no doctor or psychiatrist.” But he said in an interview that the available evidence leads to two possible conclusions: either Trump has a substance abuse problem, which appears unlikely, or “there is something definitely off about him.”

The substance abuse allegation has been around for years. The above-linked story also notes that several presidents, including Lincoln, Nixon, and JFK are believed have suffered from depression or other mood-related illnesses.