You realize we’re less than one month into this circus, yes?

After a press conference today the problem at hand should be obvious to absolutely everyone – the President has a severe mental illness. Nothing else matters at this point. There will be many sentences written, many hours of panel discussions, and hundreds of facebook posts shared going around this simple and obvious fact. But like the vast majority of our politics, it will be irrelevant.

The only thing which matters at this time is the peril faced by the United States, and indeed the world, because so much power is in the hands of someone obviously not well.

This is as close to a picture of him that I’ll use.

The press conference today was hardly unique in any way whatsoever. The extended rant about how terrible the press is was, largely, the same complaint lodged by every single President who has ever held the office. This, however, was different.

Our President is incapable of telling the difference between fantasy and reality.

It doesn’t take too much of the press conference to see the issue plainly. The most common quote which we will be hearing through the next few news cycles will resonate almost as well as Kelly Ann Conway’s infamous “alternative facts” statement.

The leaks are absolutely real, the news is fake, because so much of the news is fake.

How is this evidence of mental illness? It starts with the delivery of this line with a perfectly straight face. It runs through the follow-up which will last for days and days. Leaks, a feature of the paranoia of every President, are an understandable problem. What is different here is that they are interfering with an alternative reality that cannot be questioned in any way.

It gets silly fast.

Like many people with a severe mental illness, deep inside Trump understands there is a problem. The problem with leaks is not that the reveal his words or actions to the American people but that they reveal Donald Trump to Donald Trump.

Nothing else matters at this moment. We should all be quite used to lengthy discussions of “issues” which don’t actually matter in any way whatsoever given that nearly every aspect of our politics has been based on avoiding the difficult work which needs to be done. Our world is changing rapidly and we have to accept what has to be done. But this is inherently different.

The chatter about Gen Flynn or Russians or anything else is only relevant to the extent it makes it clear to a majority of representatives and senators that impeachment is essential. It will take quite a lot for that to happen so we can expect non-stop chatter for a while. It’s so unlikely, in fact, that illegal ways of removing the danger are probably much more likely.

The Founding Fathers gave us many things, but especially our basic principles.

We know, for example, that the intelligence community is keeping critical information from the President. The war between the two is only going to worsen and the attempts to isolate the mental illness more obvious. But what if there is a critical threat to the United States, such as the recent missile test by North Korea? While Trump takes the calls in an open air party and only makes a bad situation worse we can expect at some point the situation will be dealt with by a military acting solo. It is a simple prelude to an actual coup.

That would be a tragedy for our Republic, but overall less so than what we are experiencing now. We will get over it one way or the other. What we may not get over is the immediate threat we must deal with now.

How will this all end? It’s hard to say. The system will move forward as if there is not an immediate mental health crisis, as legal systems nearly always do. It is a terrible failing of the system but it will have to be dealt with.

With all the words thrown around none are more important than this: our President has a severe mental illness. Everything else is irrelevant.