No wonder the Russians backed Donald Trump.
He clearly is a "useful idiot" to the Kremlin. Just look what he's doing to us.
Bob Corker sees it. The Tennessee senator says he tried for a while to gently nudge the president into a governing groove with statements in August that Trump "has not yet" been able to demonstrate the stability and competence to be a successful president. He tried again last week, calling the president's three top advisers all that stand between Americans and chaos.
Now it seems, Corker has resorted to baiting the president in a tweet, something Hillary Clinton said Trump was susceptible to during the campaign. She was right, of course.
Her point was that Trump could be baited into a foolish war if a foreign leader chose to publicly criticize the president in the same way that Trump communicates. Clearly in Trump view, what's acceptable behavior for him is only acceptable for him, no one else.
Thus in a series of escalating insults, Corker tweeted, "It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center."
Trump then dubbed our senator "liddle Bob Corker."
From this vantage point, Corker is doing us a favor, pushing this unstable president nearer the precipice of showing himself for the thoroughly unstable, incompetent and dangerous person that he is.
Corker told The New York Times this president treats his office like "a reality show," and is reckless enough to put his country "on the path to World War III."
Our question is when will more Republicans come out of their bomb shelters to help Corker?
When will somebody get serious about invoking the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office? We don't have time to wait on Special Counsel Robert Mueller to make an indictable or impeachable case against Trump.
Vanity Fair writes: "Corker seems to have painted a familiar portrait. Speaking anonymously to The Washington Post, one aide likened Trump to a 'whistling teapot, saying that when he does not blow off steam, he can turn into a pressure cooker and explode.'"
We saw this in Trump's impromptu news conference after the Charlottesville, Va., violence. Immediately after the incident in which a woman there was killed, the president read a scripted and appropriate statement. Then he fumed for a few days and went off - divisively and publicly defending neo-Nazis.
Vanity Fair, in a piece headlined "White House allies worry Trump has become unstable," notes that efforts to keep Trump from boiling over fall to John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and Rex Tillerson. But "at least two legs of the stool have become wobbly of late."
Kelly is clashing with Trump, and Tillerson is still in the doghouse for reportedly calling Trump "a moron." And, oh yeah, Trump tweets that he'll be glad to "compare I.Q. tests" with Tillerson.
Politico has written that the president's advisers try a strategy of constrainment, trying to control what reaches his desk or whose calls he gets. They also sometimes advise allies to make their cases on television because Trump is such an avid TV watcher.
But as Corker's adult day care tweet notes, sometimes the keepers clearly miss their shift.
So what happens next?
How long before Trump decides to change the subject with a missile launch? When that happens, how much GOP support would Corker get from a squeamish set of Senate and House colleagues who wouldn't even own war when it was in the control of their favorite target of derision, President Barack Obama?
The Washington Post's right-leaning Jennifer Rubin, in an opinion column writes, "Corker raises a legitimate and unavoidable issue - the president's mental stability. ... If the president of the United States cannot be trusted with nuclear codes, he cannot remain in office. Republicans need for once to put aside tribal loyalty and think constructively about how to secure the country's safety and survival."
We couldn't have said it better.