Charles Pierce writes for Esquire and doesn’t hold back. He thinks the newspaper headlines didn’t capture the essence of our president’s appearance in the Rose Garden on Friday.

I fear they missed the story that was staring them right between the eyes…. To wit:

The President* is A Delusional Maniac With Sawdust Pouring Out Of Both Ears.

My sweet bearded Lord, what a performance. I don’t know what my favorite part was. It might have been when he admitted to NBC’s Peter Alexander that he was only declaring an emergency because he wanted to get his mitts on the money as fast as possible. It might have been the moment when he recalled how Barack Obama told him that he was planning on launching a “very big war” on the Korean Peninsula (And this was after the president* said he wouldn’t speak for Obama, and then made up a bullshit story about him.)

Was it is the revelation that Shinzo Abe of Japan had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize? Was it the way he repeatedly hung Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen out to dry, telling the reporters that the statistics on immigrants and crime produced by DHS didn’t match up with the secret “stats” he has? It may have been when he shouted out his favorite wingnut celebrities, and then said that not only did he not know Ann Coulter, but that he hadn’t talked to her in a year. Oh, OK. If you wanted to produce a commercial to sell the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, this was it.

Mr. Pierce then quotes the president regarding his phony national emergency.

It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it. He lapsed into a sing-song cadence that was half-middle-school-taunt and half-serial-killer. No president in my lifetime ever did voice acting, let alone a voice that made you want to make sure he was kept away from the White House cutlery. The man is not all there. Everybody knows it. If your uncle behaved like the president* behaved on Friday, you’d hide his car-keys, lock up the booze, and drive him to the neurologist.

Jack Holmes, also of Esquire, agreed.

In the future, assuming there is one for this country or this species, we will look back and marvel at how the White House press corps questioned our King Lear of a president as if he were Otto von Bismarck. Over and over again, reporters sit through an incomprehensible deluge of various phrase-like objects and unfinished sentences and then stand up, one by one, to ask this guy about his China policy or whatever. It’s a kind of collective suspension of disbelief, where everyone in attendance at one of these nationally disgraceful press conferences agrees to pretend that the president is not, in fact, an old man whose brain is rapidly atrophying due to a debilitating level of cable news consumption.

Does that seem harsh? Is it untoward to state the obvious—that the President of the United States is a Fox News Grandpa who gets the lion’s share of the modicum of information he actually retains from the various blabbering heads that praise him all day through the teevee?

… The president is an experiment: he is a low-information voter, a talk-radio caller jumped up on confusion and resentment towards a changing world—not to mention ill-gotten gains—whom We, The People saw fit to make the planet’s most powerful man. [Fox News “personality”] Sean Hannity is briefing the President of the United States on what’s happening in the world. God help us all. Don’t ask him about his budget, for Christ’s sake. Ask him what the three branches of government are.

But he wasn’t done. It is quite simply impossible to wrap your head around the vast depths of the paranoid delusion and public display of non compos mentis that was on show in the Rose Garden this fine February Friday. So just concentrate on this part, here, where the president admits—while announcing he’s declared a national emergency—that there is no national emergency, he just felt like speeding things up….

This is insanity. It’s not a “national emergency” if you don’t really need to declare a national emergency, you’re just mad that Congress didn’t give you more money for your Big, Beautiful Wall. It’s time we all stopped pretending that the president is merely ignorant or rude or even crooked, and start to process the fact that he ain’t all there. How much more will he be allowed to destroy as he thrashes about on the border between his long history of skirting the law and his growing romance with the phantasmagorical as the lights begin to dim in his creaky attic?

Instead of treating this guy with respect, media people and politicians should acknowledge what most of us have known for a long time. He is seriously unfit and should be removed from office forthwith.