By D. Allan Kerr

Somewhere, somehow, someone with some amount of influence with the American masses has to step up and verbalize what we see right before us – the next President of the United States is an absolute nutjob.

But until then, like nudity in the old fable of the emperor with no clothes, “mentally unhinged” is being accepted as the new normal.

Just this past week, Donald Trump took credit for Japanese company SoftBank’s decision to invest some $50 billion in the U.S. “Masa said he would never do this had we (Trump) not won the election!” he tweeted after meeting with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.

Not surprisingly, this turned out to be another blatant Trump lie.

See, in the real world, multi-billion dollar companies don’t just pick up a newspaper, notice that a particular individual has been elected president, and hop in a plane to invest a few billion dollars in that country. Do people really believe that? I mean, think.

This was a massive undertaking developed over several months and actually announced back in October – before the election – as part of a $100 billion deal also involving Saudi Arabia.

A week before the SoftBank lie, Trump tweeted that in his bizarre alternate universe “millions of people” had voted illegally in the November election. He had no evidence to support this delusion, didn’t even attempt to provide one. Just kind of blurted it out.

And this was while arguing against the recount movement.

So now, otherwise well-regarded political leaders are trying to rationalize the ramblings of this whacko.

“I think the American people find it very refreshing that they have a president who will tell them what’s on his mind,” his Vice-President-to-be, Mike Pence, said in defending the lie about illegal voting.

And House Speaker Paul Ryan, who I’ve always thought to be a pretty smart guy, actually asked “60 Minutes” last weekend: “Who cares what he tweeted on some Thursday night if we fix this country’s big problems?”

Good point – what harm could the tweets of a mentally unstable President-elect possibly have on the grand designs of the universe?

Then the Boeing tweet followed just a couple of mornings later, after the CEO of that company criticized Trump’s attacks on free-trade agreements. Following the appearance of those comments in the Chicago Tribune, Trump tweeted a threat to cancel Boeing’s deal to build Air Force One and the company’s stock took a temporary hit.

Not exactly the sanest of moves regarding America’s biggest exporter and the employer of about 160,000 people.

And when a union leader at Carrier called out still more Trump lies, regarding the number of employees being retained in Indiana, the president-elect tweeted the following:

“Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!”

Obviously, Trump has no clue what Jones has done or hasn’t done as a union leader – he just started irrationally throwing out whatever insults came to mind. Without considering, of course, that Jones isn’t empowered to entice companies with millions of dollars in tax breaks, which even Sarah Palin called “crony capitalism.”

Immediately after Trump’s tweets, Jones started receiving threatening and harassing phone calls. But the steelworker also responded, “I would expect that if he were to tweet something, he should have come out and tried to justify his numbers.”

We should have been clued in to Trump’s mental state last year when he repeatedly insisted that “thousands and thousands” of people had celebrated the 9/11 attacks on New Jersey rooftops. This is absolute fiction. A lie. It never, ever happened.

Except in Trump’s mind.

We should have known when he repeatedly denied saying a number of things he was actually recorded saying on video.

We should have known when he lied again and again and again on a never-ending stream of topics.

We should have known when he tried to tie the father of Ted Cruz to the President Kennedy assassination and in utter sincerity cited the National Enquirer as his source.

I mean, that’s demented. But when Trump was merely a candidate, it was somewhat entertaining. As president, it could be catastrophic.

I feel like the Will Ferrell character in the movie “Zoolander,” when he points out that the famous “looks” of a male supermodel are really all the same look. “Am I on crazy pills?” he asks in exasperation.

I would imagine there has to be some sort of mental competence exam required to assume the Oval Office, and that voters should be advised of the results. If there’s no such exam, I’d say now is a pretty good time to start one.

(December 9, 2016)