Since 2016, I have participated in more conversations than I can count focused on the query: “How can anyone look at Donald Trump and conclude this mentally-ill buffoon should be President?'”
The only answer I’ve been able to come up with, after surveying the research, is that Trump hates the same people they do, and to MAGA, shared racism is all that matters.
During the last few months, that question has taken on even more relevance, because Trump’s mental processes–such as they were–have dramatically declined. That deterioration was “front and center” during what was billed as a press conference a week or so ago.
The best account of that event–attended by what was evidently a hand-picked group of “journalists” unlikely to ask pertinent or follow-up questions–was written by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic.
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
The so-called “press conference” was Trump’s response to the publicity that Harris and Walz were generating (Trump can’t bear not being the center of attention) and was even more bizarre than usual.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking…
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that attendance at the rally preceding the January 6 insurrection exceeded that of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington–an event that drew a quarter of a million people.
Trump also invented a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, who had once dated Kamala Harris, saying that Brown had told him (unspecified) “terrible” things about Harris. (Brown says no such ride ever took place.)
Nichols properly described the bottom line to all this:
The issue is that a former president is frighteningly delusional, and if any other candidate had done this—Biden was roasted over stories that were obscure but turned out to be true—it would dominate the news with understandable alarm about the well-being of the candidate.
The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.” The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.” The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,” but CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.”
All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Here in the real world, we’ve noticed.
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