Tag Archives: Trump

Trump’s Mental Decline

There are ten days until November 5th, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and finally–finally–the media has begun to focus on the fact that a major-party candidate for President is bat-shit crazy.

Do MAGA voters even care? Or does their hatred of “those people” [fill in the minority of your choice] outweigh the very real prospects of domestic autocracy and potentially, World War III? Do they even understand that Trump’s mental breakdown means they are actually voting for a JD Vance presidency?

Google “Trump’s mental breakdown” or something similar, and Google obliges with numerous hits. Even the New York Times, which has been inexplicably unwilling to hold Trump to the same standards they applied to Biden, has noted the evidence. Under the headline “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age,” the Times noted Trump’s age and the fact that

the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Other outlets have been less restrained. The Boston Globe addressed the seeming reluctance to call a lunatic a lunatic:

We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy. So why are Republicans and the press holding Trump to a different standard than Biden?…

President Biden, after struggling with his answers during a June debate with Trump, ended his bid for a second term in July. That decision came after Democrats publicly voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness and the press pursued the controversy breathlessly for weeks. Editorial boards, including the Globe’s, had even urged Biden to step aside.

Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell. That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country.

Forbes —hardly a Left-wing publication–has also weighed in, noting that

In interviews and speeches that have grown progressively longer during his third White House campaign, Trump often leaps back and forth from one topic to the next, appears increasingly unhinged, and mixes up and mispronounces words.

The article went on to catalog the reasons for concluding that Trump’s senility has become too obvious to ignore. And the New Republic–which is Left of center–recently noted that efforts to normalize what is decidedly not normal have finally given way to concerns over Trump’s very obvious mental incapacities.

Newsweek has also covered Trump’s decline. The article quoted Trump’s niece and fierce critic, Mary Trump, a psychologist by training, who pointed out that her uncle is “the oldest person in American history ever to run for the presidency,” and that “he can’t pronounce words or stay on topic,” and “engages in a worrisome degree of tangential thinking.”  Huffpost ran a similar critique by an unrelated mental health expert,. who warned that Trump’s “diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored.”

“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis told the website. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”

There’s much more, but the relative recency of these articles is unnerving, because rational observers have noted his mental issues–including an inability to engage in complex thought or analysis– for far longer. Yet the same media that hounded a much more mentally-competent Joe Biden out of the race basically engaged in what has been aptly called “sane-washing.”

As a September article from Mother Jones put it:

In recent days, I came across what seems to be a new term to describe much media treatment of Donald Trump: “sane-washing.” This is similar to the more common phrase “normalization,” but it extends beyond what we’ve seen for years—the media reporting on Trump as if he is a regular politician who operates within the conventional bounds of political spin and human actions—to covering up (or sidestepping or downplaying) Trump’s apparent cognitive flaws.

Among other examples, the article cited Trump’s claim that schools are providing sex change operations to children without their parents’ consent. Direct quote: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school.’ And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

What is wrong with our country is the prospect that this lunatic will get millions of votes.

Comments

It Can Happen Here

Most sentient Americans know this election isn’t normal–and that it’s pivotal. And from all indications, it is very, very close.

If there was ever any doubt about the basis of Donald Trump’s appeal, his recent speeches should dispel them. As his mental faculties–such as they were– continue to deteriorate, he has become less inhibited, engaging more directly in appeals to fear and– especially– hate.

As a recent article in The Bulwark reported,

The Two Minutes Hate was a famous feature of Orwell’s portrayal of Oceania in 1984. The Two Months of Hate is now a notable feature of the 2024 U.S. presidential contest. Donald Trump and his allies are closing this campaign with two months of hate in a way we’ve never seen before. And it could work.

 Trump has “abandoned any pretense of debating real issues or proposing serious programs. “In the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside.” He hasn’t just accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country, he has also accused Americans who disagree with him of being “the enemy within.”

Trump told Maria Bartiromo that an even bigger problem than “the people who have come in who are totally destroying our country” is “the enemy from within.” He called them “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.” And he said they could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”…

Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.

It’s shocking and depressing. One could tell oneself in 2016 that Trump won despite the lies and hatred. Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.

If this seems chillingly unAmerican to most of us, it’s because we’ve opted to ignore the long history of American Nazism. That history was traced in a 2021 Washignton Post article.

Even during World War II, as the United States mobilized to defeat Nazi Germany and portrayed itself as an “arsenal of democracy,” Americans remained divided about who deserved to be treated as a full citizen. In an era when restrictive nationalist and authoritarian movements took power across Europe and Asia, even explicit appeals to Nazism attracted adherents in the United States.

As the article pointed out, the idea central to Nazi fascism — the argument that “real” Americans  needed to be protected from those threatening “others” — was hardly foreign to Americans steeped in deep traditions of racism and nativism.

Trump recently announced that he will be holding a rally in Madison Square Garden–bringing to knowledgable ears an echo of  the Bund’s February 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden. That rally drew more than 20,000 enthusiastic supporters under banners that included swastikas and images of George Washington.

It wasn’t just the Bund.

Father Charles Coughlin — a Roman Catholic priest with a popular radio broadcast in the 1930s — went even further, mixing anti-semitic rhetoric with direct support for Adolf Hitler. Eventually forced off the air in 1942 and nearly defrocked by the church for his pro-Nazi politics, Coughlin’s near-decade of national popularity reflected the appeal those beliefs had for a measurable segment of the American public.

The Post profiled a number of other prominent Nazi sympathizers, for whom “democracy was worth sacrificing to preserve the dominance of the White race — as they defined it.”

Just as the revived KKK in the 1920s enjoyed mainstream support, the ideas animating U.S. fascist groups were hardly fringe. In April 1940, when asked whether “Jews have too much power and influence in this country,” a national majority answered, “yes.” After U.S. entry into the war, public participation in pro-Nazi organizations ceased, but the sentiments remained. In July 1945, the number of Americans who responded “yes” to this question about influence had risen to 67 percent.

The war drove American Nazis underground, but nativism, anti-semitism and authoritarian tendencies did not vanish, even in the fastest-growing city in the country, Los Angeles. Los Angeles had been one of the largest centers of Klan activity outside the South in the 1920s and 1930s. A Klan member had been elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1923.

Polling tells us that America’s Presidential race is essentially tied. If that’s accurate, it can happen here.

Comments

President Vance?

Those of us who have been obsessively following the political campaigns have been struck by Trump’s increasingly precipitous mental decline.  In just the past week, he has turned in truly bizarre performances. At a rally, he stopped taking questions and stood for 39 minutes silently “dancing” to music from what was evidently a playlist; in interviews, he refused to answer questions, instead going wildly off-subject, lobbing insults and demeaning journalists at the Wall Street Journal.

With less than three weeks left until November 5th, we seem to be in a race to see whether Trump’s meltdown will be too complete–and too impossible for even MAGA to ignore– before the election, or whether America will risk the unthinkable by electing him and then waking up to the reality that we’ve really elected JD Vance.

Heather Cox Richardson has focused upon that prospect, noting that–even if Trump wasn’t so obviously losing it–he’s 78 years old. The likelihood of a senile 78-year-old serving a full term is, to be charitable, low.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Richardson described several other “tech bros” who subscribe to that world-view and support both Trump and Project 2025, which–to use academic language–“operationalizes” it. It is a worldview and a plan that JD Vance wholeheartedly endorses.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Vance would continue the Right’s war on education; Richardson notes that Vance has called American universities “the enemy.” But there’s much more.

Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages.

The available evidence suggests that MAGA folks are far less supportive of Vance than they are of Trump, despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that Vance is a far more articulate communicator of their Project 2025 worldview. I wonder how many of them will knowingly vote for a Vance presidency– assuming they are capable of recognizing that probability.

I also wonder how MAGA voters are processing Trump’s increasingly public deterioration. How are they explaining away the bizarre comments about sharks and the “great” Hannibal Lecter, and Trump’s own “beautiful body?” Do they worry about the fact that every economist–liberal or conservative–says Trump’s love-affair with tariffs would tank the economy, increase inflation and impose a huge tax on American families?

Or does their loyalty to Faux News and its clones protect them from even hearing about these things?

And most obsessively of all, I wonder how many of these fearful, angry, and irrational people are there–and how many will vote?

Comments

Biden Administration Bragging Rights

A few days ago, I wrestled with the question that I still believe is THE question–how can anyone look at Donald J. Trump and see a person qualified to be President (or, frankly, dog-catcher)? Today, I want to focus on a different question: why has there been so little public appreciation of the incredible performance of a transformative and incredibly successful Biden Administration?

The most recent jobs report (a report Simon Rosenberg characterized as “Smoking Hot”) showed the addition of 254,000 jobs in September–far in excess of expectations. Not only that, but routine revisions from the previous two months added another 72,000 jobs. Both liberal and conservative economists agree that the American economy is currently the strongest advanced economy in the world.

That strong economic performance has allowed the administration to accomplish other important tasks.

Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris we’ve had the longest period of low unemployment in a peacetime American economy since WWII and the best job market since the 1960s. The stock market is breaking records. GDP growth has been 3% over 3 years. We have the lowest uninsured rate in American history. The rate of formation of new businesses is at an all time high. Wage growth has been running ahead of inflation for some time now. The battle against inflation has been won. The deficit is lower. Crime is down. Drug overdoses are down. Obesity is down. The flows to the border today are lower than at the end of Trump’s Presidency. We passed the first bi-partisan gun safety bill in 30 years. Domestic oil, gas, renewable production are higher than they’ve ever been and we are more energy independent today than we’ve been in decades. The three big Biden-Harris investment bills will be creating jobs and opportunities for American workers for decades to come, while accelerating the energy transition needed to keep the planet from warming.

Read that paragraph again, and unless you have been lobotomized by Faux News and its clones, you can’t help but be impressed. Despite the constant, bizarre and increasingly frantic lies of Trump and his MAGA minions, crime is down. Inflation is way down. The deficit is lower. We are finally combatting climate change. And much more.

Unlike Trump, who is a publicity hound entirely focused on occupying center stage, and entirely uninterested in governing–or honest work of any kind– Biden approached the Presidency as a job. He was so focused on performance rather than publicity that in the third year of the administration, Politico ran an article titled “30 Things Joe Biden Did That You Might Have Missed.” Among them: expanded overtime pay guarantees; first over-the-counter birth control pills; making renewable power the nation’s #2 source of electricity; rules preventing discriminatory mortgage lending; crackdowns on junk fees and overdraft charges; and a wide variety of measures aimed at ensuring a level playing field for American business vis a vis China.

And that was before the administration engineered lower prices for several lifesaving medications–including insulin, which is capped at $35 for Medicare recipients.

American society is certainly not perfect, but these facts are so positive–especially given the chaos inherited from Trump and the pandemic–that Republicans have resorted to simply lying about them. Marco Rubio responded to the most recent jobs report by insisting that it must be “fake.” Trump and his allies lied about FEMA’s response to hurricane Helene, calling it inadequate, despite the fact it was characterized by Republican governors as excellent. And Trump has continued lying about endorsements.

Here’s the thing: As we enter the last few frenzied weeks of the Presidential campaign, it is easy to get caught up in the lies and the constant name-calling–to attend more to the horse-race and less to the candidates’ demonstrable policy and performance differences.

Most of the people who will go to the polls this year lived through a Trump administration characterized by constant turmoil and turnover, not to mention the sight of a U.S. President openly consorting with autocrats while demeaning and undermining America’s allies. For the past four years, those voters have thrived under the Biden-Harris administration.  Citizens who care about policy, who base their votes on verifiable facts and experience and who care about the common good, will vote for Kamala Harris. Those who are motivated by bigotry and resentment–voters who reject reality and whose sole interest is culture war and animus–will vote for Trump and the profoundly regressive MAGA movement promised by Project 2025.

Harris is running on the premise that Americans won’t vote to go back. I hope she’s right.

Comments

Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

Comments