Trump is bonkers, even if the mainstream press doesn't quite say it
16 October 2024
The mainstream media criticized President Biden relentlessly for minor age-related deficits and called on him to resign. However, it is not doing the same for Donald J. Trump, even though his mental functioning is much worse:
It is the job of the press to call this out. It is their responsibility to explain to the public not just that Trump is deceitful but that he is fabricating a world that does not exist—a world where inflation is rampant, crime is uncontrollable, the border is open, Covid was not his responsibility, and Biden’s policies are devastating the country. Wolves and Sheep blog
I wrote this essay to make everyone aware of the media’s sane washing, defined as attempting to make Trump’s statements and actions that are “bonkers” appear rational. To get a full picture of the news, I find it useful to subscribe to several blogs.
From Heather Cox Richardson’s blog:
After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck.
Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.
When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
. . .
As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.
. . .
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”
Donald Trump seems to be decompensating mentally before our eyes.
From The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump
I don’t know if you remember this, but one of the reasons people gave for supporting Donald Trump in 2016 was that “he tells it like it is.” That was alarming for two reasons: one, he almost always lies; two, the few things he is honest about are his hatreds—of people of color, of immigrants, of women.
Over time, we learned that, as far as the corporate media were concerned, all of that—the mendacity and the bigotry—was baked in. Eventually, the list of egregious things we were supposed to ignore grew to include Donald’s two impeachments, the big lie, an attempted insurrection against his own government, the theft of highly sensitive government documents, 93 indictments in four jurisdictions, being found liable for sexual assault and defamation, being found guilty of 34 felonies, his cruelty, his viciousness, his fascism and stochastic terrorism . . . I could go on, but you get the idea.
It seemed unthinkable, but it was as if Donald had committed so many horrors, that instead of their being additive (which is generally how these things work), each new transgression replaced the one that came before, therefore, somehow canceling it out.
Do you remember when the media was deeply concerned about the cognitive wellness of Joe Biden? It was almost an obsession. Every time President Biden opened his mouth, there was some analysis of his age-related cognitive decline. Based on Biden's debate performance in June there was reason for concern (although in the days after the debate it seemed pretty clear that the “problem” was that Joe Biden was an eighty-one-year-old man with a bad cold who had a terrible night).
The relentless coverage of every single one of Biden’s missteps overshadowed the fact that his opponent spent the entire debate lying, engaging in delusional conspiracy theories, and promoting his fascist agenda. Now that Biden has dropped out of the race, Donald Trump is the oldest person in American history ever to run for the presidency. So of course, the corporate media has brought all of its experience and expertise to bear on the issue of Donald Trump's potential age-related cognitive decline, right?
No, of course not. When it comes to Donald and his emotional, psychological, and/or neurological unfitness, there is nothing to see here. It seems not to matter that he can't pronounce words or stay on topic, or that he engages in a worrisome degree of tangential thinking. All of these are potential signs of cognitive impairment, but none of it engages the sustained attention of the media. Why not? How bad does it need to be before they sit up and take notice?
Last night, I thought we finally had an answer to that question. Donald held one of his faux-Town Halls during which he answers pre-selected questions from a vetted audience. The event was held in what looked like a storage locker with no air-conditioning. About half-way through, somebody in the audience fainted. Shortly after that, another person needed medical attention. At that point, Donald decided he didn’t want to answer questions anymore.
“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he asked, a fascinating thing to say at a town hall, the whole point of which is for the candidate to answer people’s questions.
But Donald can do whatever he wants, right? Nothing sticks, nothing matters. And then things took a turn. Donald asked for music and for the next 39 minutes, which is a very long time, he stood on the stage, listened to an odd mix of songs, sometimes swinging his body around, sometimes standing stock still, on occasion mouthing the lyrics, and mostly seeming lost, broken, and beyond reach.
. . .
This is serious, serious stuff and yet the media are, once again, falling down on the job. If nothing else matters—the criminality, the cruelty, the misogyny, the racism, the viciousness, the freaking fascism—than surely the steep cognitive decline of a man who is running to be the leader of the free world should matter.
In order to underscore how perilous this moment is, media outlets should just play the uncut video from that event beginning to end so the American people can see who the Republican Party thinks is a viable candidate for the most important job on the planet.
From the Dworkin Report:
Trump’s Monday night town hall was one of the most bizarre political moments I’ve ever witnessed. For 39 agonizing minutes, Donald stood dazed and confused, listening to music in front of his attendees, spending some of the time dancing by himself like a lost sixth grader at the fall dance.
. . .
It wasn’t even a town hall. He didn’t actually give coherent answers to any of the questions. And throughout his episode, Trump swayed to a mix of opera music and “Ave Maria,” which has been played at more funerals on the Irish side of my family than I can count. Which seems fitting for Trump’s failing campaign.
They also blasted the song “Hallelujah,” and the full nearly nine minutes of “November Rain.” It was very weird.
To make matters worse, while Donald was clearly having some kind of breakdown, there were multiple medical events due to it being too hot inside the venue. One member of the crowd yelled, “Turn the AC on, it’s steaming in here,” while Donald stood hunched over a banner that read, “Trump was right about everything.”
At one point, Donald talked about how he sleeps with his bogus immigration chart “every night,” saying, “I kiss it.” He even told the audience to vote on January 5, which is two months after Election Day.
Some columnists are providing this assessment of Trump’s declining intellect:
From Paul Krugman, The New York Times:
On Thursday, in the course of a rambling, at times incoherent speech to the Detroit Economic Club, he declared, “We don’t have electricity. In California, you have brownouts or blackouts every week. And blackouts, I mean, the place is stone cold broke, no electricity.” This isn’t true, it wasn’t true when he made similar assertions last year, and 39 million Californians can tell you that it isn’t true. But in Trump’s mind, apparently, that long-ago electricity crisis never ended.
. . .
Electricity supply and urban crime aren’t the only issues on which Trump’s image of America seems stuck in the past. During his Detroit speech, the former president did something unusual for a candidate one might have expected to flatter the voters in an important swing state: He insulted the city that was hosting him, declaring that if Kamala Harris wins, “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit.”
Actually, that would be great if true: Detroit has been experiencing a major economic revival, so much so that it has become a role model for struggling cities around the world and has been praised for its startup ecosystem. But I doubt that Trump knows or cares about any of that, and in his mind Detroit is probably still the poster child for the industrial Midwest’s economic struggles around, say, 2010.
The point is that there’s a pattern here. As many observers have noted, Trump routinely peddles a grim picture of America that has little to do with reality. What I haven’t seen noted as much is that his imaginary dystopia seems to be, in large part, a pastiche assembled from past episodes of dysfunction. These episodes apparently became lodged in his brain, and perhaps because he’s someone who is not known for being interested in the details and who lives in a bubble of wealth and privilege, they never left.
The thing is, Trump is fond of denigrating his opponents’ cognitive capacity. He has called Harris “mentally disabled” and a “dummy.” He has called for CBS to lose its broadcasting rights over a “60 Minutes” interview with her — one that was edited in a routine way — in which Harris, a former prosecutor, came across as, well, pretty smart, whatever you may think of her policies.
But what would Trump say about an opponent who, like him, seems stuck in the past, who routinely describes America in ways that suggest that he doesn’t know what year it is?
The mainstream media is getting a little better but needs to be more consistent:
Washington Post - Yes, this is what Donald Trump really sounds like. No, you cannot ignore it.
CNN - Haberman explains what caused Trump to end town hall and dance for 30+ minutes
MSNBC does focus on these stories - Why Trump’s on-stage interview on economic policy was such a mess.
Since U.S. citizens are ultimately responsible for the prosperity of the United States of America, we must recognize that Donald Trump is mentally unstable and act accordingly.
We need to do more to support Kamala Harris for President.
Visit here for events sponsored by the Democratic Party.
In addition to writing this blog, I am texting voters, distributing signs, writing checks, talking to friends and relatives, putting signs in front of my house and sponsoring a voter turnout competition. Each one of us has to decide what we can do, but we should be trying to do more than we are doing now.
My related essays:
Donate to preserve democracy, 10 October 2024
Make sure the young adults in your life have a voting plan, 3 September 2024
Do something positive - don't just stew over the news, 12 July 2024
Volunteer opportunities, 10 July 2024
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