Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged attacks on Kamala Harris are an example of personal compulsion as a type of political “strategy.” Because he is a human wrecking ball against American democracy, the rule of law, and human decency, this approach has served Trump very well. His political and personal brand is based on disruption and chaos. His MAGA people see such behavior by Trump as a sign of his “authenticity” and “honesty” instead of as the behavior of a deeply troubled person. Public opinion polls and other research show that supporters of political strongmen and autocrats like Donald Trump are driven by voters who want leaders who will break the law to “get things done” for people like them.
For a variety of reasons, President Biden, as exemplified by his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June, was having a very difficult time effectively confronting such a human force of destruction and chaos. Enter Vice President Kamala Harris in her new role as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
Trump is continuing to behave in such a way that suggests he is experiencing some type of crisis in his thinking, cognition, and overall mental health.
At this very early stage in the 2024 election, Trump’s personal compulsion as a political “strategy” appears to be encountering serious difficulties against Vice President Kamala Harris. Public opinion polls show a great change in momentum, and Harris is now tied with or leading Trump nationally. She is also tied with or leading him in the key battleground states. The crowds at Harris’ political rallies are growing and enthusiastic. Trump’s MAGA people appear to be increasingly bored. His rallies, while well-attended, are being dwarfed by Kamala Harris’ (and now her vice-presidential running mate Tim Walz’s) crowds.
Trump is increasingly triggered by Kamala Harris’ early success and how she refuses to be intimidated or cowed by him. In all, Trump’s sudden change of political fortunes has left him in a state of confusion, upset and rage. Trump is now saying that Kamala Harris’s crowds are faked, the result of manipulation by artificial intelligence (AI). Trump is lying. The crowds at Kamala Harris’ rallies and other gatherings have in fact dwarfed Donald Trump’s these last two or so weeks since she became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Trump’s claims that he is a victim of a conspiracy by a pro-Harris AI is a sign of his egomania and how he is experiencing a narcissistic injury. It is also an attempt to manipulate his gullible MAGA cultists to further do his bidding.
If Donald Trump actually believes that Kamala Harris’ crowds do not exist then, as George Conway recently suggested during an appearance on MSNBC, his family should seek out medical help for him. Even Jonathan Chait, the reliable centrist at New York magazine, is sounding the alarm about Donald Trump's apparent challenges with reality and what that suggests about his mental and emotional well-being: "Trump is literally claiming Harris spoke before an empty room, created a false impression of a large crowd, with the participation of the national media that reported on the event as it occurred. He then bootstraps this ludicrous assertion into the charge that Harris is stealing the election and 'should be disqualified.' The most important thing about this Trump claim is that it confirms once again that he is both completely demented — the fake-crowd theory is less plausible than the notion NASA faked the moon landings — and totally unwilling to abide by the democratic rules of the road. It has become tedious to say so, but supporting his candidacy, even if you prefer his policies on taxes or regulation, in any way is deeply irresponsible."
Most importantly, Donald Trump’s lies and/or delusions about Harris’ popularity are an iteration of the Big Lie and a preview of the attacks on her legitimacy and that of the 2024 election if she defeats him.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes warned:
This is pre-election denialism by Donald Trump….It's no mystery, Donald Trump is never going to graciously concede defeat in this election. He's already laying the groundwork for what's going to happen after November. I think this is going to be an extraordinarily dangerous period. He has election deniers in key states, his base is psychologically not prepared for him to lose.
This is a desperate man. Donald Trump will not simply lose the election. Donald Trump knows if he is not elected president, he may be going to jail. He will do and say anything. You see in that tweet, not merely the fact that he is rattled and losing it, but that he is already coming up with his lines for why he can deny the results of the election, how Kamala Harris' nomination is unconstitutional, how this is being stolen – all of that in advance.
No one should be surprised or think that this fever is going to break on Nov. 5. Whatever happens, we are about to head into a very dangerous period in American politics, led by Donald Trump, obviously assisted by Republicans who simply have decided that they're not going to draw the line.
In his decades of public life, Donald Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be a racist, a white supremacist, and a violent misogynist.
Based on information first-hand witnesses, the New York Times is reporting that Donald Trump has been calling Vice President Harris a “bitch” in private. Based on what Trump’s own nephew alleges in his new book, there is little to no doubt that Donald Trump uses even more hateful language about Harris’ identity as a Black woman in private.
The Times reports:
At the Aug. 2 dinner, Mr. Trump told donors that the news media had been incorrectly suggesting that he had mellowed since the assassination attempt. “I’m not nicer,” he said, according to one person in attendance.
Another said Mr. Trump described himself as “angry,” because “they” — unspecified adversaries that the attendee took to mean Democrats — had first tried to bankrupt him and then to kill him.
Indeed, Mr. Trump has often been in a foul mood the past few weeks. He has ranted about Ms. Harris. He has called her “nasty,” on “Fox & Friends,” and a “bitch,” repeatedly, in private, according to two people who heard the remark on different occasions. (“That is not language President Trump has used to describe Kamala, and it’s not how the campaign would characterize her,” Mr. Cheung said.)
His quickness to anger has left him susceptible to manipulation, even among close allies.
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During a recent series of rallies, interviews and other events Donald Trump is continuing to behave in such a way that suggests he is experiencing some type of crisis in his thinking, cognition, and overall mental health.
For example, during a rally in Montana on Friday, Trump appears to “glitch” and pause as he searches for words and then makes unintelligible noises and strange utterances. This is not a creative use of language as some have suggested. Something is clearly amiss.
Last Thursday, in an attempt to recapture some momentum following a several-day absence from the campaign trail, Trump hosted a press conference/speechifying event at his Mar-A-Lago headquarters in Florida. This did not help Trump’s cause. He was detached from reality—in a manner that was even more extreme than his normally aberrant standards. By NPR’s very conservative count, Trump lied more than 200 times (he does not make “misstatements”):
There were a host of false things that Donald Trump said during his hour-long news conference Thursday that have gotten attention.
A glaring example is his helicopter emergency landing story, which has not stood up to scrutiny.
But there was so much more. A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.
Politicians spin. They fib. They misspeak. They make honest mistakes like the rest of us. And, yes, they even sometimes exaggerate their biographies.
The expectation, though, is that they will treat the truth as something important and correct any errors.
But what former President Trump did this past Thursday went well beyond the bounds of what most politicians would do.
Donald Trump would go even further in his attempts to rewrite reality, this time literally, in response to Harris’ early surge of popularity and this whiplash moment since Biden stepped aside.
In a post on his Truth Social propaganda disinformation platform last Tuesday, Donald Trump shared a conspiracy theory-paranoid fantasy that President Biden is going to take back the nomination from Harris at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago:
What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!
A generous reading of Trump’s conspiracy theory is that it is part of a larger strategy of projection, where he accuses the Democrats of staging some type of internal coup against Harris and that they are the real fascists and enemies of democracy. In reality, Trump is describing what he and his forces tried to do on Jan. 6 and their plans to end American democracy in the future when/if he and they take power. The more likely explanation for Trump’s conspiracism (and paranoia more generally) is that he is increasingly detached from reality because a Black South Asian woman is beating him in the polls—and if she wins the election he may find himself in prison for his many crimes.
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In total, Trump’s increasingly unhinged (“deranged” is an ever more appropriate word) attacks on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and his behavior more generally, reinforces the conclusion that has been reached by many expert observers that something is profoundly wrong with the corrupt ex-president’s cognition, mind, and emotions. Given that Trump is the presidential nominee of one of the country’s two main political parties, this should be a cause of great national alarm and concern among the mainstream news media.
By comparison, the mainstream news media savaged President Biden, a man who is experiencing normal challenges of aging but whose mind remains sharp and his personality normal and healthy, and drove him to step aside as the Democratic Party’s nominee.
The situation is even more serious given Donald Trump’s promises and threats to be a dictator (who will be empowered by a corrupt Supreme Court) and how he is channeling Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
What if the American mainstream news media exercised even one-tenth of the scrutiny, rumor-mongering and muckraking, personal and professional invective and score-settling towards Donald Trump that they directed at President Biden? America’s political reality at this moment (and throughout the Age of Trump) would likely be much different. In a series of posts on X/Twitter, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called out this negligence:
Press should report this as incoherent, displaying mental deterioration. He is unwell. The refusal to explain how unhinged he is and instead to normalize is reprehensible
The press was able to describe Biden’s affect, energy, syntax. Why don’t they do it for Trump? It is nothing short of shameful
To make this rather than his mental breakdown is everything wrong with MSM. They are blatantly covering for him. The same paper that had blanket cover of Biden
Here is how to write it: “Donald Trump, in a shocking display of incoherence and break with reality, held a press conference that will reraise fears of his mental competency. Among the blatant lies: His rallies were bigger than MLK, Gov. Walz wants to kill babies and he is ahead.”
No candidate has ever lied this much, this bizarrely, no candidate has had such a tenuous grip on reality. Why haven't RS yanked a clearly disturbed person? Will you hound them to comment on this meltdown? Bring in the shrinks and the historians to explain what he is doing. Do. Your. Damn. Job.
At his website Press Watchers, media watchdog Dan Froomkin highlights how the mainstream news media’s enabling of Trump’s lying and detachment from reality is actually doing the work of the Republican Party’s anti-democracy agenda:
Now that the players have been clearly established, it’s time for the political media to turn to the issues.
And when writing about those issues, it’s imperative that journalists point out the most salient characteristic of the Republican platform: That it’s almost entirely based on lies.
This is not hyperbole. Just listen to Trump’s semi-coherent news conference on Thursday (transcript parts one, two and three.) It was lie after lie after lie. The fact checks (by the New York Times, the Associated Press, and MSNBC) barely scratched the surface.
As it happens, the Trumpian vision for the future is most effectively summarized in one handy document, the official Republican platform.
It is a litany of lies — about the border, immigration, the economy, energy, our international standing, the military, you name it.
It’s one thing when a party makes unlikely campaign promises. That’s normal. But it’s another when the underlying premises beneath those promises is wildly deceitful.
Political journalists at our most powerful news organizations are strongly averse to taking sides in a partisan dispute. They don’t want to be accused of bias. Their bosses tell them to afflict both sides. They consider themselves above the fray.
But when one of the two political parties’ entire argument is so obviously deceitful, from start to finish, it’s not right for journalists to treat them alike.
While the “fact checks” are well intentioned, they aren’t enough. Every article or broadcast segment about where Trump stands on the issues should make it clear that his entire pitch is built on an edifice of lies.
And if those lies are gaining traction in the public sphere, the media has an obligation to correct them. Anything else is dishonest.
He concludes, “Trump and the Republican Party aren’t so much trying to persuade as they’re trying to deceive. These are not disputes about policy. These are deceptive incitements. Indeed, there is very little in terms of actual, detailed policy proposals in the platform – or in Trump’s stump speeches — just broad strokes with no details, based on lies….That’s the message that American political reporters should be conveying to the public. Doing anything short of that is journalist malpractice. It’s aiding and abetting liars.”
Once again, there is no “liberal media.” If such a thing were in fact true, then there would be endless coverage of Donald Trump’s obvious and worsening state of mind and increasingly dangerous behavior. I am not going to hold my breath waiting for the American mainstream news media to practice pro-democracy journalism and to speak truth to power about Trumpism and the larger neofascist danger to the country’s democracy and society. All I want is for the mainstream news media to do their jobs, just the bare minimum at this point, in how they report on Donald Trump and his behavior and what it will mean for the country when/if he takes control of the White House in 2025.
The facts and the proper context for these events are sufficient. The dangers of Trump and his MAGA movement and its forces are that grossly obvious. For the mainstream news media to do anything less if even worse malpractice than we have seen to this point throughout the Age of Trump and the democracy crisis.
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