Is Donald Trump losing it for real this time? That's a question being asked and answered all over social media and cable news this week in the wake of his bizarre performance in Pennsylvania on Monday night. I know his weird behavior is something we're all very aware of and also unfortunately aware that it has been normalized over the past few years to the point that it hardly even gets mentioned by the mainstream media much less analyzed with the same focus and fervor given to Joe Biden's verbal stumbles or Hillary Clinton's emails. But Monday night's very eccentric performance even got the Washington Post's attention. The paper described it with this headline:
Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode
After the Trump campaign left thousands of people stranded in the desert in the middle of the night following his Coachella, California, rally over the weekend, they once again dropped the ball by holding his crowded Oak, Pennsylvania, town hall in a venue without air conditioning, so a couple of people fainted shortly after it began. (Trump later posted on his social media site that they fainted from the excitement. He really does think he's Elvis.)
Just listen to that laughter when he insults the Wall St. Journal and the editor of Bloomberg News. That's not about their wallets. Their wallets are fine. That's about their ids.
The campaign briefly halted the program, as they often do when these happen. Still, this time once they played a little musical interlude from Trump's playlist, he abruptly decided he didn't want to take any more questions. Instead, he had his minions continue to play his very eccentric song selection for almost 40 minutes as he danced his little dance on the stage with the sycophantic moderator, North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, awkwardly trying to follow along.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump has seen that the Harris campaign has a DJ entertaining people at her rallies and thought he could replicate it with his special Mar-a-Lago playlist featuring Pavarotti and Sinead O'Connor. But watching him try to get down with Slash's ripping guitar solo on Guns and Roses' "November Rain" was so embarrassing one had to look away. It was a trainwreck and the campaign knew it.
That's why they assembled every surrogate, henchman and TV pundit supporter to fan out on Tuesday the minute Trump finished his event at the Chicago Economic Club to pretend that it was a triumph in a vain attempt to swallow up the growing public realization that Trump is far more addled and mentally chaotic than what we've seen previously.
Top aide Stephen Miller called Trump's rambling "the greatest live interview any political leader or politician has done on the economy in our lifetimes."
Fox News' Sean Hannity was similarly effusive in his praise for Trump's performance:
That's ridiculous. Trump was unable to answer any questions directly, instead meandering from one topic to another, clearly out of his depth when pressed for details and often just outright lying. At one point he was asked about whether Google should be broken up and he answered that he couldn't get it out of his mind that the Justice Department had intervened in a voting rights issue in Virginia. That's not a rational response to that question.
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At another point he got angry at the interviewer, John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, when he tried to bring Trump back on topic, explaining to Micklethwait that he was doing "the weave," his latest excuse for the mental incontinence he displays on the stump. The so-called weave is now being used to rationalize his inability to keep a single train of thought or give a straight answer in an interview:
He finally regressed to his usual juvenile belligerence and insulted Micklethwait and the friendly Wall St. Journal, saying they don't know what they're talking about.
You'll note the cheering and laughing at Trump's ignorant insult from the audience. Now, it's possible that the Trump campaign managed to fill the room with his fans but it seems unlikely that Chicago, home of the highly influential University of Chicago School of Economics, wouldn't have mostly serious members of its Economic Club in attendance. But in both the New York and Detroit events as well, the audience seems to have given Trump a very enthusiastic reception and it makes you wonder how savvy these so-called pillars of the financial community really are.
A few days back former president Barack Obama held a rally for Harris in Pennsylvania in which he made a case that's especially relevant in the context of Trump's ongoing chest thumping about his supposedly historically successful economy. Obama pointed out that Trump inherited a thriving economy only made possible by Obama's hard-won rebuilding from the financial crisis (which he inherited from the previous GOP president, George W. Bush.) Obama is right about that. The data is clear.
Even more galling, Trump is trying to do the same thing again. The country's economy was in shambles from his mishandling of the once-in-a-century pandemic and he left the mess for Joe Biden to clean up, which the president has done impressively. Trump is making the rounds to these economic clubs all over the country and is babbling incoherently about tariffs and "drill baby drill" saying that all of his ideas will be paid for by "growth" which Biden and Harris have failed to achieve which is a lie, of course. On virtually every measure, the economy is doing very well and even if you remove the year of COVID, growth under Biden exceeded Trump. The cover story of this week's Economist magazine is "The American economy, the envy of the world."
The Wall St Journal polled economists, who were in overwhelming consensus on their expectations should Trump or Harris win the election:
The New York Times actually interviewed some of the audience at the Detroit Economic Club event last week and all seemed to be business and financial types you might expect to be concerned with their bottom lines above everything else. They rationalized their support for him by saying they didn't believe Trump would actually carry out all those unseemly threats he makes about deporting millions of people or going after his political enemies. They told the reporter they believe the media blows it all out of proportion or it's all just an act. Despite their protestations, it's an act they apparently enjoy quite a bit.
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According to the Times, Trump was just an avuncular fella, entertaining the folks with some funny stories about his body, his hair, muscle cars and Elon Musk with just a few "rough edges" about stolen elections and the like. I watched that speech. It was the usual rambling, incoherent, ignorant nightmare:
I'm not sure if it's more alarming that he said it or that the Times and the allegedly sophisticated financial whizzes in the audience all thought it was charming and reassuring.
It's been very difficult for many of us to understand how this race can be so close considering all we know about Trump's unfitness. It's clear there is a hardcore base of Trump followers who cannot be budged from their support. You see them interviewed at his rallies and they are so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole that they are no longer in touch with reality.
But I think we imagined that the type of people who belong to the Economic Club of a major city might be able to rationalize their support for him in service of their portfolios but it is a bit surprising to realize that they actually like all the things they purport not to believe are true about him. Just listen to that laughter when he insults the Wall St. Journal and the editor of Bloomberg News. That's not about their wallets. Their wallets are fine. That's about their ids.
These are the respectable members of the cult and it explains why we might only be able to count on a small percentage of Republican voters to cross over and vote for Harris. MAGA isn't just the people waving around the huge Trump flags. It's the people in the pin-striped suits laughing at his puerile insult "comedy" and loving watching him sticking it to the libs. The Trump cult contains multitudes.
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