I have written twice before about the state of 78-year-old Donald Trump’s mind and once about Joe Biden’s mental slippage before he stepped back from the 2024 presidential election.
Biden’s mental fitness and rigor are less of an issue today, even though he has 3 ½ more months as president of our country. He has surrounded himself with competent cabinet members who he listens to. He appears to be tracking on issues he is facing as a short-timer, like the recovery from Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record on Trump’s messy mind, but his recent speechifying has descended to new volumes of erratic B.S. He is sounding crackers.
I was on the professional speaking circuit for a couple of years a decade ago, and my sponsors and speaker bureau wanted me to keep my talks to an hour. An hour and 15 minutes was all right if there were questions and answers afterward. People turn off when you are talking at them for more than an hour.
Trump’s recent speeches in Mosinee, WI, and Butler, PA, have almost hit the two-hour mark. Some attendees left early.
His motor-mouth speeches ramble all over the place. He says he is “weaving” thoughts together. He often repeats the same speech fragments over and over; that gives him time to conjure up other tangents to ride. Off he goes into another sphere of la la land.
In my previous two columns, I wrote one article to nail down that he is beyond a narcissist. He is a certifiable psychopath. The big difference is that a narcissist is an egotist who actually wants other people to like them. A psychopath has complete lack of empathy, has almost no self-awareness and focuses only on his needs.
My second article suggested mental decline. It pulled sample sections of his recent speech in Mosinee, Wisconsin to demonstrate that they were word garbage with little order, logic or factual truth.
Trump uses other rhetorical tactics to keep his persona out in front of the cameras that he loves so dearly. He gets incensed when people challenge the size of his audiences. For instance, he bragged that the audience was behind him in his recent presidential debate with Kamala Harris. There was no one else in the debate room but the two moderators.
He loves playground insults. Examples:
- A former Utah governor, U.S. senator, head of the 2002 U.S. Olympics, venture capitalist and top scholar at Harvard University is “stupid Mitt Romney.”
- Whoopi Goldberg is demented, filthy and disgusting.
- Harris was born mentally impaired. She’s a “dummy.”
With Harris having a slight lead in most national polls, the desperate former president has been promiscuously flinging out new promises of tax breaks almost every week, including exemptions for tips in restaurants, for social security income and overtime work. He would extend his 2017 tax cuts. Corporate taxes would drop to 15% from 21%.
Trump ran up the national debt by more than $7-8 trillion in his first term in office, and his inflationary promises would do the same in a second term. (Note that Harris has also made expensive promises.)
You may ask why I am unloading so heavily on Trump’s chaotic mind at this late stage of the campaign. It’s because the state of his mind is all important for the future of the country if he is elected on Nov. 5.
His messy, angry and vindictive rhetoric is where he lives day in and day out. It tells us who he really is.
It is very difficult for journalists to cover someone who regularly unloads buckets of bile and misinformation, especially against his enemies and immigrants, illegal or legal. The tendency for reporters is to pull out some sections of Trump’s babblegarb that carry an element of logic and sense. By doing so, they make the speaker sound more credible and adult than the big percentage of his disjointed messages puts forward.
They make him look better than his essence.
So I make no apologies for calling out him out for his verbal diarrhea. It is who he is.
If you don’t believe he is out-of-control, read the speech transcripts from Mosinee and Butler.
With astonishment and worry for the future, I did just that.
