On June 27, just a couple of weeks from now as I write this, Donald Trump is scheduled to debate Joe Biden live on CNN. I hope it happens, since the more people see of Donald, the better it is for Biden, but I’m betting it won’t.
Trump may be enough of a narcissistic egomaniac to think he’s still in fine fettle to cross swords with Biden, but everyone around him will be begging him to find an excuse to back out, preferably one they can pin on the Democrats (the debate format is unfair, the moderator is a known Trump-hater, something like that). Anyone who wants Donald re-elected in November will do whatever’s possible to keep the orange idiot off the debate stage, and not just because his prior debate performances with Biden showed him to be a clueless nitwit who thinks if he shouts continuously at a volume that prevents the other guy from being heard, he’s won the intellectual contest. The thing is, Trump isn’t merely as dumb as a sack of lug nuts these days. He’s succumbing to dementia. He rambles, free-associates, and goes off on ridiculous tangents, babbling like he’s fit for the long term care facility, which he is. No way his closest supporters and advisors want the whole world to watch him sundown and decompensate on stage.
You’d never know it from most of the media coverage, but all you have to do is listen to him speechifying at one of his MAGA grievance-fests to realize he’s lost his grip. By now, you’ve probably seen his famous “boats and sharks” digression, but it really does bear re-watching, so here it is, along with a few other Trumpian gems – including his vow not to pay the contractors who did a “shit job” on setting up the teleprompter, and his inability to say “military”- in clips mediated by my beloved Nicole Wallace:
He’s trying, I think, to take a dig at the woke liberals who want various modes of transportation to switch from internal combustion to electric motors, and he begins with a typically oddball claim that some boat-builder told him “it’s a problem, sir, they want us to make all electric boats”. Just as an aside, has nobody ever told this dum-dum that it’s an obvious tell when he begins a story with anyone addressing him as “sir”? There’s even a term for it: “sir stories”, which everybody knows are made up bullshit. Even his cult followers know it. Anyway, so far, nothing new, the usual Trump blather, he likely heard somewhere that there is such a thing as marine electric propulsion, and wants to turn it into a rant along the lines of “now they’re coming for your boats”, just like they were coming for your hamburgers, and your gas stoves, which is just like the woke bastards who also foisted cancer-causing wind turbines on an innocent public. Similarly old-school is Donald kicking it off with a claim that he’s very smart because of his non-existent association with MIT (his uncle was a distinguished prof there, and Trump likes to claim that he has the same genetics, so he must be a genius too). Oh yeah, and scientists are full of shit, as always, because they claim that sharks only attacked a woman because they were confused, and didn’t mean to gobble up a human, like, get out of here, they’re sharks, eating people is what they do, so that’s the sort of crap you get from those propeller-heads. Scientists.
Lies and nonsense. Par for the course. But then comes this thing about the screwed-either-way choice between getting electrocuted by the sinking boat, or being eaten alive by the nearby shark, which Donald wants you to know is about ten yards away, and that’s very, very close if you’re talking sharks. Even the MAGA-maniacs in attendance seemed too confused to muster up their customary whooping approval. To be fair, maybe it wasn’t just Donald that had them sitting there looking stunned. This was a rally in Las Vegas, and it was something like 110 degrees Fahrenheit. People were actually suffering heat stroke as they sat there baking like tater tots – no kidding, six people ended up in the hospital – so maybe they were all too debilitated even to holler “lock her up!”, and couldn’t focus. Still. This is pure “time to put Grandpa off to bed” material.
I just love how Donald acknowledges the literally deadly heat, and tells his followers to cling to life, since, though he doesn’t care about them, he needs their vote. It’s kind of like the time he told the adoring crowd that most of his supporters were uneducated, but that was O.K., he loves the uneducated.
The derision doesn’t seem to bother anybody.
Today, I was reading a newsletter sent around by this fellow named Jeff Tiedrich**, whose seething hatred for Donald makes me sound like a red-hat-wearing rally attendee, and saw that Trump just belched this out on his failing social media platform:
Yoiks. This is seven or eight kinds of crazy. I guess it’s not completely fair to call Donald a moron if he doesn’t understand Bitcoin mining – I have trouble figuring out cryptocurrency too – but c’mon, it sounds like he actually believes Bitcoin is a physical thing that’s extracted from the ground, just like coal, though it’s also something that comes from a factory, and could be manufactured exclusively in the good old US of A. “Defense against a CBDC”? Hunh? Tiedrich helpfully informs me that a CBDC is crypto issued by a bank, so O.K., I guess Trump hates banks, the loan-denying bastards, and wants us to think we all need defending from their ruthless monopoly over money. But Biden hates Bitcoin? He does? And that helps China and the Commies? What’s energy dominance got to do with it? Does Donald think you don’t just mine Bitcoin like coal, you can also burn it?
Yes, he’s always been this stupid, but this is whole new level of disjointed incoherence. Note the time stamp: nearly midnight. He’s sundowned.
Just today Trump was addressing his GOP stooges at the Capitol, supposedly to talk about his policy agenda once he’s back behind the Resolute Desk. I’m sure they decided to hold the meeting behind closed doors, out of earshot of any pesky journalists, but there’s always some GOP lickspittle willing to leak stuff anonymously, and reporter Jake Sherman got wind of a few of Donald’s not merely false but outright loony non-sequiturs:
You bet, Donny, I’m sure Nancy Pelosi’s whack-job of a daughter told you that you and the former Democratic Speaker would have been good together (but didn’t the crazy lady call you “sir” while saying it?). I can just picture it, you and Nancy having candlelight dinners, dancing cheek-to-cheek, the whole romantic nine yards. Sorry though, sir, but sir, I say with tears in my eyes despite being a big tough guy, what’s the frigging point of this ludicrous fabrication?
Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman, of the online news organization NOTUS, were talking to sources too. Their report:
Donald also ranted variously about Biden, the Department of Justice (he called them “dirty bastards”), and of course that Dem-loving punk Taylor Swift, in between the usual crap like claiming he would have prevented both the war in Ukraine and the October attack on Israel by Hamas, if only the election hadn’t been stolen (or “stollen” as Donald would have it). He also took a gratuitous swipe at the “horrible” city of Milwaukee, tactically an unsound move being as that’s where the Republican National Convention is slated to be held, and cracked wise about Hannibal Lecter, as has lately been his wont, repeating his oft-repeated but always uproariously funny play on words about the fictional serial cannibal once “having a friend over for dinner” (rim shot). Nobody’s quite sure why, lately, Trump’s been babbling in admiring tones about Hannibal Lecter. Maybe he saw Silence of the Lambs a little while back. His droll joke is actually cribbed from the last thing Lecter says to Clarice Starling.
Donald’s performance today was actually better than average for him these days. He’s been all over the place at his recent rallies, his mind wandering while he shouts disjointed word-salad about irrelevant and unconnected things that usually aren’t real. Sometimes you almost feel bad for him, especially when he seizes up mid-sentence, loses the thread, and tries to cover it up by racing off on another tangent. Reporters are saying that if you watch him deliver a full speech (which of course isn’t recommended) his mental decline is obvious, and accelerating. You think his handlers are going to want him out and about after six o’clock, standing at a podium on CNN and yapping at Biden? Only God knows what’d come out of his mouth. They’ll stop him if they can.
I think they can. Actually, I bet Donald doesn’t even need stopping. I think he’s afraid to be tested in any environment where he’s not the only one talking. He certainly seems to have feared the debate stage during the Republican primaries, perhaps figuring he didn’t need to take the risk when the outcome was a foregone conclusion, but also, I think, because he knows he’s not up for it any longer. His lawyers, I suspect, had little trouble persuading him not to take the stand at his recent trial, despite all his public bloviating about wanting to testify.
If he does show up on the 27th, I’m expecting a train wreck. It may actually be ghastly, and difficult to watch. The amazing thing is that it might not make any difference. No matter how deranged he appears to the rest of us, the Base will probably be unperturbed if Donald’s brain goes to pieces on live TV, just as they are at his rallies. They’ll probably like what they see. He’ll probably get a bump in the polls.
I used to worry a lot about what Trump would do during a second term, God forfend. Now, given the evident rate at which his brain’s being devoured by worms, I’m not sure Donald’s even going to be a factor if he regains the White House. By next January, he could well be a gibbering idiot, incoherent, incapable of directing his subordinates, and so far gone that he’s no longer the one we need to worry about. It’ll be like the last couple of years of Chairman Mao’s tenure were rumoured to be; he’ll be kept out of sight to drool on himself and fill his diaper, while the Veep, his cabinet, and his Chief of Staff formulate policy for him. Donald won’t be running the country. Stephen Miller will, and trust me, that’s even worse.
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**You might want to check him out. He’s extremely vulgar, and has adopted that annoying convention, which I deeply abhor, of never using capital letters to start sentences, but he’s often hilarious.
the needlefish 