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| Is This Guy On The Way Out? |
A pretty extraordinary article appeared in the online version of The New York Times that was published on October 6, 2024. If you click the following link, depending on your subscription status, you may be able to read an article with this headline: "Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age."
This is a long article. I am not providing the entire text, but I do give you some choice parts of the article, below (with emphasis added).
The Times' article raises the question - at least to me - whether voters who are planning to cast their ballot for the Trump-Vance ticket understand that they are probably voting to make J.D. Vance the next president of the United States.
Having read what The Times' has reported, I think it's pretty clear that if Trump is elected in November he will, of necessity, and perhaps by design, be quickly replaced by Vance. I have seen news speculations, earlier, that indicate that this is exactly what Peter Thiel and his cohorts, who urged Trump to name Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate, have always expected and planned.
J.D. Vance for President?
If you don't think that's a good idea, then don't vote for former president Trump!
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With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.
By Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman
Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.
Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.
He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me”when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race....
A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past ....
He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone.
While elements of this are familiar, some who have known him for years say they notice a change. “He’s not competing at the level he was competing at eight years ago, no question about it,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump ally who has endorsed Ms. Harris. “He’s lost a step. He’s lost an ability to put powerful sentences together” ....
John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better. As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazytown.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far. His own estranged niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book identifying disorders she believed he has. Mr. Trump bristled at such talk, insisting that he was “a very stable genius” ....
Some of what he says is inexplicable except to those who listen to him regularly and understand the shorthand. And he throws out assertions without any apparent regard for whether they are true or not. Lately, he has claimed that crowds Ms. Harris has drawn were not real but the creation of artificial intelligence, never mind the reporters and cameras on hand to record them.
He mispronounces names and places with some regularity — “Charlottestown” instead of “Charlottesville,” “Minnianapolis” instead of “Minneapolis,” the website “Snoops” instead of “Snopes,” “Leon” Musk instead of “Elon” ....
He considers himself the master of nearly every subject. He said Venezuelan gangs were armed “with MK-47s,” evidently meaning AK-47s, and then added, “I know that gun very well” because “I’ve become an expert on guns.” He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such prize exists.
He is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue when he noticed a buzzing insect. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we can’t take it any longer.”
But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”
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| Our Next President? |
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