Six weeks ago, Joe Biden gave a historically bad debate performance that led to a firestorm of questions about his age, mental acuity and ability to carry out his responsibilities as president. Three weeks later, he withdrew from the 2024 presidential campaign.
We need to have the same conversation about former President Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged public events and what looks like his diminished capabilities.
To be sure, Trump has always been manifestly unqualified to hold public office — whether it’s president of the United States or local dog catcher.
To be sure, Trump has always been manifestly unqualified to hold public office — whether it’s president of the United States or local dog catcher. His stunning lack of intelligence, propensity for conspiracy theorizing, lack of curiosity about any element of public policy, and his treatment of the public sphere as a venue for attacking those who he believes have wronged him are not new developments. But that doesn’t mean political media shouldn’t be focused on them.
Indeed, there are lots of places where we could start this discussion, but how about Trump’s post on Truth Social from earlier in the week?
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 couple of quick notes: The Constitution has not a single thing to do with the picking and choosing of presidential nominees by political parties. This statement is yet one more piece of evidence that suggests Donald Trump has never even glanced at the Constitution. How a man with such a poor grasp of the nation’s founding document could ever be the nominee of a major political party will always be disturbing.
That post also reminds us that the three-time Republican presidential nominee struggles with spelling, capitalization, punctuation and run-on sentences. With the rollout of a new moniker for his 2024 rival, “Kamabla,” it’s more clear than ever that Trump’s nickname game is at its nadir. No one seems to know the meaning of “Kamabla,” and nicknames like “Cryin Chuck Schumer” or “Shifty Adam Schiff” suggest that the former president isn’t even trying anymore. (For now, we’ll put aside how accustomed we’ve become to a presidential nominee childishly insulting his political rivals).
But, of course, there’s the more obvious point that everything he’s written above is certifiably insane. The argument that there was a coup against Biden, that Biden intends to “crash” the Democratic National Convention in Chicago or that the people Biden hates most include the vice president he endorsed to replace him is a new level of lunacy for Trump.
As several media commentators have speculated, Trump’s prediction of a Biden presidential campaign reprise is a clearly veiled hope that the candidate he appeared on track to defeat in November will return. Indeed, at a similarly unhinged news conference Thursday afternoon, Trump repeated the charge, claiming that “the presidency was taken away from Joe Biden” and that he’s “very angry” about it.
It’s understandable that those who have followed Trump for so many years would seek to explain the former president’s statements from a psychological perspective. Getting inside the tangled synapses of Trump’s brain is one of the best ways to interpret his bizarre public statements.
But in doing so we tend to lose sight of what doesn’t require deep psychological interpretation: Trump’s obvious unfitness.
It simply isn’t normal for an adult to make the kinds of statements that regularly emanate from Trump’s mouth. It simply isn’t normal for an adult to make the kinds of statements that regularly emanate from Trump’s mouth. It was only three weeks ago that Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention for 92 minutes, uncorking an unending stream of lies, exaggerations and general incoherence. If any other politician, nay any other human, engaged in the sort of stream-of-consciousness meltdown on a national stage, there’d be calls for an intervention. On Thursday, Trump did a news conference in which he focused on his favorite metric for political success — crowd size; attacked Harris’ intelligence; lied, for the umpteenth time, about the events of Jan. 6; and made his oft-repeated lie that Democrats support killing babies after they are born. Yet, much of the national media treated his RNC speech and Thursday’s news conference as examples of “Trump being Trump” and focused not on his increasing disconnection from reality but on his acceptance of a debate schedule with Harris. And in a sense, this is “Trump being Trump.” But that’s the problem. We are inured to Trump’s craziness and far too often it is sanitized or de-emphasized because it no longer piques our imagination. It’s become the soundtrack of modern American politics. But with 87 days until Election Day, perhaps it should receive the same focus as Biden’s disastrous debate performance six weeks ago. One of the two major presidential candidates seems disturbingly unwell. He makes false, incoherent and exaggerated statements far more than he tells the truth. He ceaselessly hurls insults, engages in bizarre, often disturbing conspiracy theorizing, rewrites history and offers barely a hint as to what he would do if elected for another term in office. Let’s talk more about it.
Michael Cohen is an MSNBC columnist. He is also the publisher of the newsletter Truth and Consequences and hosts the weekly podcast That ‘70s Movie Podcast. 
