Seriously, Objectively, Has Trump Lost His Marbles?

Let's start off with some numbers, like the numbers folks at the Trump campaign-- if not their sheltered capo-- are confronting daily. These come from Change Media, one of this cycles' best polling firms. Biden leads Trump by 10 points among likely voters nationally, and by 6 points in the battleground states, steady over the past two weeks. Majorities disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, helping your pocketbook, COVID-19, and ensuring relief for COVID-19 goes to those who need it. Only 43% of voters nationally approve of Trump’s overall job performance and strong approval is also at a new record low of 35% in the battleground states, while 51% strongly disapprove.

Voters are also rejecting GOP governance more broadly. In Florida a 57% majority disapprove of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ handling of the outbreak. In Arizona, a stunning 71% disapprove of the job Republican Governor Doug Ducey is doing handling COVID-19. Democratic Governors, on the other hand, receive much better ratings for their handling of the outbreak: 55% approve of Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of COVID-19 (50% strongly approve), 55% and 56% approve of the jobs Tom Wolf and Tony Evers are doing, respectively, and 51% approve of Roy Cooper’s handling of the outbreak. The rejection of GOP governance is translating to strong margins for Democratic candidates for Senate in Arizona, Michigan, and North Carolina. The Democratic candidates lead by 7 points in each of those races.

I asked Adam Christensen, a progressive House candidate in an open, red-leaning district in north-central Florida (FL-03) how this negative feeling about Trump and DeSantis and GOP governance in general is playing out in his race against Trump extremist Judson Sapp. Wednesday morning Christensen told me that "Last night's AARP public debate was a perfect encapsulation of the reason the Republican Party is self destructing. Nearly every Republican was more concerned about 'government overreach' than they were about protecting the people they claim to want to serve. We had many brag about openly flaunting mask regulations, decrying 'socialism,' and claiming that this pandemic happened because 'we didn’t know how to stop it.' They blamed the CDC, the WHO, China, everyone but themselves. To most people watching last night, the reason the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that hasn’t gotten a handle of this crisis is obvious. Grown men are throwing a temper-tantrum when being asked to do the equivalent of wearing a seat belt. I’m sure their mothers told them growing up that every action has consequences. The consequence for burying your head in the sand in the middle of a pandemic and making up conspiracy theories is that no one takes you seriously anymore."

Trump is, clearly, having a mental breakdown and his grasp on reality is, at best, tenuous. At his press conference/campaign rally in the Rose Garden Tuesday, wrote the Washington Post's Jacqueline Alemany, he invoked Biden's "name nearly 30 times on a range of topics, and despite his claims otherwise, sounded like an underdog on shaky ground throwing spaghetti at the wall to find a new message that might stick." She noted that as an excuse for his poor poll numbers, he seems to think "a lot of people don’t want to talk about" their support for him. "I think they’re not going to say, 'Hey, I’m for Trump, I’m for Trump'-- they don’t want to go through the process. And I fully understand that, because the process is not fair. The media doesn’t treat us fairly. They never have, and perhaps they never will. But maybe they will when we turn this around for a second term, and it’s going to happen very quickly."

Dana Milbank went right to the heart of it: he's losing (or lost) his mind-- or, as he put it, Trump's window is closing. "All signs suggest it’s closing on his presidency because of his world-class incompetence with the coronavirus pandemic, the protracted economic collapse that resulted, and the increasingly overt racism Trump has embraced," he wrote. "But it also appears the window is closing on his connection to reality, if it hasn’t already. Trump called a news conference Tuesday evening in the Rose Garden... to launch an hour-long diatribe against Joe Biden, attributing a platform to his Democratic opponent that bore hardly any resemblance to anything occurring in the real world."

Biden would “incentivize illegal alien child smuggling,” Trump announced.

He would “abolish immigration enforcement," “abolish our police departments” and “abolish our prisons, I guess.”

Biden’s party is even “calling for defunding of our military,” Trump alleged.

And, yes, Biden’s energy plan “basically means no windows” in homes or offices by 2030, he said, and “cold office space in the winter and warm office space in the summer.”

Um, Biden would abolish windows?

“I’m not making this up!” Trump said, mid-jeremiad. (Actually, he was.)

He alleged that Democratic mayors possibly “wouldn’t mind” if terrorists “blow up our cities.”

“We could go on for days,” he said after 40 minutes. Indeed, the only limitation was Trump’s, and his staff’s, imaginations.

...He started with an announcement about Hong Kong; bounced to Biden’s infrastructure plan; swerved to the pandemic; careened to the swine flu of 2009; lurched to Ukraine and Burisma (“Where is Hunter?”); wobbled into the stock market; detoured to “AOC” (“a young woman not talented in many ways"), “Bernie" and Nancy Pelosi; floated into Maine fisheries; listed into the “tremendous fraud” of mail-in voting (“a mailman was indicted someplace”); and took on water with a claim about “criminals pouring into our country”-- from Europe.

Every now and again, his thoughts would return to the paper in front of him, and he would read some other fantastic allegation against Biden, so absurd it seemed to surprise even Trump. “Oh, I didn’t notice that,” he said, reading an allegation that Biden has plans to rejoin the Paris climate agreement but make it “worse than it was.”

“We did this very quickly,” Trump explained at one point as he read through the imaginary Biden agenda.

Who would have guessed?

Trump’s instability seemed to have been set off by Biden himself, who earlier Tuesday did the very opposite of what Trump did: He delivered a reasoned and measured speech about his infrastructure plans, hewing closely to the teleprompter and taking no questions, and eschewing liberal favorites from the Green New Deal. “Look, these aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams,” Biden said. “These are actionable policies.”

Confronted with an opponent who is conspicuously reasonable, Trump has pretended he is running against somebody else. He has tried to brand Biden as senile and corrupt, and his allies have tried to brand the presumptive Democratic nominee a sexual predator and a pedophile.

“Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party,” Trump alleged. Biden “never did anything but make very bad decisions.”

“Last Independence Day, Biden attacked the United States.”

“Biden is pushing a platform that would demolish the U.S. economy.”

“He wants to kill American energy!”

He has “the most extreme platform of any major party nominee by far in American history.”

“It’s worse than Bernie’s platform it’s gone so far right,” Trump said, mixing up his directions.

5-Watt Bulb by Nancy Ohanian

How stupid and ignorant does anyone have to be not to notice the president is off his rocker? Does he expect anyone to believe any of this? Certainly not the press, but what about Trump fans in Wyoming, Mississippi and Oklahoma-- a state to which he personally brought the pandemic and where a 993 one-day spike on Tuesday brought the state's total cases to 21,738? Milbank wrote that "Maybe some in the MAGA crowd will believe that. They’ll also believe that 'thousands of people in New York died because of poor management' by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and that Trump’s decision to stop flights from China saved '2 to 3 million lives' ('a number that we’re actually working on'). Asked whether his extraordinary Rose Garden tirade was a sign that he thinks he might lose, Trump’s answer included references to his electoral college win in 2016 and the fact that 'we’re making swabs [in] a beautiful big new factory.' Beautiful, that is, until Biden takes away all its windows."

In response to the Rose Garden loony session, CNN analyst Stephen Collison wrote about Trump's denial and delusion... brutally. "Rarely," he noted, "has a president shown himself to be so unequal to a tragic national emergency. Hundreds of Americans are dying daily and tens of thousands are getting infected from a once-in-a-century virus. States and cities are closing down again, threatening to trigger a ruinous new economic slump. Doctors and nurses lack sufficient protective gear as they battle the deadly pathogen. And with testing swamped by waves of disease, one top official is warning of the 'the most difficult time' ever for US public health this winter. Yet this is what is on Donald Trump's mind: Joe Biden didn't fix the country's roads and bridges, crowds of bikers and boaters in MAGA hats prove that election polls are wrong, and the border wall is almost finished (except it isn't). Oh, and by the way, where is Hunter Biden?

What is needed from Trump and his administration is a plan to tackle the most relentless national challenge since World War II, consoling words to memorialize the 140,000 Americans who are already dead and the thousands destined to follow, and the rhetoric to summon the will to triumph over this invisible enemy.

All Trump could offer on Tuesday was self-pity, incoherence and indifference. He came across as a leader living in a different dimension from his people and their fear and suffering and uncertainty about what the coming months will bring.

This is a President who has demonstrably failed to beat back the virus and has long since stopped trying to lead the country out of the darkness. He resorts to boasting about inconclusive steps he took months ago-- like limiting travel from China-- that have no relevance to the current moment, and he complains he's not getting enough credit for his performance.

He's also mining divisive political seams he thinks helped him in the past. In a CBS interview on Tuesday, he insisted that more White people than Black people are killed in police violence, dealing an insult to the national soul searching about race following the death of George Floyd.

"We could go on for days," Trump said at one point in his Tuesday tirade, and for a while it seemed that he might in the blasting July heat of the Rose Garden, where journalists sat wearing masks, socially distanced and in bemused silence.

...Trump has been charging that Biden is mentally impaired and is not fit for the Oval Office. But at times, it was the President who appeared to be veering into confusion and incoherence. At one point he appeared to argue that his rival's vow to sign the Paris climate accord would lead to US office buildings being constructed without windows. And he suggested Biden wouldn't even know how to define the word "carbon."

...The President did his best to talk up his "transition to greatness," but the idea is so divorced from the awful reality of the last few weeks-- with the average daily rate of new infections hitting 60,000-- that his words only served to display his own considerable remove from reality.

"I think you're going to have some good news very, very quickly having to do with the vaccines," Trump said, at about the same time that Fauci said that it could take a year-to-a-year-and-a-half for the world to get a Covid-19 vaccine, that even then may not be completely effective.

Despite the rolling shutdowns in cities across the country, certain to throw many Americans who work in the service, tourism and transit industries out of work again, the President stuck by his predictions of a riotous return to economic growth.

But absent any credible plans to stem Covid-19's march, all the President has to sell right now is hope.

"I think by Election Day you're going to see some incredible numbers. The third quarter is going to be really good, the fourth quarter is going to be great, but next year is going to be one of the best economic years," he insisted.

"So hopefully I'll be able to be the President where we say, 'Look at the great job I did.'"

And as far as that enthusiasm gap problem... Sure voters aren't enthusiastic about voting for Biden-- how could anyone but a complete jerk or ignoramus be?-- but what they are enthusiastic about is voting against Trump. That looks like it will be enough to get him out of the White House. And even Trump voters aren't filled with anti-Biden jet fuel, the way they were in Hillary's case.