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Donald Trump’s public appearances tend to follow a pattern. The former president will have a message he intends to deliver, and he’ll have a teleprompter to guide his rhetorical path, but the Republican will invariably ramble, sharing weird and random thoughts about all sorts of things.
To hear the GOP candidate tell it, his stream-of-consciousness nonsense only appears to be incoherent.
“You know, I do the weave,” Trump boasted last week. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
For one thing, the idea that the former president hangs out with “like, English professors” is hilarious. For another, there’s no hidden genius in Trump’s rambling. He seems to enjoy sharing bizarre ideas, theories, and the details of conversations that occurred only in his mind. There’s nothing “brilliant” about it.
Elaine Godfrey wrote for The Atlantic this week about one of the GOP candidate’s latest gems.
During a conversation onstage at a Moms for Liberty event last week, Donald Trump said something that made even me — a seasoned visitor to Trump’s theme park of hyperbole — look around in confusion at the people around me in the audience. Said Trump: “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”
Not to put too fine a point on this, but Trump’s claim was plainly delusional. The is no epidemic of school-based gender-related surgeries.
But while the rhetoric was certainly ridiculous, it wasn’t altogether surprising.
Trump’s bizarre comments about “the transgender thing” came on the heels of the former president blaming wind power with people eating less bacon.
“You take a look at bacon and some of these products,” he told a Wisconsin audience last week. “Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”
As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones responded, “I don’t know how you can even fact-check a tangent like that.”
This rhetoric followed Trump speaking — more than once — about his fear of sharks, which apparently had something to do with electric boat batteries. It led author Steven King to note, “This is like listening to your senile uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink.”
The larger question is whether Trump is actually getting worse.
My MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem presented a persuasive answer this week: “Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easy to forget how far he is from fulfilling the basic requirement of a politician to speak clearly. Trump’s speeches seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day.”
The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie made a related case, arguing that the Republican presidential hopeful is unable “not just to speak truthfully about a topic, but speak coherently about any topic. ... Trump hasn’t just deteriorated, he’s clearly cognitively impaired, and it is bizarre to me that this isn’t just a major story.”
For much of the year, there was a spirited public conversation, fueled by intense media interest, about whether President Joe Biden was too old and addled to do the job. Perhaps it’s time to renew that conversation, turning attention to the incumbent’s immediate predecessor and would-be successor?
As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summarized last week, “It is a little weird that ‘age concerns’ have disappeared as a constant focus of campaign reporting and discussion even though the GOP nominee would be the oldest man ever sworn in to the office and is very obviously sharply declining before our eyes.”