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This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 23 episode of "The Rachel Maddow Show."
This weekend, The Washington Post published a story about the “turbulent phase” Donald Trump’s campaign has entered into, with just six weeks to go until the election. The Post describes Trump’s behavior in the campaign as “impulsive” and “impetuous,” noting:
In a single 24-hour span at the end of last month, for example, he amplified a crude joke about Vice President Harris performing a sex act; falsely accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden; promoted tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory; hawked digital trading cards; and became embroiled in a public feud with staff and officials at Arlington National Cemetery.
All in 24 hours! The Post goes on to describe, gently, what they call Trump’s “policy incoherence” at this point in his campaign. To be clear, his policy incoherence is off the charts.
There’s so much interest and appetite in the mainstream media for reporting on Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump as if they’re just normal, competing candidates. But while Harris is scoring the endorsement of 700 retired military and national security officials, Trump is promising that, if he’s president, he’ll find out where California is hiding its huge secret faucet that they use to dump all the rainwater into the ocean.
As Harris calls for an expanded child tax credit, Trump is promising to abolish the Department of the Interior, take away the broadcast licenses of news organizations that criticize him, and put former President Barack Obama in front of a military tribunal.
Republicans in the House just ignored Trump’s demand to shut down the government before the election and they’re going ahead with funding the government against his wishes. That insult and rebuke to the party’s leader would have led the news for days if this was a candidate who attracted normal political coverage.
Trump, instead, is racing toward Election Day, rolling out new money-making efforts to squeeze money out of his fans almost every day. There’s the new Trump commemorative coin, hot on the heels of Trump’s crypto venture, which he’s rolling out with the help of a man who calls himself the “dirtbag of the internet” and another self-proclaimed pick-up artist.
That insult and rebuke to the party’s leader would have led the news for days if this was a candidate who attracted normal political coverage.
And his wife is launching a book, hot on the heels of the news that the majority or her campaign appearances this whole cycle were ones for which she was personally paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. His daughter-in-law, whom he installed as the chair of the national Republican Party, nevertheless found time to drop a new single for her side gig as a singer. None of these things raise money for the campaign, they’re all just personal money-making gigs for him and his family.
Trump also brought a 9/11 truther to the 9/11 commemoration, right after his staff shoved an Arlington National Cemetery worker when she tried to stop them from filming campaign videos at gravesites.
Then you have the Trump-endorsed North Carolina Republican candidate for governor, whom Trump has celebrated. Trump has yet to rescind that endorsement, not even after the reporting that he literally calls himself a Nazi, praises Hitler, praises "Mein Kampf," wants to take away women’s right to vote, and wants to bring back slavery because slavery was a good thing. (Robinson has denied the allegations.)
Just imagine being a world leader coming to New York for the United Nations General Assembly this week, fully briefed and cognizant that a presidential nominee in that situation has essentially even odds of being elected right now in the United States of America. Imagine having to come up with your contingency plans for that.