Let’s keep it simple, shall we? If Donald Trump were your grandpa, you’d be having family meetings about how to protect him from himself. Assisted living? A nursing home? Or would it be necessary to have the old man confined to a psychiatric clinic?
One thing’s for sure: Somebody would have to do something.
Over the last couple of weeks alone, the Republican front-runner for the presidency has made a series of bizarre pronouncements that would land an ordinary geezer in a competency hearing.
Trump suggested that the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could be executed for treason. At a California rally, Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi, the 83-year-old husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was bludgeoned almost to death a year ago by a hammer-wielding MAGA supporter. The crowd laughed.
He emitted a stream of insults and threats against prosecutors, judges and court personnel involved in the several civil and criminal cases against him. “Deranged,” “psycho,” “monster,” “crackhead,” “animal” and “degenerate psychopath” were among the epithets. An ordinary criminal defendant would already have been jailed for contempt.
“Crooked Joe Biden, let’s indict the m----er! Let’s indict him,” Trump told a California crowd. The entire “Biden crime family,” he vowed, will be imprisoned during a second Trump administration, much as he once promised to lock up Hillary Clinton.
Even more bizarrely, Trump bragged at a subsequent rally about having “a much better body” than President Biden and claimed he could beat him in a fistfight. “I think I could go like this,” Trump puffed, “and he’d go down,” as reported by Business Insider.
He also claims he’s 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds.
To people with eyes, 6 feet and 275 is more like it. Biden’s three years older, but clearly more fit.
Trump further boasted that he’s a much better golfer than the president, as if it matters. Of course, Grandpa Trump’s well-documented cheating at golf makes it hard to know if he’s really any good at all.
(Actually, my personal favorite among the former president’s athletic fantasies was the time he claimed to have had a two-man MLB tryout with Hall of Fame first-baseman Willie McCovey during his senior year in high school. For the record, the late, great McCovey was eight years older than Trump and was already a National League All-Star by 1963. Slate researched newspaper box scores documenting Trump’s high school career: His batting average was .138 in a prep school league. No professional team gave him a tryout. No how, no way. It’s George Santos-like make-believe, pathetic and ridiculous.)
But I digress. During a recent campaign rally, Trump boasted of being endorsed by an imaginary serial killer. As reported by Ben Blanchet for The Huffington Post, he asked an Iowa crowd, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?” Actually, Lecter was a fictional character in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs,” and the actor who played him, Anthony Hopkins, has made it clear he’s no Trumpist.
So, fantasy or delusion? Does it even matter?
‘Banality of crazy’
Most of these bizarre moments are simply not being reported in the “mainstream” press. Granted, there’s more Trump coverage than anybody really needs. But try to imagine the hullabaloo that would have resulted if Biden called somebody, anybody, a “m----er.” The outrage and/or expressions of deep concern would never end. A lifelong stutterer, all Biden has to do is stumble over a word to generate a veritable tsunami of commentary about his advanced age.
Trump recently went on Fox News to claim that there’s a gigantic, untapped water source in Northern California that Gov. Gavin Newsom could use to soak the national forests to prevent wildfires, but that Newsom refuses to open the valve. Trump said that people in Beverly Hills would be able to take long showers.
Once again, this is clearly delusional in the psychiatric sense. No such reservoir exists. Even if it did, California’s national forests comprise 20 million acres, much of those mountainous. Trump’s plan is the environmental equivalent of injecting Clorox to cure COVID. But mainstream media don’t report it, and the Trump cult will believe anything. So the show goes on.
Last week, the leading GOP presidential candidate proposed shooting shoplifters to death and warned that Biden would lead us into World War II. Writing in the The Atlantic, Brian Klaas laments that he searched The New York Times for any mention of these significant blunders, but found none.
“The Banality of Crazy,” he calls it.
Recently, we also learned, thanks to ABC News, that Trump “allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago club.
That, the Times did report. On page 13.
The old fool’s a walking national defense threat.
Time to drop a net over him.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”
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