Jennifer Rubin adds her voice to the growing chorus warning that the XPOTUS doesn't seem to have even a full Euchre deck:
Trump seems unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that “nobody was there” and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated (our own reporters were eyewitnesses to the event).
Trump might be conditioning voters for another “Stop the Steal.” But then again, he might be just losing it.
A glitch-plagued X interview (unable to start for 45 minutes) with Elon Musk, owner of the social media site, only made things worse. People on social media reflected shock at hearing him slur and ramble his way through a softball interview. His obsession with President Joe Biden, who is no longer running, sounds like Trump cannot cope with his actual opponents. A much less alarming performance in the debate effectively ended President Biden’s campaign.
Had the media been conscientiously covering Trump, the public would understand these bizarre outings as part of his noticeable cognitive decline. Trump’s sporadic appearances on the trail alone should be grist for the cable news shows. When they do discuss his mental state, it is often in the context of horserace politics.
Josh Marshall fumes that most major news outlets haven't covered this disaster nearly as thoroughly as they discussed Hillary's emails:
[E]lite media continues to focus on Trump’s recent antics as an extended tantrum or flawed strategy when it is much more appropriately seen as a mental and cognitive state which is manifestly unfit for holding public office. Trump is also not morally fit for office. But that’s different, and that’s always been the case. The normal rejoinder is that Trump’s mental fitness is sort of irrelevant since most of us already know that and his supporters don’t care. Those conclusions are mostly true as far as it goes. But it represents a failure of journalistic logic which is remarkably widespread in media today. Put simply, that reasoning is mainly above the pay grade of journalism. It’s not the job of journalism to adjust the editorial choices or insights of daily news coverage based on driving electoral or public opinion outcomes. It’s to cover the news. There’s no single way to cover the news and no single, objective version of what constitutes the news. But that reasoning about impact is not an appropriate one and it is deeply damaging to journalism in myriad ways.
We have 81 days until this deranged, kinda-dumb geezer could get re-elected to the presidency.