Trump Needs Help
Last night he simulated oral sex in public.
By Tom Nichols
Kevin Dietsch / Getty
November 2, 2024,
2:02 PM ET
I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I
will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former
president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to
pantomime the act of giving fellatio.
I could have put it differently. I might have said that “a
cognitively impaired man, who has long been showing signs of serious emotional
instability and has a history of sexism and racism, engaged in crude behavior
in front of a large audience.” But that wouldn’t capture an important reality:
This deeply impaired man is tied in the race to become the
next president and could be holding the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal in
less than three months.
I don’t know if this bizarre display will move votes away
from Donald Trump. Nothing seems to dent the loyalty of his base. Trump voters
are resolute in their determination to minimize his ghastly antics, or even to
scrub them from their minds. (As one commenter said on
social media today, Trump’s new mantra might be: “I could stand in the middle
of Fifth Avenue and blow somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”)
Besides, it’s always difficult to single out one terrible
moment at a Trump rally when there are so many from which to choose. Last
night, for example, he insisted that he won Wisconsin twice. (He didn’t.) He
also took a
veiled racist shot at the Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is
Black. “Your team is very good,” Trump told the crowd. “I would say the Greek
is a seriously good player. Do you agree? And tell me, who has more Greek in
him, the Greek or me? I think we have about the same, right?” Antetokounmpo is
of Greek and Nigerian parentage, and was born in Athens. I am a half-Greek
myself (my mother was Irish American), and the Bucks star is as Greek as I am,
but we all get the joke: A Black Greek! Get it? He’s Greek …and Black!
Trump is white, and we know this, by the way, because he
told us so. During a stop in Michigan before he got to Wisconsin, Trump explained that he could have been living an easier life on the
golf course had he chosen not to run for president:
That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got
the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that
beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned,
beautiful.
This was not the first time Trump had made comments about
his skin. But I digress, because I’d rather be talking about Trump’s clumsy
racism than his hummer on a mic holder.
Look, my Greek father lived to be 94 years old. He might have found the idea of
a Black Greek basketball player kind of amusing, and he might have laughed
about it among his poker buddies. My dad was a working-class, shot-and-beer guy
who told more than his share of sexist and racist jokes.
But if my father in his late 70s had simulated a blow job
in mixed company—never mind in front of an audience that included children—I’d
have brought him in for a complete neurological workup. Despite an ability to
swear that rivaled the Old Man in the
movie A Christmas Story, he deeply disapproved of men who swore or
were crude in front of women and kids. When I would go out drinking with him, I
occasionally saw him go over and caution other men whose language was getting
out of hand. (He was a former cop and worked as a bouncer for a time.) Dad was
not exactly Emily Post, but there were limits.
Trump, by most reports, has always been a vulgar and
ignorant man. This creepy moment in Milwaukee will add to our national and
international humiliation if he is returned to office. But more important,
manifesting this kind of disinhibited behavior in public more and more often is
a warning sign that he is simply not stable enough to sit in the Oval Office.
I do not know if Trump’s erratic behavior, his apparent
physical decline, his bizarre rambles and their mental cul-de-sacs are part of a larger
illness. Trump’s critics claim that he has dementia and other afflictions. I am
not a doctor, and I cannot reach that conclusion. But I know this much: If
Donald Trump were your father, your husband, your brother, your uncle, or
merely your friend, you would insist that he see a doctor, and you would likely
shield him from large gatherings where he could become an object of ridicule.
You might even suggest that family or friends look in on him more often.
Whatever small mercies and considerations you might offer
to a man acting like Trump, you would certainly not place him in positions of
pressure or responsibility, or inflict situations on him in which he would be
called upon to make speedy and important decisions. You definitely would not
make him the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and
place the safety of billions of innocent human beings in his hands.
The rally crowd, ever faithful and willing to do its part,
laughed as Trump pretended to pleasure a piece of equipment. But for the rest
of us, the laughter has to stop, and the horror of what might happen in a few
days must take its place.
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and
an author of the Atlantic Daily newsletter.
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