Donald Trump is
losing his marbles
He can no longer follow
the plot or distinguish fantasy from reality. Maybe surviving an assassination
attempt affected him, but it appears that the prospect of losing an election to
a Black woman is more than his diseased ego can bear.
By Gene
Lyons
Here’s my question: Is
there anybody in the Republican Party with the presence of mind and the
political courage to imitate the Democrats? Persuading Joe Biden to withdraw
from the 2024 presidential race was difficult and painful for all concerned.
Particularly for Biden himself.
Yet Biden’s age-related
infirmities were nothing compared to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s. Prone
to stumbling over words and intermittently forgetful, Biden appeared unlikely
to carry the burdens of the presidency for another term. Yet when confronted
with political reality, he acted appropriately. History will record it as among
his finest hours.
Trump, on the other
hand, has gone completely around the bend. Some apparent combination of senile
dementia and mental illness has rendered him totally unfit for public office.
To put it bluntly, the man has lost his marbles. He can no longer follow the plot
or distinguish fantasy from reality. Maybe surviving an assassination attempt
affected him, but it appears that the prospect of losing an election to a Black
woman is more than his diseased ego can bear.
What other explanation
could there be for the candidate’s crackpot fixation with the size of crowds
drawn to Kamala Harris’ campaign rallies?
“Has anyone noticed that
Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote in one of his mad Truth Social
postings. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.'d’ it, and showed a
massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Supposedly, a
maintenance worker at a Michigan airport tipped off Trump to a “fake crowd
picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the
mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.
“She’s a CHEATER,” he
continued.
By this time, just about
everybody with a working TV has seen footage of the Harris campaign’s Detroit
arrival, which drew an estimated 15,000 voters to the airport on short notice.
No fake photos necessary. The rally was covered live on C-Span, for heaven’s
sake.
The Republican nominee
went on to boast about the vast throngs that supposedly attend his public
appearances. Why, the crowd that gathered outside the White House on Jan. 6,
2021, greatly outnumbered even those that heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s
famous “I Have a Dream” speech all the way back in 1963!
Another ridiculous
invention. In reality, upward of a quarter-million people gathered on the
Washington Mall to hear Dr. King speak during the Kennedy administration.
That’s at least five times as many as stood outside the White House to hear
Trump whine about losing the 2020 election.
You wouldn’t think the
former president would want to remind people about Jan. 6, except that he now
claims that shameful event caused no fatalities. History records that four
people died after the mob that Trump urged to “fight like hell” stormed the Capitol.
Indeed, Trump’s entire
campaign has become a bizarre spectacle challenging all but the most deluded
members of the MAGA political cult to deal with the question comedian Richard
Pryor once memorably asked, “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”
But what really took the
prize during Trump’s near-hallucinatory hour-long “press conference” last
weekend was a preposterous tale involving an imaginary helicopter ride that was
calculated to shame Harris for having once dated former San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown.
Asked by a helpful
reporter if Harris’ political career had been helped along by dating Brown —
translation: Did your opponent sleep her way to the top? — Trump responded with
a cock-and-bull story about an apocryphal helicopter crash that everybody supposedly
involved says never happened.
“Well, I know Willie
Brown very well,” Trump answered. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with
him. We thought, maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a
certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a
pleasant landing. And Willie, he was a little concerned. So I know him pretty
well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about
her ... But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala ... [M]aybe he’s
changed his tune, but he was not a fan of hers very much at that point.”
Not a syllable of this
is true. Brown insists he was never in a helicopter with Trump and never
bad-mouthed Harris to him. Trump himself was involved in a hairy helicopter
incident in New Jersey in 1990. Harris was then in her mid-20s, a fledgling
prosecutor who hadn’t yet dated Brown. A different Black California politician,
Los Angeles city councilman Nate Holden, was on board. Now 95, Holden figures
Trump couldn’t tell him and Brown apart.
Mental health
professionals call this kind of thing “confabulation” — basically a blending of
a real memory with a fantasy. It’s common among patients slipping into
dementia.
But then Trump’s always
been a world-class liar.
Gene Lyons is a National
Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”