'Unstable, disordered, and morally repulsive': Expert shreds Trump's final campaign weeks

Former President Donald Trump has proved more strongly than ever his unfitness to return to the nation's highest office, conservative former Naval War College professor and The Atlantic contributor Tom Nichols wrote in an analysis Friday.

"Trump, of course, tops the leaderboard for gobsmacking moments, and this week, his comments ran the gamut from vile to hilarious to head-scratching. Even so, nothing could match his description of the January 6 insurrection — one of the darkest moments in American political history — as 'a day of love,'" wrote Nichols.

This moment came when he was trying to win over an undecided Cuban-American construction worker at a town hall who said he was "disturbed" by Jan. 6. Trump not only praised the rioters but lamented the death of Ashli Babbitt and falsely claimed none of the rioters had guns.

That construction worker has since made clear he wants nothing more to do with Trump after that answer. But that wasn't even the only mess the former president got into recently, Nichols wrote.

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In particular, he said, Trump also attended the Al Smith Dinner hosted by the Catholic Diocese of New York, and, just as he did when he attended 8 years ago, delivered a mean-spirited performance, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris' IQ, saying it wasn't "settled" whether Abraham Lincoln was a good president, and whining about Fox News running Harris campaign ads.

"Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, and many others who should know better sat there and pretended that Trump was just a regular political candidate soft-shoeing his way through an Al Smith dinner," wrote Nichols. "All of these people should have refused to share a stage with Trump, but the dinner was another example of what Jonathan Last acidly — and rightly — calls 'Kabuki Normality,' the careful pretense that all is well, and that appearing with a convicted felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, a racist and a misogynist and a 'fascist to the core,' is just another day at the office for the leader of New York’s Catholics and the senior Democratic senator from New York."

Trump, concluded Nichols, is "unstable, disordered, and morally repulsive" — but somehow he is still competitive in the election. "If Trump wins, in January, he will sit behind the Resolute desk, and military aides will once again walk him through the process to order the use of nuclear weapons. No phrase or expletive is enough to capture that terrifying possibility."