'So far off the charts it's almost paranormal': Trump's candidacy staggers FT columnist

Financial Times columnist Edward Luce on Wednesday took stock of former President Donald Trump's third White House run — and found that much of its shock value had worn off.

However, Luce cautioned that Trump has not gotten any less shocking than he was eight years ago, and he noted that over the last week Trump made inflammatory statements and took several alarming actions that, for any other candidate, would be on the front page of every major American newspaper.

"He purged the Republican National Committee with 60 staff firings — the opening move by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who he handpicked as RNC co-chair," wrote Luce.

"He did a U-turn on TikTok, now saying its Chinese parent company should retain ownership. He mimicked Joe Biden’s stutter, insisted that America’s true inflation rate was 50 percent and attacked Jimmy Kimmel as the worst-ever Oscars host. It seems almost trivial to add that new details emerged about Trump’s apparent soft spot for Adolf Hitler."

All of this led Luce to believe that "Trump’s candidacy is so far off the charts it is almost paranormal."

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The problem, wrote Luce, is that not highlighting Trump's regular abnormality leads to a massive double standard in which he is not judged anywhere close to the same criteria as other politicians.

"Trump issues regular flights of gibberish that might trigger a primary challenge if they came from Biden," argued Luce, who then cited Trump's utterly baffling answer to a question on inflation this week.

He ended his column with a warning that Americans need to take Trump's dangerous rhetoric seriously, no matter how old-hat it now seems.

"If Trump is true to his word, 10 months from now he will be rounding up millions of illegal immigrants for deportation," he wrote.

"Ukraine’s war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia will be over. The same fate would befall Trump’s federal criminal trials. His Department of Justice would be investigating his opponents. And he will have invoked the Insurrection Act to shut down civilian protests with US troops. "