'Dribbling the applesauce': Political experts say 'feeble' Trump has moved beyond 'crazy'

A panel of longtime political commentators agreed that Donald Trump may have always been a little "crazy" or nutty in a laughable way, but they're now concerned he's "dribbling the apple sauce" — meaning they believe he is showing signs of a cognitive decline.

Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, former MSNBC host Donny Deutsch began by describing Trump as a laughable kind of disturbed.

"I don't think they care he's crazy," Deutsch said of Trump's MAGA loyalists. "I think a big part of his base — I have a friend, [who thinks Trump's] so toxic. And then he says, 'He's really crazy, ha ha.' And then laughs. I don't know how people can extrapolate out. This is the guy making decisions for the world, and he's not well."

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Wallace cut in to say that the idea that Trump is "crazy, ha ha," isn't what she's talking about.

"I think there's something different between a strapping lunatic and somebody feeble who's spilling his applesauce," Wallace explained. "I know some of those kinds of voters who are, I'll take the crazy bleep-hole over a Democrat, but I think this is something different."

Deutsch asked if it was "evilness," but Wallace called it "incoherence."

"If Joe Biden had ever talked about a crowd at a debate, we would have stopped traffic. There would have been TV live casting in Times Square with a clock on it to see how long he imagined an audience where there wasn't one."

Deutsch, who has known Trump for decades, said that he never "knew" the man who has been making comments like he has in the past year or so.

"He was always full of baloney, he was always braggadocious. He was sharp, but now he's not," said Deutsch.

Wallace said that Benito Mussolini was "crazy, but he was vicious. I mean, this is feeble," she said of Trump. She also thinks Trump might be "scared" because he's made too many mistakes.

Deutsch, however, thinks that he has people around him who aren't telling him the truth and instead are there to prop him up as "doing great."

Bulwark editor Charlie Sykes agreed there's a difference between the "raving lunatic or being somebody in decline, dribbling the applesauce."

"Look, the latter is weakness, and it's exhausting," he said. "I think one of Donald Trump's greatest political accomplishments has been to convince the media and much of the country that his jibbering nonsense is just Trump being Trump. That it's completely normal, and that we should not hold him accountable."

He said then that it highlights the media's dilemma and dangers of "sane-washing" the things Trump says. It's the problem The New York Times has gotten itself into with its readers. It's why even Fox News, he said, "is backing away."

He said Trump has a "reptilian instinct of what the voters want to hear" and he's turning back to what was comfortable for him and what got him reactions from his crowd.

"Why should we report that Trump is saying crazy crap? Because he always says crazy crap because this crazy man wants to be the leader of the free world and have access to nuclear weapons," Sykes finished.

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