Donald Trump’s recent speeches have lapsed into an incoherence that’s striking even for him — and it’s causing a whole new level of panic over his possible return to the White House, an MSNBC columnist wrote Tuesday.
Using a recent address in Potterville, Michigan to illustrate his point, writer Zeeshan Aleem commented that Trump had always been rambling — but he seems to have reached a new level of confusion.
“The words below were taken verbatim,” he wrote, before quoting Trump:
“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”
Aleem then paused to try to understand what had been said.
“This is ... impossible to follow,” he concluded.
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“Trump’s asides stack atop each other with such density that it’s dizzying for even professional political observers to discern what he’s trying to get at. Why is a presidential candidate leapfrogging from talking about Harris’ policy record to the bath he took on a property he owns to where he ranks on the list of “horribly” treated presidents? His asides themselves are often unintelligible. What is this alleged anecdote about his San Francisco property meant to convey? What does he even mean about how horribly presidents were treated? To cap it all off, Trump casually tossed out an insidious conspiracy theory. He implies we don’t know who shot him, when of course we do.
“Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easy to forget how far he is from fulfilling the basic requirement of a politician to speak clearly.”
Aleem argued that Trump, up to this point, had been partly protected because he was campaigning against President Joe Biden, an 81-year-old candidate whose age and mental ability had been made a focal point of the Trump campaign.
But now, facing 59-year-old Kamala Harris, his lack of mental acuity has become more obvious.
“Questions about Biden’s mental acuity were rightly raised in this election cycle,” he wrote. “Questions about Trump’s mental acuity should be raised, too.”
“The incoherence of the Potterville speech is just one of countless examples.”
He went on, “Biden’s exit from the race not only sharpens public awareness of Trump’s age and communication struggles, it also shields Democrats from accusations of hypocrisy. Now, as Harris energetically lays out how she wants to improve the country, Trump’s bizarre speeches look even more concerning than they did before.
“After all, during his first term, Trump’s imprecise, impulsive way of communicating made him exceptionally dangerous when speaking about sensitive diplomatic and national security issues, such as in his policies toward North Korea. Those risks will only be greater if he becomes president again.
“And it’s genuinely chilling to imagine a less capable, less focused Trump handling another major public health crisis such as Covid. Trump's seeming decline isn't his worst quality — but it likely would make many of his vices worse.”