The New York Times' Ezra Klein on Tuesday released a lengthy podcast in which he tried to answer the question, "What's wrong with Donald Trump?"
Throughout the podcast, Klein goes through assorted explanations people have come up with for the former president's mental state, before he zeroed in on something that has long been Trump's greatest political strength: His lack of inhibition.
While many voters think that politicians as a whole are inauthentic because they speak in highly calculated terms, Trump supporters love the fact that he freely insults all of the people whom they dislike without paying any social repercussion.
However, Klein believes that this has also been a weakness for Trump because he frequently lobs insults at others even when it makes no sense to do so, such as when he recently responded to a question about whether he'd want former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley on the campaign trail with him by mocking her for losing her home state to him in the 2024 Republican primary.
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"If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect," writes Klein. "If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane."
Klein goes on to say that he believes Trump literally cannot help doing things such as this because "he is missing the part of his mind that tells him what not to say, what not to do."
Klein then looks toward the future and imagines what this would mean for a second Trump term in which the former president would be even less inhibited than in his first one, due to a combination of both age and a what's projected to be an all-MAGA staff that will carry out his every order.
"Now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time," he warns. "That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doing."
