More and More Evident: Trump Totally Bonkers

It’s always fun to be in San Francisco. It was especially fun last weekend when, during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump stunned California political reporters with his account of a near-death experience in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, where Brown never stopped trashing his former girlfriend, Kamala Harris.

Within minutes, Brown, tracked down by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli at Sam’s Grill, refuted the entire story. He’d never crash-landed in a helicopter with Trump. He’d never been in a helicopter with Trump, period. And he hadn’t trashed Kamala Harris.

At first, reporters thought Trump might have been talking about a 2018 helicopter ride with former Governor Jerry Brown. Then it turned out Trump was actually remembering a helicopter trip from New York to Atlantic City he took early in the ’90s with former Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden, which did experience engine problems.

Trump got it all wrong. He confused a Black Willie Brown with a white Jerry Brown; a Black Willie Brown with a Black Nate Holden; California with Atlantic City; and just made up stuff about Kamala Harris. Imagine how Republicans – and the media – would have demanded invoking the 25 th Amendment had Joe Biden made such a string of misstatements.

But it’s wrong to dismiss Trump’s helicopter fantasy as simply a temporary lapse of memory. It’s much more serious than that. It’s not the first example of crazy things Trump has said recently. It’s the latest in a string of statements that, even for Trump, are completely bonkers.

They include Trump’s claims that an angry Biden will arrive at the Chicago convention and take the Democratic nomination back from Kamala Harris; that it’s “unconstitutional” for Harris to run for president; and, of course, that Harris is not Black, but only started pretending to be Black when she decided to run for political office.

Trump also continues his bizarre obsession with crowd-size. He falsely bragged that he had a bigger crowd at the Ellipse on January 6 (50,000) than Martin Luther King Jr. enjoyed at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream speech” (250,000). And he falsely claimed that a crowd that showed up to greet Harris at the Detroit airport simply didn’t exist. “There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d it,” Trump declared. Which came as news to the 15,000 fans on the tarmac.

Every time he opens his mouth, Trump spews out another mind-blowing assertion. He insists that Biden sent the FBI into Mar-a-Lago with orders to assassinate him. He accuses Biden of faking Covid a couple weeks ago. He accuses Democrats of wanting to kill babies after birth. He claims that Venezuela is releasing its convicts from prison and sending them to the United States, in a move worked out with the Biden administration. And, of course, this is the same man who still insists at every rally that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 election.

There’s no other way to say it. Donald Trump is not funny. He’s not clever. He’s not confused. He’s sick. He’s mentally unhinged. And it’s getting worse by the day.

In 2017, 27 leading psychiatrists and mental health experts published “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” in which they warned that Trump was not mentally fit to be president. Dr. John D. Gartner, clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years, summed up their findings: “Trump is bad, mad, and getting worse. He evinces the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible for a leader.”

On my podcast In April, Dr. Gartner told me Trump had rapidly and markedly deteriorated in the seven years since. In 2017, Gartner noted, he was talking about intermittent examples of mental collapse. “Now,” he said, “he is getting worse. He can’t get through a whole rally without revealing himself.”

How bad is it? Even worse than you think. “I am certain that if he is re-elected,” Gartner warns, “he will become cognitively incapacitated. There’s no way at the rate of deterioration t hat he’s showing that he can make it through four more years without falling off the cliff.”

That’s the truth about Trump, the dangerous reality that the media should be talking about every day. It’s time they stop treating Trump like just any other normal candidate – he’s not! – and start covering him for what he is: an old man, the oldest man who ever ran for president, who’s already mentally ill and steadily getting worse.

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(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod.)