Trump's rash of bizarre claims and wild tangents is no laughing matter

Donald Trump was always unfit to be president, however his apparent cognitive decline since he last ran for office in 2020 is alarming.

He has long spewed lies and conspiracies, but Trump’s rantings have become more delusional — underscoring how he can’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear launch codes, let alone to manage budgets, unpredictable crises or delicate matters of foreign affairs.

If elected again, his detachment from reality poses a threat to the stability of the country and the free world.

Trump is stuck in a dark place, making it impossible to lead the nation to a brighter future. His fear and anger routine feels especially tired next to Vice President Kamala Harris’ vision of joy and hope. Indeed, the growing wave of enthusiastic support for Harris has seemingly knocked Trump loose of his moorings.

In recent weeks, he has significantly reduced his campaign schedule and retreated to his Palm Beach resort, where he gave a rambling news conference that was unglued even by Trumpian standards. With no supporting facts, he claimed the stock market was crashing, that the country was on the brink of a depression, and World War III was looming.

Trump made a number of bizarre claims, including that people were “dying financially because they can’t buy bacon” and that Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ vice presidential pick, was “heavy into the transgender world.”

Trump wrongly said everyone would be forced to buy electric cars, and that would require every bridge in the country to be rebuilt because the weight of the batteries made electric vehicles heavier.

He went off on a wild tangent about the time he almost crashed in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though Brown says he never flew with Trump.

Contrary to what polls show, Trump said the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was something “every Democrat and every Republican wanted done.” He incoherently said gasoline was “going up $7, $8, $9 a barrel” although gas is sold by the gallon.

Trump repeatedly overstated crowd sizes at his rallies. At one point, he falsely claimed more people attended his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, than the estimated 250,000 who watched the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

By the time the news conference ended, Trump issued 162 misstatements, exaggerations or flat out lies in just over an hour, according to a review of the transcript by a team of reporters and editors at NPR. The full transcript is worth perusing to fully contemplate how Trump could be president again — or how a Fox News anchor could describe his performance as a “clear eyed and sober assessment of the state of the nation.”

Days later, Trump took to social media to claim the massive crowds turning out for Harris and Walz were fake and had been generated by artificial intelligence. His wacky post makes QAnon conspiracy believers seem cogent.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote. “There was nobody at the plane and she ‘A.I.’d it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DON’T EXIST!”

The election is fast approaching, and this is the nonsense Trump is obsessed about. For the record, video footage and photographs captured by the media and attendees showed large crowds greeting Harris.

Trump, a twice impeached, convicted felon, facing three criminal indictments, went on to argue that Harris “should be disqualified” from running for president because the (not) fake crowd image was election interference.

Such drivel may be chalked up to Trump giving the MAGA masses more bread and circuses. But it is more troubling than that, as Trump is once again undermining democracy by recklessly sowing seeds of doubt in the upcoming election.

He did the same thing in 2020. Even after losing more than 60 court cases and having his own Homeland Security officials declare the election was the most secure in history, Trump refused to concede and illegally attempted to overturn the results, which culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump’s recent meltdowns are part of his broader deterioration. He frequently slurs words, forgets names, and confuses elected officials.

This is not a new issue, but it appears to be getting worse. In 2019, Trump called Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tim Apple. In 2020, he repeatedly referred to Rep. Matt Gaetz as Rick Gates, a former aide who was convicted for his role in the Russian election interference case. More recently, Trump mixed up Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.

During recent rallies, Trump has gone on incoherent rants about sharks and electric boats. He has an odd obsession with fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

At a rally in Montana, Trump strangely said no one knows Harris’ last name. Uh, it’s Harris, just like her father, the retired Stanford University economics professor.

On several occasions, Trump has conflated mental asylums with asylum seekers. During a rally in the Bronx, he gave a head-scratching soliloquy about how he puts on his pants. He even claimed President Joe Biden would crash the Democratic National Convention and take back the nomination.

This is way beyond weird and has nothing to do with policies or plans to improve the lives of working Americans. Still, most Republican officials and many in the media ignore or downplay Trump’s peculiar state of mind.

Normalizing Trump’s unhinged musings is dangerous, and the kid-glove treatment stands in stark contrast to the onslaught Biden endured from the media, Democratic officials, and donors following his lousy debate performance.

Biden’s issues centered more on his speech, stemming from his lifelong struggle with stuttering. During the debate, he looked at Trump with his mouth agape and occasionally lost his train of thought and froze up, adding to the alarm.

Trump, on the other hand, struggles to form coherent sentences, mispronounces words, and goes off on nonsensical tangents that are detached from reality. His incessant lies border on pathological. He also exhibits a grandiose sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and a constant need for attention and admiration that can impair leaders who are so deeply focused on themselves.

Biden wisely put the country ahead of his personal ambition and stepped aside. That leaves Trump, 78, as the oldest presidential nominee in American history. His advanced age is not the only red flag.

In 2017, more than two dozen concerned psychiatrists and mental health professionals warned about Trump’s instability in a book titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. And more recently, medical experts have expressed concern about Trump’s mental capacity with one psychologist saying his speech, memory recall, and other behavior shows he is “dangerously demented.”

It should be noted, however, that those assertions are a violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s so-called “Goldwater Rule,” which prohibits mental health experts from offering “professional opinions about the mental state of individuals that they have not personally and thoroughly evaluated.”

For his part, Trump claims that he “aced” a cognitive test, though mental health experts note that it is hardly an effective diagnostic tool.

And it’s unlikely that the former president would ever feel compelled to release more details about his mental state.

So it will ultimately be left to voters to determine whether Trump’s outlandish ravings are the product of “a very stable genius,” or someone who is more dangerous, more delusional, and more unfit to be president with each passing day.

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