Donald Trump Is Losing His Marble

We need to talk about whether Trump has the capacity to be president.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

It is no secret that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World does not think much of Donald Trump’s ability to be president. During his first term he displayed the kind of immature leadership that caused his staffers, subordinates, and supporters to talk about him like he was a toddler. His record as president was pretty, pretty bad. His actions following his 2020 loss were so egregious that they pushed Bob Woodward off the nonpartisan fence that he had been stapled to for the past four decades.

The polling, however, shows that Trump is keeping the race close. Clearly many Trump supporters have developed rationalizations for why they can still support him.

Far be it for me to judge these folks — or, for that matter, the remaining undecided voters. I can outsource that task to Lewis Black:

Instead, I want to ask a simpler question: is Donald Trump even capable of being president for another four years?

The evidence of Trump lacking the stamina and cognitive capacity for the job has been mounting this week. For one thing, he keeps bailing on speeches and media interviews. The New Republic’s Edith Olmstead chronicled all his recent cancellations:

Donald Trump has pulled out of two major interviews Thursday, after the Republican presidential nominee made several appearances this week that went disastrously awry.

Trump had been scheduled to do an interview with NBC News’s senior business correspondent Christine Romans that would air Monday, but the plans for a face-to-face were apparently shelved. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Thursday that one source suggested the interview had only been “postponed.”

The former president also canceled his speech to an NRA convention on Tuesday in Savannah, Georgia. Convention organizers said Trump had a “scheduling conflict.”

These two changes come just days after Trump canceled plans to appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box, which the economic show’s co-anchor Joe Kernan reported Tuesday.

Olmsted’s claim that Trump’s appearances went “disastrously awry” seems harsh — until one reads Philip Bump’s transcription of what Trump said he would do to lower grocery prices in the Washington Post.¹ Trump’s entire, unhinged, unfocused rant is worth reading in its entirety. In the interest of brevity, however, I’m just gonna excerpt the portions of Trump’s answer that had anything to do with, you know, lowering grocery prices:

So, you know, it’s such a great question in the sense that people don’t think of grocery. You know, it sounds like not such an important word when you talk about homes and everything else, right? But more people tell me about grocery bills, where the price of bacon, the price of lettuce, the price of tomatoes, they tell me. And we’re going to do a lot of things.

You know, our farmers aren’t being treated properly. And we had a deal with China, and it was a great deal — I never mentioned it because once Covid came in, I said, that was a bridge too far because I had a great relationship with President Xi [Jinping]. And he’s a fierce man and he’s a man that likes China and I understand that. But we had a deal and he was perfect on that deal, $50 billion he was going to buy. We were doing numbers like you wouldn’t believe, for the farmer. But the farmers are very badly hurt. The farmers in this country, we’re going to get them straightened out. We’re going to get your prices down.

It goes downhill from there — and it is also worth noting the basic Economics 101 point that enabling more U.S. agricultural exports to China would, if anything, raise food prices in the United States.

This is not the only time Trump has given an incoherent policy response about grocery prices during the general election campaign. There was this beauty from last month:

Speculation about the degradation of Trump’s reasoning abilities has been a running theme of his political career. That speculation has accelerated this past week, however. Trump’s worsening incoherence has started to attract more media attention. The Boston Globe’s Kimberly Atkins Stohr wrote about it earlier this week:

What was crystal clear was the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy.

President Biden, after struggling with his answers during a June debate with Trump, ended his bid for a second term in July. That decision came after Democrats publicly voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness and the press pursued the controversy breathlessly for weeks. Editorial boards, including the Globe’s, had even urged Biden to step aside.

Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell. That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country….

His diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored. He may not be able to get a grip, but it’s long past time the news media and Republicans stop participating in the gaslighting. We can see reality with our own eyes.

The problem has become so apparent that even the New York Times is covering it. Maggie Haberman noted on CNN that Trump’s advisers worry that this “unfiltered, meandering” version of his stump speech will alienate voters. Haberman’s colleague Michael C. Bender wrote about this issue, noting that, “some Trump advisers and allies say privately they…. worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.”

This closing anecdote of Bender’s story stood out:

In Prescott Valley, Ariz., on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s scripted remarks hewed tightly to the anti-immigration message that has become central to his campaign. He stayed on track for the first half-hour of the event before taking a more scenic route to the finish.

After about 25 minutes, he told the crowd he wanted to tell “one quick story” about a friend with a car plant in Mexico.

But he never finished his tale. Instead, he lost the thread one minute later as he complained that if he mispronounced one word he would be accused of being “cognitively impaired.” Then, he botched the phrase by saying President Biden was the one who was “cognitively repaired” and referred to the election as three and a half months away, not three and a half weeks.

About 20 minutes later, Mr. Trump seemed ready to wrap up his speech. He promised the crowd would see him again soon and said he was thinking about residents on the East Coast suffering after the recent storms.

“So in closing,” Mr. Trump continued, “I just want to say Kamala Harris is a radical left Marxist rated even worse than Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas.”

He proceeded to speak for 17 more minutes.

Republicans lambasted Democrats earlier this year for ignoring evidence of Joe Biden’s deteriorating cognitive abilities — and, in retrospect, they were right to do so. I wonder, however, whether these same GOP critics can muster any kind of introspection about Trump’s ability to do the job. Because it seems increasingly clear that Donald Trump is losing the one marble that was rattling around in his head.

1. This occurred at the town hall that Trump cut short and turned into a music concert for 40 minutes.