Late stage Detrumpmentia

Photo: AL.com

It’s hard to put your finger on when exactly it was that he hit the late stage of what we have been seeing for the last ten years.  The question of Trump’s mental acuity came up again yesterday watching his Biden-debate-level disaster of a press conference in a ballroom at his club/resort/motel in Palm Beach, Florida.  I think I’ve identified the moment when we all knew we were dealing with a man who had completely lost his ability to make sense of the world that confronts him daily.

It was April 4, 2020.  You remember the early months of that year, don’t you?  Two weeks previously, Governor Cuomo in New York had ordered all “non-essential” businesses shut down.  Schools were closed, along with restaurants and offices.  The words “essential workers” entered the lexicon to describe not only doctors, nurses, and emergency responders, but grocery store check out persons and pharmacists at your local Walgreens or CVS.  People were in a panic as COVID hit and hit hard.  Cruise ships had docked with hundreds of people sick from the newly-identified virus.  Flights from China had been shut down.  Flights overseas and within the U.S. had been scaled back because of fears of transmission in the closed space of an airplane fuselage.

People in New York City, who had been confined in their apartments for weeks, were opening their windows at 7:00 p.m. every day and banging on pots and pans, singing, and yelling thanks to first responders and medical personnel who were risking their lives each day.  This is what one New York television station showed on the evening news:  bodies being moved into temporary storage in refrigerated trucks parked outside the hard-hit Wyckoff Hospital in Brooklyn. 

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In Washington D.C. however, in the press room at the White House, the scene was different.  Donald Trump had ordered a daily briefing on the COVID situation that included a not-yet-crucified Anthony Fauci and a new figure in the Trump administration, the scarf-wrapped coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, Dr. Deborah Birx.

Trump himself had begun dominating the daily press briefings with his own assessment of the disease:  It was “going away,” “within a couple of days it’s going to be close to zero,” “It’s going to disappear,” “Calm, you have to be calm, it’s going away,” “ Stay calm. It will go away. You know it — you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory,” “It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month. And, if not, hopefully it will be soon after that,” “It is going to go away. It is going away.”

That last promise was on April 3, 2020.  The next day, on April 4, 1,224 deaths in the U.S. were reported from COVID.  By that date, there had been a total of 8,376 deaths from the virus nationwide.  These numbers would go up – way, way up – but with scenes on television of doctors and nurses in moon-suits with respirators in hospital corridors lined with COVID patients often unconscious, on beds, panic had set in. 

That day at the White House briefing, after hearing remarks by a “science and technology” expert from the Department of Homeland Security named Bill Bryan that “the virus dies quickest in sunlight,” Trump took the microphone and said this:

“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just a very powerful light,” Trump turned to Bryan, “and I think you said that hasn't been checked because of the testing.  And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too.”

One news camera covering the briefing panned to Bryan and Dr. Birx looking dumfounded as they sat along a wall next to the podium.  But Trump wasn’t finished: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

Trump’s invention of his “disinfectant” cure for COVID at the briefing that day became known as “injecting the bleach.” Uttered while hundreds were dying without letup, while stocks of medical devices like respirators and even scrubs and surgical masks were running out and his own son-in-law was being accused of withholding supplies from blue states in favor of states that voted for him, I think it represents the early-onset stage of what we saw yesterday at Trump’s Mar a Lago press conference.

Standing before a clutch of reporters who were crammed into the end of one of his overly-ornate ballrooms, Trump reheated some of his regular chestnuts – that no one was killed at the Capitol on Jan. 6; that Vice President Harris, who was a prosecutor in San Francisco and Attorney General of California, had not passed the bar exam; that gasoline costs “$7, $8, $9 a gallon;” that Democrats will “force” everyone to drive an electric car; that Harris will “destroy” Social Security and Medicare; and that “not one soldier” died in Afghanistan after he spoke with a Taliban leader in March of 2020.  Back on earth, 13 soldiers died in hostile action after that conversation took place, Kamala Harris passed the bar, gas costs an average of $3.50 a gallon, two people were killed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and three people later died as a result of the insurrection that day.

But those are, for Trump, just ordinary political lies told in the same way he breathes and drinks Diet Cokes.  It was Trump’s claim that he had been in a helicopter crash with long-time California political leader Willie Brown that grabbed the headlines.  It was a wholly-invented delusion.  There was no helicopter crash.  The “Brown” Trump rode the helicopter with to observe damage from the Paradise fire was then Governor Jerry Brown.  And Trump’s claim that Willie Brown “told me terrible things about her [Kamala Harris],” was completely made up, Brown telling the New York Times today that he remains “a big fan and supporter” of the Vice President.

We appear to be witnessing the death-rattle of the Donald Trump we have come to know and despise over the last ten years.  Trump, who after the Republican National Convention behaved as if he was coasting to victory in November, is now locked in a contest with Vice President Harris that is, according to FiveThirtyEight.com and other poll aggregators, “even,” with Harris running ahead in battleground states, and purple states like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada that “leaned Republican” according to the Cook Report now seen as “a tossup.”

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Harris raised $370 million in July, about $170 million more than Trump raised that month.  The Harris-Walz barnstorming tour of battleground states is filling venues to overfull, while J.D. Vance, who actually advertised that he would “follow” the Democrats’ tour, has appeared before crowds of about 200 or less.

Trump’s press conference yesterday was announced only the night before, giving the national press little time to move camera crews and top reporters to Palm Beach in time to cover it.  It appeared to be the kind of move Trump makes only when “He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him,” Trump’s former communications director posted yesterday.  “He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”

Asked why Trump has only one campaign appearance this week in Montana, which he carried by 16 points in 2020 and 20 points in 2016, Trump sneered:  “What a stupid question,” adding after a moment’s thought, ”Because I’m leading by a lot, and I’m letting their convention go through.”

The Democratic National Convention begins not next week, but the week after.  That’s a lot of time to allow for “their convention to go through.”

The one thing other than his lying that has remained consistent with Trump is his bottomless rage.  He didn’t crack even the tiniest of smiles at yesterday’s press conference.  Trump’s mini-me, J.D. Vance, seems to see his job as spreading white boy grievance and anger.  The same night Harris introduced Walz as her running mate before an overflow crowd of 12,000 in Philadelphia, Vance made a speech in front of a crowd of about 200 that was “small but weirdly intense,” according to Amanda Marcotte, who covered the appearance for Salon.  “Every type of white man that gets a hasty ‘swipe left’ on his dating profile was in attendance. Roided-out dudes with bad tribal tattoos. Older men radiating ‘bitter divorce’ energy. Men with enormous beards that have never known the touch of a trimmer. Skinny fascists wearing expensive suits, despite the oppressive heat. Glowering loners staring at the two women under 40 like cats watching birds out a window.”

Sounds like a winning coalition to me, doesn’t it to you?