Trump on the stump: We have to come up with a new word for "unhinged"

We have to come up with a new word for “unhinged.”

That was my reaction after watching the entirety of Donald Trump’s speech at his Las Vegas rally on Sunday.  We also need a new phrase for “word salad,” because it does not adequately describe either the structure or content of Trump’s sentences…if they can be called that. 

I have spent more time than I would have, if I were not in the business of covering politics, watching tapes of Trump’s rally speeches this year.  During the 2016 campaign, I even attended one of them in Bethpage, New York, on Long Island, where I caught the barest glimpse of Trump appearing to be detached from either his circumstance as a candidate or the reality around him.  He began that speech, to a largely working-class audience in heavily Republican Nassau County, with a paeon to the Bethpage Black Course, a storied public golf course near the venue where Trump was speaking.  It’s a public course where he played golf as a boy from Queens.  Trump ran his mouth about the course his love for the game of golf, how much he played the game now, his ownership of multiple private golf clubs…on and on he went until, from my perch near the back of what had been a massive Grumman aircraft company hanger, I could see people walking out before he had reached the 10-minute mark of what would turn into an hour-long tirade.

Trump’s stump speech has evolved from its infancy back in early 2016.  In those speeches of yore, he spent a good deal of time going after Hillary Clinton, his opponent for the presidency. But in the early ones, he had not yet reached the point of leading audience chants of “lock her up,” preferring to link her to non-scandals of the Clinton White House, during which the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, stumbled into the sub-scandal that became Clinton’s sexual dalliances with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. It led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, but sadly in Trump’s view, Clinton was subsequently acquitted.

Today, as has been reported so often there is little need to go into it here, Trump’s stump speech is largely a thumb-sucking litany of all the bad things that have been done to him by nasty liberals, who have morphed recently into Marxists and Communists in his telling.  It’s a sad tale that is so unfair, as if fairness has had any place at all in American political life.

But the speech in Las Vegas, delivered to a crowd estimated at about 7,000 on a day when temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, turned notable when Trump’s teleprompters failed, causing him to begin what some press accounts have called “riffing” but what I would call a descent into some previously unexplored loony tunes, psychotic, batty, demented, crackpot, crazed, bonkers, maniacal, nutty, daft, non compos, whacko, gaga parts of his brain.  Those are synonyms for “unhinged” courtesy of the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, by the way.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Salon. To read the full column, go here:

Trump jumps the shark