What On Earth Did We Just See?

A joyless, gibbering, shrunken, bitter, and weird Donald Trump.

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule." -- President Gerald Ford, 50 years ago.

But here’s the thing about national nightmares: They recur. And yesterday reminded that our latest fever dream is far from over.

Happy Friday.

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Joyless Trump

Normally, I’d rather be eaten by fire ants than sit through a Trump press conference, but on Thursday, I made the poor life choice of listening to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago performance.

My quick take: What, in the name of all that is holy, rational, and coherent did we just listen to?

Most media accounts do not come close to capturing the wretched shambolism of it all, and some reporters scrabbled desperately for nuggets of coherence in the former president’s rolling gibberish.

But I want to come back to the main point: What in G-d’s name did we just watch?

For an hour yesterday afternoon, we were subjected to the maunderings of a mind utterly untethered from logic, facts, and decency. Trump clearly suffers from a severe and apparently debilitating case of Crowd Envy; and we got the customary firehose of bullshit. But that’s hardly new, is it?

This Trump, however, was also something else: a rattled, deflated, joyless, and frightened figure. There were the usual insults, fabrications, and lies, but this Trump seemed less menacing than simply old and tired — a man without a single drop of joie d vivre.

This is Trump losing.

Exit take: If this had been Joe Biden, the media would have been on fire with speculation and about his cognitive decline and mental health. If Kamala Harris turned in a performance even remotely like this, it would be regarded as a full-on disaster. But since this is Trump, it’s just another Thursday.

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Some of the savviest takes:

• Britian’s Independent captured the moment: “Trump holds seemingly pointless press conference filled with false claims.”

• The Wapo’s Karen Tumulty:

  “Unhinged” has become a shopworn word in the years since Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower. But the former president’s hour-long news conference on Thursday afternoon from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida might have been a new personal best…

  [The] former president on Thursday veered from grievance to grievance like a pinball.

• Susan Glasser:

  As the press conference approached the one-hour mark, Trump seemed to suddenly remember what he was supposed to be talking about. “It’s about policy,” he said.

  The rest of his riff I offer here in full:

  It’s about policy. It’s not about her. I think she’s incompetent. Because I’ve watched her. She destroyed California, she destroyed San Fran—everything she’s touched has turned to bad things. I’m not going to use foul language. But everything she’s touched has turned bad. She’s incompetent. The reason she’s not doing what I do and she’s not doing what she should be doing . . . She won’t even do interviews with friendly people because she can’t do better than Biden . . . and he was never, twenty-five years ago, the sharpest or brightest bulb in the ceiling, that I can tell you, O.K.? . . . But he could do interviews at least . . . But she’s, she should be doing interviews. She doesn’t want to do interviews. And the reason she doesn’t is No. 1 her policies are so bad . . . And it’s not going to change because it’s really ultimately not about her as much as about her policies. She wants open borders, she wants to defund the police . . . she wants to take away your guns. Anybody that thinks they’re not going to come after your guns—you know, when I was President, I totally protected the guns. I think it’s very important.

  Substantive stuff, right?

• MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

  This is the kind of performance from Trump that, if the Republican party was still a functioning institution, would have a lot of people panicked and wondering about how to get him to drop out.

• Hayes again:

  If you think Trump’s brain is scrambled now, just wait until he’s 82 with the nuclear codes.

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BONUS MUST READ: Experts: Trump speech patterns hint of potential cognitive decline | STAT

“Trump keeps losing his train of thought. Cognitive experts have theories about why.”

This shifting from topic to topic, with few connections — a pattern of speech called tangentiality — is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics.

Back in 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, a STAT analysis showed Trump’s speaking style had deteriorated since the 1980s. Seven years on, now that Trump has the GOP presidential nomination, STAT has repeated the analysis. The experts noted a further reduction in Trump’s linguistic complexity and, while none said they could give a diagnosis without an examination, some said certain shifts in his speaking style are potential indications of cognitive decline.

Read the whole thing here.

The Rage of Cori Bush

My latest, in the Dispatch: “Cori Bush’s Defeat Highlights Democrats’ Cognitive Dissonance: Progressives got a win when Kamala Harris nominated Tim Walz, but they are losing big across the country.”

Cori Bush was not a happy warrior.

The second Squad member to be ousted by Democratic primary voters this year, the Missouri congresswoman was bitter and defiant in defeat. In striking contrast to the “joyful” vibes at the top of the Democratic ticket, Bush promised vengeance against the pro-Israel groups she blamed for her defenestration. 

“All they did was radicalize me, so now they need to be afraid,” she declared Tuesday night. “They are about to see this other Cori, this other side,” she said before directly addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel group that backed her opponent. “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.” 

It was unclear how she intended to do that.

Bush was handily defeated in the high-profile primary by St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell, and she follows Jamaal Bowman—a fellow member of the progressive Squad that also includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—into involuntary retirement. On the eve of his own defeat in June, Bowman also launched an angry rant against AIPAC. 

“We are gonna show f—ing AIPAC the power of the motherf—ing South Bronx!” Bowman shouted during a rally headlined by Ocasio-Cortez. 

Bowman lost by nearly 17 points to fellow Democrat George Latimer after the most expensive primary campaign for a House seat in American history. 

But it was Bush’s defeat that highlighted the apparent cognitive dissonance in the Democratic Party.

On Tuesday, the same day Bush lost her race, progressives in the party cheered Kamala Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate—bypassing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had drawn the ire of the party’s anti-Israel left. Progressives looked triumphant and ascendant, just hours before Bush made their alienation from the party’s mainstream clear with her angry display.

Remarking on the mixed message, Josh Kraushaar, the editor-in chief of Jewish Insider, noted that the controversy over Shapiro demonstrated that “pockets of anti-Israel activism within the party are now a factor that any Democrat (Jewish or not) has to confront.” But Tuesday’s primary, in which actual Democratic votes were cast, “also shows that these radical voices, disproportionately represented among young Americans, are still a small minority within the party.”

Indeed, these are muddled days for the progressive left and its anti-Israel wing. While many regard Harris-Walz as a dream ticket, both Harris and Walz have solid records of support for Israel….

You can read the whole thing here.

Nota bene

A.B. Stoddard in the Bulwark: Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win

A Harris victory could become a nightmare.

An investigation by Rolling Stone identified “in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania . . . at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.” Of those 70, 22 of them already have “refused or delayed certification” in recent past elections. Nationwide, Republicans have refused to certify results at least 25 times since 2020, in eight states—the most in Georgia.

The article describes social media posts from the zealots who have infiltrated election administration as showing “unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.”

There are more than enough such individuals in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis.

Today’s obligatory dog pictures

Our French dog, Zoke, is vacationing in England this week.

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A boy and his dog. Silas and Eli at the lake.

Finally…

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Guess who really enjoyed Trump’s meltdown?