A boy has a crush on a girl and tells everyone how great she is. The girl does not feel the same way and picks another suitor. The boy gets on the public announcement system to tell the entire school that he loathes her. That is what happened between Donald Trump and Taylor Swift. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Trump posted shortly after the superstar endorsed Kamala Harris last month. Until then he would regularly compliment Swift, saying last November: “I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful.”
Trump’s superpower is that teams of psychologists could spend all their hours dissecting such moments and still not dent the material. It is even harder for America’s media to do justice to the random nuttiness of his streams of consciousness. The only way to understand his state of mind is to watch every rally to the end or read all the transcripts. Ninety-nine per cent of voters do not have the time. Which means that Trump is treated as the same old Trump, eliciting familiar shrugs with the latest childish insult or outrageous vow.
You could smuggle a sharp cognitive decline into Trump’s persona and few would notice. In politics, this offers a rare form of hurricane insurance.
Crowds leave his events early. Yet according to Trump on Monday, Harris and Joe Biden have deprived him of the Secret Service protection needed for booking larger venues, which leaves tens of thousands of disappointed Trump rally-goers waiting outside.
That this is fiction goes without saying. But it is hard to record such instances several times a day without seeming obsessional. The US media can thus come across like the proverbial blind man feeling an elephant. The scale and strangeness of the object is impossible to grasp. Trump’s words are therefore summed up in abbreviated — and coherent-sounding — form. The media’s leftwing critics call this “sanewashing”. A better term might be “Trumped”.
Nobody who rewatches Trump in 2016 and compares him with today could deny that his memory is patchier and his vocabulary smaller. Even when he avoids familiar tangents about Hannibal Lecter and death by electrocution or sharks, his repetition is notable. “Kamala is mentally impaired,” Trump said at the weekend. “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. It’s sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way.”
The question arises why 81-year-old Biden stepped down from his party’s nomination while 78-year-old Trump has faced no such calls. The simple answer is that Democrats were panicked. Biden would probably have lost the election to Trump. Voters could see his physical appearance, which looks far more frail than Trump’s. If they read what each of them says, however, they would get a different impression. Biden sometimes forgets his point and often trails off. But his transcribed thoughts are not crazy. Harris can sound halting, especially on economic issues. But she shows no hint of being “mentally disabled” as Trump just called her.
Which brings us back to Trump’s own mental state. Five weeks from now, America could elect a man who has promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants. He has not ruled out setting up a network of detention camps. Such steps will be necessary, he says, because migrants are lethal. “They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat,” he said in Prairie du Chien last weekend. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members.”
The media has largely failed to probe how US law enforcement would uproot millions across the nation without involving mass-scale violence. How could Swat teams raiding hundreds of neighbourhoods figure out who is illegal? Many families are a mix of documented and undocumented. Would they rip mothers from their children? Mass deportation is the thread that runs through almost all of Trump’s meanderings.
From tax cuts and tariff wars to wholesale oil drilling, Trump’s other promises appeal to specific groups of Americans. But a strikingly large number of voters across the board support mass deportation. If Americans knew what that would mean in practice, many would reconsider. It is a measure of Trump’s ability to distract people, including the media, that this central feature of his plan is known only in the abstract. Yet it could permanently alter the face of America.
edward.luce@ft.com
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