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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

Tony Vinciquerra, the TV industry veteran who revived Sony Pictures Entertainment and established it as an “arms dealer” to streaming services, will step down as chair and chief executive of the group early next year.

Vinciquerra, 70, who joined Sony in 2017, sold off most of Sony’s international cable TV assets as consumers “cut the cord” and signed up for streaming services.

He also decided against launching a streaming service, opting instead to license Sony-produced shows such as The Crown and Better Call Saul. The strategy kept Sony Pictures profitable.

Ravi Ahuja, 53, a former Disney and Fox executive who heads Sony’s television studios, will replace Vinciquerra.

The biggest threat in a hurricane isn’t the wind, it’s the water. From the mountains of western North Carolina to the Florida coast, communities were inundated by torrential rain and flooding from Hurricane Helene.

There’s still another two months left in hurricane season. It helps to know that flooding from heavy rain can happen just about any time, anywhere, as climate change makes torrential downpours more common. 

As the water recedes, the long, slow process of recovery begins. Here’s what you need to know to prepare for flood waters, and how to start picking up the pieces when the water’s gone.

My house flooded. What should I do first?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency says the first thing you should do is check for things like damaged power and gas lines and cracks in the foundation to make sure it’s safe to go inside.

If it is, and there’s no standing water in the house, go to the circuit breaker box and turn off the electricity. If you smell natural gas or propane, or hear a hissing sound, FEMA says to contact the fire department immediately. And put distance between you and the house.

Then you’ll want to check to see how high the water rose. If it got above your house’s electrical sockets, you should call an electrician to make sure the system is safe to use, says Brad Hubbard, president of National Flood Experts, an engineering firm.

“You don’t want to, obviously, put live electricity through a wet situation,” Hubbard says.

What if I couldn’t evacuate and I’m stuck on the upper floor of my house? Should I wade through the water to get out or wait for help?

Flood water is dangerous. It can electrocute you, and there’s often debris, sewage and toxic chemicals in it. So, if you can wait for the water to recede or for help to come, that’s your best bet, says Jennifer Horney, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the public-health impacts of disasters.

If you have to enter a flooded area, Horney says you should take precautions, like wearing sturdy shoes to protect your feet and trying to keep open wounds from coming into contact with the water.

“People die in storms all the time from taking a risk that they don’t need to,” Hubbard says. “If you’re trying to save a person, go for it. If you’re trying to save your car or a piece of property, it is not worth it.”

Janice Whitley wipes her face while working to find valuables from her 93-year-old mother’s bedroom in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Old Fort, North Carolina.

Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

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Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

It’s safe to go back inside my house. Now what?

Use your cell phone to take a ton of pictures of the outside and the inside of your house. You’re documenting the damage and trying to show how high the water got. That’s important for making an insurance claim or applying for federal assistance. The more pictures, the better, Hubbard says.

If you have flood insurance, file a claim as soon as possible. “Get your name on the list,” Hubbard says. “There are tens of thousands of people who are dealing with this right now, and [insurers are] just going to go down the list. So, the quicker you get on the list, the quicker that this is all going to be resolved for you.”

Then you need to dry your house as fast as possible. That means ripping up carpets, removing furniture and cutting out drywall starting a foot above the water line.

Keep in mind that after disasters, electricians, contractors and other people who help with recovery are in short supply. Hubbard says be patient with them. “We all live in these areas that we serve,” he says, “and it means that when there’s a storm, the people who are trying to help you are also dealing with their own problems.”

What about next time?

Take precautions beforehand if possible. Photograph your home, possessions and valuables before an extreme weather event hits, to use for insurance claims. If there’s a flood threat, put valuables on top of kitchen counters or on a second floor if you have one. You can also put important items inside of a dishwasher, which is watertight, Hubbard says.

Preparation also includes taking stock of the risks you face. Only about 4% of homeowners nationwide have flood insurance. When disasters like Helene happen, people without flood insurance are often left to shoulder the costs themselves, which can have profound consequences.

“This will be a material financial event for them and could change the course of their life,” says Matthew Eby, chief executive of First Street, which models climate risk.

You can go to FirstStreet.org, type in your address and see what kinds of risk your property faces. “You can discover that I do have flood risk when I may not have known that,” Eby says, “and I can look at what solutions might exist.”