Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 22.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Reports about presidential nominee Donald Trump’s behaviour have grown more alarming in recent weeks. There were bizarre comments during a campaign rally speech in Wisconsin about a fly that joined him onstage, a 40-minute dance party in the middle of a town hall in Pennsylvania, calling Democratic representatives Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi each “an enemy from within” that “should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” and then doubling down when asked about his comments, saying, “They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists.”
Mr. Trump’s erratic behaviour and meandering speeches are, of course, prime fodder for Kamala Harris’s campaign, which has seized upon these episodes as even more evidence that Mr. Trump is unfit to hold the office of the president.
It is worth noting that just a few months ago President Joe Biden agreed to step aside after widespread concern about his health and mental capacity for the job. The Republicans who led the charge about Mr. Biden’s age are unsurprisingly silent now that Mr. Trump stands to be the oldest person to become president and is refusing to disclose information about his health. Then again, hypocrisy has never mattered much to Republicans – recall that Senate Republicans refused to vote for Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in February, 2016, because it was an election year, and how quickly they changed their tune to push through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation just over a week before the 2020 election.
Besides, the kind of regard for acting in the best interests of the country shown by Mr. Biden isn’t exactly Mr. Trump’s forte.
More importantly, Mr. Trump is an endogenous phenomenon. We can only measure his purported erraticism or deterioration against how rational and coherent he used to be, not against what we should or could expect from others (including his predecessors and his competitors). Time and again, Mr. Trump’s supporters have demonstrated that there’s little he can say that would turn them against him.
This contorted suspension of disbelief emerges from the fact that Mr. Trump has frequently gotten a free pass from media outlets – some more than others, of course. This is because of his entertainment value, to be sure, but also because the simple act of paraphrasing Mr. Trump makes him sound more reasonable and lucid than he actually is. Any use of an ellipsis in reporting is usually an effort to interpret, and incidentally obscures, Mr. Trump’s nonsensical ramblings.
Mr. Trump, as I’ve written before, has little more than a nodding acquaintance with the truth. Being caught in a lie or a scandal, or even a brief moment of too much enthusiasm, used to be enough to sink a political campaign. In the post-truth, fake-news, election-denialism era of Trumpian politics, veracity is a footnote. Those who believe Mr. Trump is sincere also paradoxically do not believe he will do the things he threatens to do – such as jailing his political opponents or initiating the largest mass deportation in U.S. history – once becoming president.
Electoral campaigns always feature some degree of political spin. But combatting Mr. Trump’s claims is like wrestling with smoke. The truth, unfortunately, doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether people are convinced, and whether they will turn out to vote for Mr. Trump’s version of the truth in less than two weeks.
In these dying days of the election campaign, Democrats continue to argue that Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy. That his mental decline makes him more dangerous, not less. That in the next four years, should he win the presidency, he will be more easily manipulated by flattery and favours, more belligerent toward those who challenge him, more intent on destroying any guardrails that seek to contain his autocratic impulses. Democrats have four years of the last Trump presidency and nine years of Mr. Trump’s electoral antics to use in their arsenal of evidence.
The writing on the wall is clear – Mr. Trump will be even more outrageous in his second term as president. The guardrails of democracy have weakened; the advisers who stifled his ambitions have left; the Republican Party has fallen in line; Congress has proven unwilling to constrain the power of the president through the extraordinary act of the removal of a president after his impeachment.
When people show you who they are, the poet Maya Angelou once said, believe them the first time.