The press is finally starting to ask the most obvious question in the world:
This is from the Washington Post, and it follows a major story on the same theme last week in the New York Times. The taboo is finally lifting.
Cats, charts, and politics
The press is finally starting to ask the most obvious question in the world:
This is from the Washington Post, and it follows a major story on the same theme last week in the New York Times. The taboo is finally lifting.
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Not going to matter to most of his supporters, and it's hard to believe there are that many on the fence at this point.
One is never going to reach the hard core Trumpies, but the good news is we don't have to. The 2020 election demonstrated Trumps hard core of deadenders were not enough to get him elected.
What we have seen recently in the more reliable news media is that there has been a slight but measurable shift of black and Hispanic voters in Trump's direction. The ones who shifted are not MAGAnuts, they are concerned about whether Harris can be an effective President, because in their experience a "strong man" is more likely to keep control, and more likely to mirror their own views on social issues.
If those recent shifters can see clearly that Trump is not the "strong man, in control" that they have thought of him, then many of them may likely shift back to the more rational, centrist candidate.
Most of his supporters is not the game - that sort of thinking is at once simplistic and erroneous. It is pre-losing defeatism (and innumeracy as to the data)
Rather the audiences are non-hard-core supporters (which one knows exist from the data from the Republican primaries where even after it was 100% clear Haley could not win, 30 odd percent of primary voters kept casting votes against Trump (i.e. Haley)
That tells one that there is a not-irrelevant percentage of party voters who can at minimum be convinced if not to vote for Harris, to sit out.
Additionally the floating on the fence data while tiny margins are indeed another contributing difference. Analytics showed that those small numbers breaking late against Ms Clinton lost her key geographies.
You are not in your old elections, now you are in knife edge elections and mere thousands of votes even hundreds in the swing states make the difference
(and the rest of the country is irrelevant - national data is shite)
The people already in mental institutions also aren’t bothered much by other mentally ill people amongst them. Humans can get used to anything, including everyone around them acting crazy if they do it every day.
Not sure it says much that the crazies in the Republican Party have the support of the crazies in the American voting population.
Not going to matter to most of his supporters, and it's hard to believe there are that many on the fence at this point.
Of course this is not going to matter to many of his supporters. If fitness for office were a concern, they wouldn't be Trump supporters in the first place!
But the most plausible estimates I've seen suggest about 5% of the electorate is still undecided. The manner in which they break (50-50 Trump-Harris? 60-40 Trump-Harris? 65-35 Harris-Trump?) will decide the election.
Our Fearless, Inspiring, Relentless media is demonstrating what they're best at: sniffing for weakness and groupthink.
You know what they say: Democracy dies in the Mean Girls bathroom meet up.
Doesn't the bible say something about "those that live by a media sniffing for weakness and groupthink shall die by a media sniffing for weakness and groupthink"?
"The taboo is finally lifting." Barely. The MSM has ignored every hint of his gradual decline and now only suggests that maybe it's an issue. Too little too late.
They haven't been ignoring it. It's too bloody obvious. They just don't devote resources to most of it because, unlike with Biden and Democrats, Republicans think the more outrageously deranged and unfit their candidate is, the more it owns the libs, and so it doesn't get any traction as journalism. "Why MAGA loves Trump's bizarre behavior" is the story, not "Holy Shit, we may reelect a bona fide madman in a few weeks how can patriotic Americans stop this?"
After all, that wouldn't be "balanced" now, would it?
I would also take a guess that they don't want their homes firebombed, children harassed and death threats. The Trumpers are not a nice bunch, there's a reason why even the GOP politicians are afraid of them.
I have wondered about this. Also, with pollsters.
It does feel like threats are shaping the news.
Which would be big news if it were true, too.
(It certainly is true with election volunteers and poll workers and school board members I've talked to in my ME 02 district.)
I'm a close friend of the person who runs one of the major polling outfits. I can assure you that fear of Trump's supporters doesn't affect his work product.
The evidence doesn't support that conclusion.
I think there's a lot to this. Take a look at this: https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/10/14/we-are-all-don-bacons-wife-the-threats-trump-elicits-for-personal-gain/
It’s like writing about the crazy things people committed to mental institutions do vs writing about the crazy things people in the “free world” do. The former is expected so it’s unnewsworthy. An example: Florida Man stories are always popular, but are never set inside a Florida mental healthcare facility.
Of course it also helps normalize the “free world” turning crazier over time…
They don’t try to be balanced and the NYT Gail Collins openly admitted in oneof her weekly conversations with Bret Stephens.with no ensuing uproar. In fact this site is the only place I saw her outrageous statement:
Gail: You know I’m not gonna tell you that Harris is doing enough serious interviews with national reporters. She’s not. Neither, obviously, is Trump, but we have a right to hold her to a higher standard
https://jabberwocking.com/let-us-hold-donald-trump-to-normal-standards-of-conduct-please/
A big part of the problem is the "firehose of badness" effect wrt covering Trump. There are ALWAYS multiple things going on (COVID tests for Putin, Hurricane lying, cognitive decline, Vance's election denial, use of force threats, etc) and media coverage is inevitably scattershot, diluted.
Remedying this requires either (1) a story so incandescent and explosive it diverts *all* Trump coverage or (2) coordination on the part of the media to focus on the one or two stories most damaging to Trump. The second of these obviously isn't going to happen.
But to my mind, Trump's basic cognitive fitness for office is the single most important issue in terms of being able to cut through the fog and potentially affect the decisions of swing voters (and yes, they exist, and are likely still up for grabs to the tune of 5% of all voters). So, I don't think it's too late. There are still nearly three weeks until the election.
Sadly it may be too late.
It is earlier (relatively) than the Comey letter.
Like the Max Planck rubric. Is it the original version of the better known "Science advances one funeral at a time."?
The MAGA baboon colony are people who go to the doctor with covid and then reject everything the doctor tells them, including that they have covid.
Is Trump mentally fit? He's as fit as the people who vote for him.
I hope you don’t mind but I am going to borrow the phrase “MAGA baboon colony.”
Whether Trump is technically in dementia or insane (as some suggest) and whether what he says are deliberate lies or just stupidity and ignorance are not really the important things.
What is important is that he constantly demonstrates that he does not have the understanding of national matters that a President must have and that he learned nothing in his first term, except possibly what he needs to do to take revenge. His proposed solutions to problems are mostly nonsense and it doesn't really take experts to see this.
What the media need to do is not to make judgements about Trump's mental state, but to bring out how he is totally unfit. This is something that follows directly from his statements and actions; it does not need any psychological evaluation.
If the media treat the campaign as a horserace or an entertainment event, then a lot of low-information voters will also judge it that way. Trump apparently has more entertainment value than real political statespeople, at least for the type of people who watch reality shows. If the media ignore racism, then people will assume it is not an issue
Exactly. If Trump's appeal is based on racism and straight, male, christian supremacy, which it is, who really cares if the candidate is mentally fit? All they need is for him to be fit enough to nominate the judges chosen by the Federalist society.
If Trump's appeal is based on racism and straight, male, christian supremacy, which it is, who really cares if the candidate is mentally fit?
Voters who are not characterized by such attributes, that's who. In other words, the modest but critical portion of the electorate that is persuadable. If they're breaking 70-30 for Trump, he probably wins a close election. If they're breaking 70-30 for Harris, she'll be the next president.
Trump's campaign is aware of this dynamic. I'm told he's just canceled an interview with CNBC, normally a pretty friendly venue for him. I smell blood in the water.
"What is important is that he constantly demonstrates that he does not have the understanding of national matters that a President must have"
Yeah, this. The hardest part for a normally-functioning adult listening to him isn't that he *speaks* at about a 4th-grade level about everything. That's obvious enough, and it's natural to think he's doing that so he can reach as many people as possible.
No, the hard part to accept is that the 4th-grade language expresses the level of *his own mental understanding* of these complex things. His maximal level, at that. (And this is no kind of conflict with the reptilian cunning he has in spades-- they're not the same thing at all.)
Thinking he expresses more complex understandings in simple language is a kind of sanewashing that whole swathes of well-meaning adults do to themselves. Almost nobody wants to accept that a fellow adult human being who successfully came off on TV as a decisive and knowledgeable businessman, and who controls upwards of a billion dollars worth of property, can actually be the epsilon semi-moron that Tillerson recognized.
"Whether Trump is technically in dementia or insane (as some suggest) and whether what he says are deliberate lies or just stupidity and ignorance are not really the important things."
Statistically it was always possible that the White House would be occupied by a complete moron. That it could happen twice in our lifetimes is a surprise and a strong indication that there is more than just random processes at play.
Trump's remarks in an event with Bloomberg yesterday were astonishing. His rebuttal of a very concise summary of the massive impact of the tariffs he proposed amounted to "STFU you've been wrong about everything for 25 years and I'm very good at math always have been."
Naturally his supporters crowed over the way he destroyed the pompous Brit who dared to argue with him.
Unfortunately, I've come reluctantly to the conclusion that there are enough morons in America who love seeing "experts" put in their place with rudeness and insults that Trump might just win the election.
Whether Trump finally breaks down after being elected should not be the question. At this moment he is not competent to be President, as he constantly demonstrates. For that matter he was not competent during his previous administration. But the media refuse to make judgements about this except intermittently in op-eds. Reading the headlines would give little insight into the difference between candidates. During the last days of Biden's candidacy, the strong implication in the media was that it was Biden who was incompetent.
It's a two-part question:
1. Is Trump showing signs of dementia?
2. Would I be happy if Vance had to replace right after the election?
I've heard more than a few MAGA cultists discuss puling a Harris on Trump.
For eight years Democrats have been saying that Trump is unfit for office, while major media has done the dirty work of sweeping all the evidence under the rug. If a month or three into his next term Republicans claim Trump is unfit for office and must be replaced by Vance, major media will barely take a breath before saying, "Well, of course."
(A Trump presidency would bring chaos unlike anything seen in US history. A Vance presidency would be a more orderly and systematic attack on the institutions and people of the country.)
Either one's presidency would be a disaster.
But my point was that Trump's decline might have the unintended consequence of helping him win. There's bogus stuff from the right about the VP being able to make the president step down if deemed unfit. etc.
Is Trump showing signs of dementia?
He's showing at least some "signs" of dementia, sure. But that's really a diversion: whether or not he suffers from actual clinical dementia, he very clearly lacks sufficient cognitive ability to be an optimal choice for the person who runs the federal government and national security apparatus. It's a big job!
All humans begin to suffer some decline in brain health as they move into middle age. That's simple physiology. For most of us, the various advantages to aging (wisdom, experience, knowledge, judgment, discipline, etc) outweigh the decline (provided that decline is modest and very gradual) until we're quite old. But if we live long enough, well....Father Time is still undefeated.
Trump to me looks like he's not remotely fit to be POTUS, even if he doesn't technically suffer from diagnosable dementia as such.
There's still way too much both-siderism. The headline in the Washington Post this morning was "Rumors, rancor disrupt storm aid" and the opening paragraphs on the front page didn't even mention Trump's name.
The headline should have been "Trump's lies disrupt storm aid."
If any are old enough to remember the 2016 campaign, a big deal was made about whether "she" could possibly handle that 3am call about some Great National Emergency.
Okay. So this little event showed howMr Trump handled even a small emergency, a few of his stans collapsing from the heat. Did he call for an ambulance? Did he ask for better ventilation, more A/C in the hall? NO! Did he even bring the event to a speedy close by taking a limited number of questions and then dismissing the heat-exhausted throng? NOOOOO!
He had the funereal "Ave Maria" played after each collapse, then he pleasured himself by directing the DJ to play his favorite playlist, while swaying and twitching to the music FOR FORTY MINUTES, while his bewildered staff used the teleprompter to send him desperate pleas to "Take a fewmorequestions!" and possibly more that the Post didnt catch.
We all learned that when his maga minions were ransacking the capital and trying to find Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence to string up (literally), he just watched gleefully on the teevie. That was when he was somewhat more functional.
But he's a bad person in an emergency, and this event needs to be flogged as such. Demented or not, you don't want his hands on the steering wheel or gripping the nuclear codes.
I’m thinking many of his supporters are mentally unfit. That’s why they like him. There really is no recovering from this descent into chaos… not when so many are happy to vote for him. Democrats are so bad, they’d rather have trump. It’s hilarious. You all will come around… your fellow citizens are not worth the effort anymore.
A huge number of them seem to be suffering from untreated mental illnesses of varying degrees, yes.
To my great distress, its actually a bit worse than that, if possible. Its not hard to imagine, in a "West Wing" kind of way, a bunch of Repub politicos sitting around crafting messages: like "this will appeal to anti-tax voters," "this will appeal to pro life" etc, etc.
The disaster happened, when one of them said, "hey, you know which block is underserved, idiots! The Dems all have well crafted, well thought out, proposals which require, say, at least a competent middle school education to figure out. What about the 50 million people in this country who are stone morons?"
I'd like to think there was silence in the meeting, but probably only a few seconds. They realized that the Democratic Party platform has not one single plank is for the less intelligent. An opening existed, and with Trump they found the perfect guy - he absolutely has no desire to convince someone he is intelligent, unlike virtually every other politician I have ever seen.
Now, I actually saw a trump campaign ad that said, and I am not making this up, that Harris was inviting illegal aliens into the US with an app, SO THAT she could have them get transgender surgery in prison.
No, I am not making any of that up. That's why, a month after suggesting immigrants are eating cats, the race is still tight. Trump has the doofus vote completely in the bag.
Is the impromptu dance party just an attempt to bump the stranded rally-goers out of the top of the news feed?
The major papers may finally be paying some attention to Trump's mental capacity, but it's at the expense of investigating his failure at planning and disregard for people (his own followers!). Looks like his campaign didn't pay their bill, and people were stranded in the desert for hours, waiting for buses that never came.
His bad dancing is slightly amusing and odd, but the bigger story has been left behind. In the midst of multiple disasters, can Trump be trusted to build a team at FEMA when he couldn't even pay for buses for a single event?
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-followers-left-stranded-desert-after-coachella-rally-1968439
Blake needs to consider the differences between two groups of people: Those open to the truth and those unwilling to admit they're wrong.
Following the debate, most of us recognized that Biden was neither going to win nor able to serve another 4 years. Presented with visual evidence of Trump's growing problems of "weaving", slurring, referring to things that are untrue, and saying things that require sane-washing, MAGA folks deny his cognitive problems.
Also, Trump is physically unfit and isn't a billionaire. If he were, he wouldn't keep hiding his medical and tax records for the last 8 years.
I wish the media talked less about Trump and more about the scarecrows around him. It's been ever so slightly pointed out that he won't have guardrails this time around. The bigger problem is that he will, but this time horrible people. They'll be setting policy whether he's in control of his senses and plays golf, or whether he vapidly dances to YMCA.
Some people may actually be more likely to vote for him if he's diminished. All they want is the Dems out and a guy too demented to get anything done is no threat. At least if you forget the people around him.
Or it's the old Rasmussen polls trick. They would shift towards good numbers at the very end, and then boast about their accuracy.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking. Rassy (and Republican-funded Trafalgar are not cheating so much as they use a very tight definition of “likely voter”, which naturally trends Republican. I’ve been picking up an Obama vs. Romney vibe, back when Rassy had Mitt in front longer than the other polls until just before the election, when Rassy had to admit it was going to be a good turnout and ding! Just like that Obama was ahead. …
I may be wrong (again) but I think the polls in general this year have been expecting too low a turnout. But the first day of early voting has brought out record crowds. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Harris numbers start improving soon as the polls start accepting that it’s going to be a great turnout. I hope.
The sadest aspect of this is that it was always present on his administration, it's just that the volume and public manifestations of his unfitness have reached a crescendo.
Remember the reports of how staff used to structure the day for him, how diagrams, pictures, and colors were used for notes and documentation, how briefings needed to screened for sensitive information...
That was during his presidency.
TRUMP:
We took away the keys.
Don't give them back.
BTW, is it any surprise that "Nothing Compares to You" is one of Trump's favorites? He's so vain he probably thinks Prince wrote the song about him.
He's so vain he probably thinks Prince wrote the song about him
He's so pig-ignorant he probably thinks Sinéad O'Connor wrote it about him.
Maybe this is the October surprise. Surprised that the media is finally talking about Trump’s mental decline.
Ironic that this is “nowhere near as big a [political] problem” for Trump as it was for Biden given that Trump is manifestly so much further into dementia than Biden.
Cognitive issues only count if you're a Democrat.