What’s Wrong With Donald Trump?

What’s Wrong With Donald Trump?

I think there’s an answer. But it’s not age — or, at least, it’s not just age.

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You’ve probably seen the clip by now. Donald Trump is holding a town hall. It’s Monday, Oct. 14, in Pennsylvania. He was being asked softball questions by Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, and there is a medical emergency in the crowd. The rally stops for a while. They play “Ave Maria” while the medics respond. Then Trump and Noem begin again. Then someone else in the crowd needs medical help. The rally stops again, begins again. Noem is settling back in when Trump announces he’s had enough.

What comes next is something I’ve never seen before. Trump, swaying dreamily to his playlist, in front of a rally full of people, for nearly 40 minutes. It was like he was D.J.’ing his own bar mitzvah. You can look, in these clips, at the faces of the people around him, like Noem. They really have no idea what to do. They are suddenly backup dancers in a concert that shouldn’t exist.

Part of me finds Donald Trump’s behavior here unusually relatable. You think I want to sit up here talking about politics and war day after day? You don’t know the temptation to, just once, just for one week, turn this podcast into a drum and bass set or play you my favorite Kiasmos songs. But I don’t. Of course I don’t. It’s not what we’re doing here. And if I were a presidential candidate in the final weeks of a campaign, I wouldn’t do what Trump did, because the fallout would be predictable: an avalanche of media coverage asking, “What the hell was that?”

I wouldn’t do it because of the inevitable attacks from my opponents about the strange behavior I’d just exhibited onstage.

I don’t think Walz has this right. Trump did not freeze up on that stage; I’m not going to accept that. He did not lose where he was in the moment. If anything, he was all too present. But Walz is saying something Democrats really want to hear right now.

There are so many Democrats — I think you can imagine I hear from them all the time — who are furious still about the difference between the way the media treated Joe Biden’s age and the way it has treated Donald Trump’s age. The diminishment of Biden’s capacities led to unrelenting coverage and concern from the media and from Biden’s own party that ultimately drove him from the race. Every time Biden flubbed a name or a place, every time his voice was quiet or thick and clotted, every time a sentence derailed before it reached its intended station, a frenzy over Joe Biden’s fitness would rise.

But Donald Trump, at 78, is nearly as old as Joe Biden. He exhibits his own cognitive irregularities. He rambles, and he lies and makes things up and seems to get strangely lost in these digressions. His speech is associative and circular. It can read like gibberish on the page. And he goes on bizarre riffs, like this one, which is somehow about the dangers of electric boats:

There is this fury among many Democrats about the pass they feel Trump has been given. And I’ve struggled with this myself. It’s not that Trump’s age is unknown or that in the media it is uncovered. But even when we do write about it, I can tell you, it doesn’t connect in the same. The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend that it does. The audience knows what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all. And I don’t think people believe — to be honest, I don’t believe — that the core problem with Trump is his age.

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