It was billed as an antisemitism event, and, well, I guess it was, ultimately, although not in the intended sense. The phrase “antisemitism event” usually refers to an event designed to draw attention to and denounce antisemitism. But in Donald Trump’s hands, it morphed into an event that featured antisemitism, in the form of the mind-blowing comments by the principal.

After opining that the Democratic Party has “a hold, or curse” on Jewish Americans, he then said: “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent.… If I’m at 40, think of it, that means 60 percent are voting for Kamala [Harris], who, in particular, is a bad Democrat. The Democrats are bad to Israel, very bad.”

First of all, as always, he’s lying. He’s not at 40 percent. He’s at 25 percent. But lies are par for the course. What isn’t par for the course is to show up to a constituency and serially berate them. He said again that American Jews who vote for Kamala Harris “should have their head examined.” He took it as a given that Jews have a dual loyalty to the United States and to Israel—the oldest antisemitic trope in American politics. And he whined that “I haven’t been treated right” by American Jews.

But don’t worry—it wasn’t all about attacking Jews. He attacked Muslims too! He boasted that if elected, he’ll bring back the Muslim travel ban to keep out people from “infested” countries. That is plainly fascist language.

After the debate, I wrote a column arguing that this was the beginning of Trump’s unraveling. I’ve gotten my share of predictions wrong over the years, and we still have 46 days to go, but so far, that one is looking pretty good. In the last few days, Trump:

First of all, asshole, a guitar isn’t a “privilege.” It’s something you earn by learning how to play it, like I have. But learning a musical instrument requires having an attention span of more than five seconds, so that’s out of the question for Trump. He couldn’t learn the kazoo.

Second, his reference point shows his age, does it not? How far removed is Trump’s invocation of someone who was at his peak of popularity nearly 70 years ago and died nearly 50 years ago from Bob Dole’s famous reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1996 campaign? I mean, that was only 40 years after the Boys of Summer fled to L.A. And third, if you know anything about Elvis’s career and what rock and roll tours were like in those primitive days, you know that he was typically playing crowds of three or four thousand, often less—fairgrounds and high-school auditoriums. Even the ’70s-Vegas Elvis played mostly the Westgate Casino Cabaret, capacity 1,700. The large-scale rock and roll tour started with The Beatles and then grew from there. But Elvis remains the lodestar of the 80-year-old Queens brain.

Oh, and by the way: Trump said this at a rally where—of course—there were lots of empty seats and where, yes, people were spotted leaving early.

So we have two issues we need to examine here. First, the astonishingly offensive remarks Trump made Thursday night about Jews. His Jewish support should start sinking like a stone. But there’s one Jew who clearly loves him, and other events this week have to make us wonder whether Bibi Netanyahu is trying to start a war with Lebanon and maybe Iran to raise gas prices and screw up the economy (right after Jerome Powell made a move to ensure that doesn’t happen) to help Trump win, but that’s another column, if I get around to it.

The second issue is one that must remain front and center in the American political media: Trump is really losing his marbles now. Was that statement about the crowd going nuts for him at the debate a normal Trump lie? Or was it a fantasy of which he has convinced himself? If we hooked him up to a polygraph and he repeated that line, would his pulse quicken? Would he change his speech patterns, avert his eyes, cover his mouth? I doubt it. He wouldn’t even think he was lying.

The mainstream media still treats comments like this with diffidence: “Oh, that’s Trump.” No. These are defining comments. They tell us about his mental fitness. They matter. They should be covered. I can’t find evidence that The New York Times or The Washington Post covered those remarks.

This sanewashing must stop. Voters need to be informed when Trump makes statements with a tenuous connection to reality at best. He’s disqualifying himself from the presidency every day that he opens his mouth, but much of the mainstream media is ignoring the words coming out.

I know some people don’t like to play the “Imagine If!” game, but at times it’s hard not to wonder, “Imagine if Joe Biden had said the crazy thing that Donald Trump uttered.” So I’m sorry to say that there is a story from this week that demands we indulge ourselves. Imagine with me that Kamala Harris had attended—oh, let’s say a Holocaust commemoration ceremony—and she brought, as a member of her entourage, someone known for saying the Holocaust was a hoax. Or that she attended a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the company of someone who’d argued, pace Alex Jones, that the shootings were faked.

That’s what Donald Trump just did by bringing Laura Loomer to Wednesday’s September 11 commemoration.

It’s just a surreal moment. I lived in New York when the attacks happened. I keenly remember how zealous Republicans and conservatives were about 9/11, how quick they were to pounce on anyone on the left side of the spectrum who said anything that even hinted at departure from the accepted narrative—and especially those who, along the way, departed from reality. And now, years down the line, the Republican Party standard-bearer comes to New York on 9/11 itself, palling around with someone who called those attacks an “inside job.”

You’ve seen that reference many times now in the last couple of days, but it’s worth unpacking the phrase in a paragraph. “Inside job,” with respect to 9/11, meant that the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the attacks and let them happen. Or even staged them. In some variants, Israel, naturally, was involved as well. I believe a lot of bad stuff about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (still!), but I have never believed that. It’s loony tunes. But adherence to this zany theory was disturbingly widespread, at first on the far left before it spread to and was taken up by some on the far right. In polls at the time, up to a quarter of respondents, sometimes more, said they believed this silliness.

By the way, when I say that Loomer believes lunatic nonsense about the September 11 attacks, I’m not dredging up statements she made 20 years ago to criticize her today. HuffPost reported this week that just last year, Loomer “shared a video on X that said ‘9/11 was an Inside Job!’ and claimed it was somehow related to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s announcing $2.3 trillion in ‘lost’ government funds on Sept. 10, 2001.”

Loomer’s sins hardly end there, of course. She’s a racist and a xenophobe and a provocateur. She’s claimed that school shootings were staged and that the Las Vegas mass shooter was affiliated with ISIS. Remember that murder of the 6-year-old Palestinian boy outside Chicago, who was stabbed 26 times by his white landlord shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks? The landlord said he feared a “global day of jihad,” a lie spread by Loomer and Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate infamy) as well as Jones’s InfoWars website, among others. There’s a lot more. She’s poison.

The fact that Trump took Loomer to the 9/11 event has gotten a lot of coverage. I woke up Friday morning ready to unload on The New York Times for not doing a story on this, but then I looked at the website, and to its credit, the Times has a good piece up today that highlights Trump bringing her to New York and traveling with her more generally. In case you missed it, she was at the debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia. She’s a frequent Mar-a-Lago presence. He wanted to give her a campaign job back in the spring, until others objected. Loomer is apparently too crazy for Marjorie Taylor Greene. I didn’t know “too crazy for Marjorie Taylor Greene” was possible.

What does all this tell us about a possible future Trump presidency? That this racist conspiracy theorist will be around the White House whispering in the president’s ear. And she won’t be alone. Trump’s “social media war room” at the debate included Loomer, Posobiec, and Chaya Raichik, who created the “Libs of TikTok” account that promotes hate speech and transphobia. Children’s hospitals across the country have received bomb threats after social media posts on Libs of TikTok—accusing the hospitals of performing gender-affirming surgeries that in some cases they didn’t even perform—went viral in the right-wing fever swamp.

Imagine the White House filled with people like this. That’s what we’re probably talking about if Trump is elected.

Call it speculative if you want. This is part of why it’s difficult for news outlets that follow traditional reporting norms to fathom these possibilities, let alone make a news story out of them. But the fact that these people are hanging around at Trump’s invitation can’t be allowed to pass without our reckoning with it. On whatever path forward Trump hopes to forge, these people will be along for the ride. And the mere possibility that the White House is going to be bursting with racists and xenophobes and transphobes and multipurpose haters and conspiracy theorists is something to which attention must be paid. There has to be a way, within the conventions of mainstream reporting, to place this alarming possibility in front of the electorate’s collective nose.

Let’s conclude by returning to the “Imagine If” game. What would the mainstream media be doing right now if, on Wednesday, Harris had indulged in one of my above scenarios? First of all, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine, because Kamala Harris is a good human being who has normal human morals. But if she had, everyone—and I do mean everyone: the right wing, of course, but the New York Times editorial page, the talking heads of MSNBC, and even yours truly—would be in a state of meltdown apoplexy until she apologized and explained herself; and even after she did so, loads of people, right and left, Republicans and Democrats, would be declaiming on her unfitness for office and demanding that she stand down as the nominee.

But in the real world? This story, like all Trump stories, is likely to fade. That would be to the detriment of all. At the very least, the mainstream media should not let this outrage die; it should continue to rub this ugliness in the faces of the hypocrites who once called liberals enemies of freedom because we opposed the stupid and tragic War in Iraq that Bush and Cheney used 9/11 as an excuse to start, and who now want this amoral nitwit to be the leader of the free world.

For months, Donald Trump’s frequent lapses into incoherence—the half-sentences that suddenly veer off toward a distant galaxy, the asides that limn the virtues of Hannibal Lecter—have been mostly fodder for late-night TV hosts. Morning Joe has covered them consistently, but for the most part, the mainstream press has ignored them, either cleaning up Trump’s actual words so they made more sense on the printed or pixelated page or just not printing them at all.

This was easier to do when Trump was running against Joe Biden, who sometimes also lost the rhetorical thread, and whose age was a constant news story (not without justification). But now that Trump is running against a younger and more energetic opponent who tends to speak in full, logical sentences and who doesn’t go on rants about bacon and wind power, his mental state is rightly becoming more of a story. As my colleague Greg Sargent put it yesterday: “Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness.”

Which brings us to Trump’s appearance Thursday before the Economic Club of New York. I watched some of it. In fairness, reading from his prepared remarks, he was coherent. He rattled off a string of statistics about the economy under his presidency, many of which were actually true, or close enough; when he got around to describing the horrors “Marxist” Kamala Harris had visited upon America, his claims were a lot less true. (He said “crime is rampant, and fleeing is the number one occupation” in California, but crime is trending down in the state this year, and the recent population declines have been turned around too—not that Harris has control over these issues one way or another.)

Then came the question-and-answer period. A woman among the handful assembled on stage asked Trump if he would commit to passing childcare legislation, and if so what his specific proposal would be. Here’s the answer in part, as put out in a tweet by the Harris campaign:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know; I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, who was so impactful on that issue.… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that because the childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”

Trump’s answer was longer than that, but when he got around to something resembling a response, it was that his tariffs on China are going to pay for everything, no problem. Just like deporting people is going to solve the housing crisis.

A few quick facts. In the nineteenth century, before the individual income tax became a permanent fixture of life, tariffs accounted for most of the government’s revenue (at a time when the government did very little—stood up an army, ran a postal service, etc.). But today, according to the Council of Economic Advisers, import duties........

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