Trump's apparent decline might make his next coup tougher to pull off
Anyone who's paying attention has noticed that Donald Trump isn't doing so well. First came the bizarre town hall last week, in which the Republican presidential nominee swayed back and forth to music for 39 minutes to avoid taking questions. Trump followed up last weekend by boring a crowd in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with a meandering 12-minute story about Arnold Palmer, ending with the apparent boast that he'd seen the famous golfer's genitalia. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, even the loyal rally audience reacted with "stone silence" to most of this. Even the smattering of laughter when Trump marveled at the Palmer penis was, Bunch suggested, mostly a "nervous outlet for this American unraveling."
It remains to be seen if swing voters know how badly Trump is decompensating. Most people have better things to do than watch his long, strange rallies. His campaign team has canceled a series of press interviews, claiming the candidate is "exhausted." The press is finally starting to report how much Trump's behavior aligns with what medical experts cite as signs of age-related cognitive decline: such as disinhibition, confusion and erratic moods. He is sometimes unable to answer a basic question, forgetting what was asked and talking about random nonsense instead. At a different town hall event on Sunday, Trump bragged about his "cognitive tests" before forgetting the host's name and then seeming to forget his own age, saying he's "not that close to 80," even though that's about a year and a half away.
On CNN, Leigh McGowan suggested that the Trump campaign is hoping to distract voters just enough to get him over the finish line, where presumably he would be managed and possibly replaced by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
It's terrifying that so many voters are ignorant and indifferent about the fact that this increasingly confused and angry person has a coin-toss........
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