For months leading up to President Biden’s stepping aside as candidate for re-election, liberal commentators on the left voiced their anguish and anger over the disparate treatment of Trump’s and Biden’s misspeaks. Biden’s made news, constantly cited as indicators of cognitive decline. Trump’s miscues were just Trump being Trump.

In June, The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story leading to a full broadsheet page on Biden’s failing mental acuity titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping”. They were not wrong; the infamous debate would bear them out. But the paper has taken no such notice of Trump’s disoriented mind.

The New York Times ran a steady output of articles pointing on Biden’s, witness these titles this year:

Feb. 14: The Biden Problem Democrats Can No Longer Ignore

Jul. 2: Biden’s Lapses Have Increased, According to Some Insiders

Jul. 5: The Struggles of President Biden and the Truth About Aging

Jul. 22: Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common

When the search that brought up these articles was repeated with the only change being Trump’s name substituted for Biden’s, nothing came up.

With Biden out of the race, somewhat more attention has been paid to Trump’s utterances. He had mixed up candidate rival Nikki Haley with former house Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seemed to think he was running against Barack Obama rather than Biden. At his rallies, he speaks of “The Late, Great Hannibal Lecter”, a fictional serial killing who eats his victims; contemplates whether he would prefer to die from a shark or a boat battery’s electricity; thinks it a good idea to have football coaches and race car drivers “at the table” during military meetings. “Let me use these guys to guide our military a little bit”, Trump said.

These peculiar utterances have given Democratic vice president hopeful Tim Walz the opening to call Trump and his retinue “weird”.

But what the media should pay serious attention to is his increasing inability to make sense in his long disjointed, bewildering monologues. It is the media’s failure to do so in any depth — to just sum up, and not all that often, these strange soliloquies in a sentence or two rather than show full segments or full text.

Here he is talking about Kamala Harris. These are verbatim transcripts. The tortured syntax is his:

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

He is unable to stay with one subject, possessed of a disorderly mind that wanders way off the point as those who worked directly for him in his four years as president have attested. The media doesn’t go much further than to say he “rambles”. Trump’ rejoinder is:

“They’ll say ‘he was rambling’. I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble.”

He tells his rally audience about “a green new scam” of “no water in your faucets” (where, he does not say) and goes on at length about washing his hair.

” Lather. I like lots of lather, cause I like it to come out extremely dry, cause it seems to be slightly thicker that way, and I lather up, and you turn on this crazy shower and the thing drip, drip.”

He seemed to consider the growing problem of diminished water tables in this country as inconsiderate of his needs, continuing with…

“You know, it’s called rain, it rains a lot in certain places, but uh, no, their idea, you know, did you see the other day, they just..I opened it up and they closed it again, I opened it, they close it. Washing machines to wash your dishes. There’s a problem. They don’t want you to have any water. They want no water, and I was with…”

With evident embarrassment, Fox News cut away with, “And, you were just listening to former President Trump, and we’re going to talk about some of the things he was discussing there”.

This week, his incoherence finally drew some media attention. He spoke before the Economic Club of New York whose “membership is curated from the senior executives and leaders in New York City Metro Area…typically C-Suite”, says their website unabashedly. In other words, wealthy people, likely contributors. In the audience, Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, made the point that “the real cost that is breaking families’ back and preventing women from participating in the workforce is child care”. She asked if Trump could “commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable”. His answer in full — and do stay with it:

“Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, ah, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that’s because child care is child care, couldn’t, you know, something you have to have it. In this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels they’re not used to.”

The “tax” is the tariffs he intends to charge on all imports, suggesting that child care could effectively be paid for by tariffs on foreign nations.

“But they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care, we’re gonna have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small, relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be talking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”

And they applauded! Ms. Saujani said his answer was “incomprehensible”.

This is the disheveled mind we would be sending back to the White House to deal with a dangerous world. That he didn’t commit, didn’t answer the woman’s intelligent question, is the minor point. He says nothing about child care other than “child care is child care” and we must have it, makes tariffs his subject, finally wanders off into his America first sloganeering. He says he doesn’t ramble. It is surprising he even remembers that there was a question.

the tariff lie

Apart from his shambolic speaking patterns, there is the nonsense of what he says. On another occasion, speaking before a gathering of bitcoin advocates and their wasteful “mining” with thousands of computer servers, he blathered,

“We will be creating so much electricity that you’ll be saying, please, please, President, we don’t want any more electricity. We can’t stand it. You’ll be begging me, no more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough.”

If Trump means improving the national grid, he is showing his ignorance of the complexity involved, the grid being so fragmented.

In the child care answer, he has once again repeated the lie that other countries pay the tariffs. Americans pay the tariffs. This lie is particularly mendacious because tariff costs are passed forward and wind up in higher prices. The lower income groups pay a greater percentage of their income for those higher priced necessities, making tariffs a regressive tax. Yet Trump would have them be the ones to reduce the deficit, making it that much more difficult for moms to afford child care and enter the workforce.

In this same week, a “town hall” with the fawning Sean Hannity on Fox in which Trump talked non-stop, answering no questions, he’d say it again, as he has been saying for months:

“China paid us hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and tariffs under me. Under no other president, and I mean right from the beginning, did they pay ten cents.”

Nor did they pay ten cents under Trump. It begs the question, why does Hannity say nothing and allow that lie to stand. Why hasn’t Trump’s flock called him out for lying to them? Or should we realize that a huge swath of millions of Americans are truly stupid?