After a week of sulking in his Mar-a-Lago tent, Mr Trump returned to the fight with what was advertised as a “no-holds-barred” press conference in the ballroom of his Florida home. It offered no new policies and no new lines of attack on his Democrat opponents — only a rambling reprise of all his old themes, including “at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies”, according to US fact-checkers. Even the staunchly Republican Wall Street Journal declared “about one-third of Mr Trump’s remarks fell into three categories: false, obtuse or lunatic”. Its headline proclaimed: “Trump is looking like a loser again”.
What is most striking about Donald Trump in recent days is how increasingly bizarre his meanderings have become. He accuses Ms Harris of “turning black” after years of saying that she was Indian. Migrants from Mexico are coming from prisons and insane asylums. People are dying because they can’t afford bacon. Whales are being killed by windmills. Trump lies that he won all 50 states in 2020. He claims that he defeated Barack Obama (who wasn’t running) in 2016. He suggests that the nation’s top general deserves to be executed. And this is not to mention his repeated campaign riffs about Hannibal Lecter. Small wonder that the Democrats have started calling him “weird”.
What all this shows is that Mr Trump feels that this election slipping away from him, former Trump aides say. These are not winning campaign messages. He should be talking about immigration and the economy. Instead, he is spiralling down into conspiracy theories, such as claiming that the crowds at Kamala Harris’s rallies have been photoshopped on, using AI — claims that can be easily disproved.
Mr Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, goes further, saying that his former boss doesn’t lie. That would suggest conscious intent. Rather, he “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false. . . The truth is whatever he wants it to be.”
Some opponents have suggested that Mr Trump is showing growing signs of dementia. But it could be more sinister.
Mr Trump’s allies have spent the past few years quietly building a network of activists to challenge the result if he loses again. As many as 70 pro-Trump conspiracy theorists are now election officials in key battleground counties, including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada. No wonder President Biden says that he is not confident of the peaceful transfer of power if Mr Trump loses again.
Whatever the cause of Mr Trump’s departures from reality, we should all be worried.