In 1979, Alan Alda wrote and starred in a film called The Seduction of Joe Tynan. It was the story of a young, dynamic senator with a name that seemed rather close to that of a fellow who had been elected a US senator at the age of 29 in Delaware seven years earlier. Idealistic Joe Tynan, who harbors presidential ambitions, finds himself in a pickle when the much older and more powerful Sen. Birney (Melvyn Douglas) pressures him to support a Supreme Court nominee with a racist past. As Tynan, who is married, investigates the jurist’s history, he has an affair with a labor attorney (Meryl Streep!) who has the goods on the nominee. I don’t recall much of the movie, but I have a strong recollection of one powerful and painful scene: The elderly Birney, who has been covering up signs of dementia, is chairing an important committee hearing, and he unintentionally starts speaking French, revealing his cognitive decline.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, while many of us were holding our breath regarding President Joe Biden, I wondered if an event like that would strike the politician who once seemed the model for Alda’s character. Biden’s debate with Donald Trump was not quite this. But it did show that he was not up to the task of mano-a-mano combat with the demagogue who tried to destroy American democracy. And the Harris substitution spared Biden, whose presidency has been loaded with significant accomplishments, further embarrassment. But, as I worried about that movie scene becoming a real-life occurrence, I might have been envisioning the wrong candidate. The odds-on favorite now for a public breakdown is Trump.

I must admit I’ve been surprised by how poorly Trump has reacted to the Harris hand-off. He has been caught flat-footed. Let’s stipulate that Trump, no stable genius, has in the past nine years frequently demonstrated keen political instincts. He has a good sense of how to attack an opponent. Typically, it’s been with ridicule, name-calling, lies, and other middle-school bullying tactics, but give him his due: He’s been effective. That’s how he won the GOP nomination and the presidency in 2016. And though he lost to Biden in 2020, his assaults on the president this past year—calling him old, weak, crooked, the worst president, whatever—helped him gain the lead in the race.

Ever since Harris became the nominee, Trump’s special sauce has not been so special. Losing the target he counted on, he has flailed. At first, he made fun of her laugh. That went nowhere. Then he claimed she wasn’t really Black. Maybe MAGA-ites thought that was clever. No one else did. Mispronouncing her name was a favorite tactic, and he tried calling her “Kamabla.” That didn’t catch on. He slammed her as low-IQ and deployed his tried-and-true insult to women: “nasty.” Next he claimed she was using AI to fake photos of the huge crowds she was drawing. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg says this was a strategic move on the part of Trump to rev up his base to expect Democratic cheating on Election Day. I’m not so sure there was such a coherent strategy. But if any non-MAGA voter paid attention to this charge, he or she might well have concluded Trump was unhinged. (The crowds were witnessed by many, including journalists and attendees.)

On Thursday, Trump held another rant-a-thon for the media, this time at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He laid out a bunch of new attack lines on Harris. I’m not weird, you are, he said to her. He proclaimed that he calls her “Kamala” because no one knows her last name. Huh? "She's unbelievable in terms of her badness to some of our allies, some of our great allies,” he said. “You know who I’m talking about.” Actually, we don’t. And he resorted to the same-old/same-old: She’s a socialist, she’s a commie: “She’s a radical California liberal who…broke the world.” He did not explain that.

Folks of a certain age will remember what used to be called summer reruns. In the pre-internet era, the three broadcast television networks would replay shows that first aired in the fall, winter, and spring. With nowhere to turn for original content, this was a downer for viewers. Haven’t we already seen this stuff? Trump has become a summer rerun. He’s rehashing all the old lines, and they’re not sticking. Maybe they play okay for his diehard supporters. But he needs non-MAGA voters to win. Yet—and here’s another metaphor—he’s acting like a boxer past his prime, just swinging wildly at Harris and not landing the punches. And when he held his boring chat with Elon Musk on Monday night, it seemed he was slurring his words. Without Biden as a comparison, Trump is the old guy in the race who’s far past his sell-by date.

Political reporters have noted that Trump has had a tough time shifting his focus from Biden to the new gal. That seems obvious. And the reason? Maybe it's simply that he’s too old. As they age, some people become less flexible in their thought processes. They need to stick to the familiar and have difficulty dealing with change. Trump’s inability to readjust could be the result of a cognitive lapse. In his social media posts, he keeps returning to Biden, even suggesting that he (Trump) was cheated by the Democrats out of the contest against Biden that he had counted on. He calls the D’s switcheroo “election interference.” It’s as if someone altered the usual time of his breakfast and he can’t handle it.

There’s also this: Trump’s at-rest manner is nastiness. That worked when he went up against the GOPers of 2016 and Hillary Clinton. My hunch is that generally a lot of people don’t like to see a powerful old man, much less one found liable for sexual assault, be mean and nasty to a woman. Clinton, though, was already widely disliked. (Yes, I know she won the popular vote.) Thus, Trump’s misogynistic stance toward her might not have offended as many voters as an ungracious assault on another woman would have. Outside the confines of MAGA World, Harris might not be regarded as a figure warranting derision and hatred. Trump’s nastiness toward her may not be as effective as it was against Clinton.

On Thursday, Trump revamped the leadership of his campaign, bringing aboard Corey Lewandowski, whom he had fired from his 2016 campaign after Lewandowski assaulted a reporter. (In a separate event, a Trump donor later said she had been groped by Lewandowski.) Bringing back an old cast member, Trump is trying to find that 2016 magic.

But remember all the drivel that unlike his past efforts, his 2024 campaign was going to be managed by professionals? The estimable Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita would create a well-organized juggernaut. None of that stuff matters. Trump is the Trump campaign. Trump is the message and the messenger, in the way that grease was the word. And Trump is not aging well. All the questions he recently raised about an elderly candidate who was not up to speed now apply to him. He may not have the juice—or the neurons—to meet the moment. His gig has gotten old; his campaign has become a stale rerun.

Still, the race remains tight, and Trump could win. He’s cagey. He’ll throw plenty of crap at the wall and see what sticks. But to prevail, he will now have to be the candidate who dodges questions and concerns about his abilities and competence. At the Bedminster press conference, Trump was asked about Nikki Haley’s advice that he “quit whining” about Harris. Trump replied, “I have to do it my way.” He’s stuck in his ways, and he may not have the capacity to see that.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally may have receded from the public conversation, but paranoid right-wingers are not done using it to spin up conspiracy theories that attribute this horrific event to their political enemies. They can’t, however, tell us who specifically was behind this foul deed (other than the shooter). PJ Media, a right-wing site, ran a story this week blaming the amorphous Deep State with this headline: “The Deep State Still Wants to Kill Trump Before the Election.” (Sometime after the article was posted the headline was changed to “The Deep State Is Still Targeting Trump Ahead of the Election.”) PJ Media contributor Stephen Kruiser wrote:

We have had little in the way of answers explaining how a lunatic kid was able to saunter up onto a rooftop and attempt to murder the former president of the United States of America. True, the rarest of rare things did follow the assassination attempt—a bureaucrat was forced to resign—but that was more of a smoke screen than anything else.

The story we're being told is that the Secret Service was plagued by a bout of incompetence after an extraordinary, lengthy run of doing its job exceedingly well.

As far as I am concerned, that doesn't pass the smell test.

The Executive Branch of the United States government under Joe Biden has been very focused on destroying Donald Trump. Since 2020, we live in a world of tinfoil hats, so it's not ridiculous to wonder if one of its agencies might have deliberately shirked its duties to put Trump in peril. In fact, that's easier for me to believe than the idea that one of the few government agencies that does its job well suddenly turned into a bunch of incompetent buffoons.

He ended on a dark note: “The Democrats fear Trump's return to the presidency more than they fear anything else. In the last few years, we've seen them go to extremes to achieve their political goals. It's not a stretch to say that there are more extreme extremes for them to explore between now and November.” In other words, though there is no actual evidence of any assassination plot, we can expect more Democratic-inspired assassination efforts against Trump!

Over at another conservative site, American Thinker, in a piece titled “Of course they tried to kill Trump,” John Conlin, identified as “an expert in organizational design and change,” put it this way:

Now who “they” are is yet to be answered, but it is clear this was a perfect setup—from their perspective—but the dang shooter missed! This seems to be the only flaw in their plan. Then blame it on incompetence and poor communication—but the deal is done, he’s dead. Problem solved.

And of course, the shooter was put down immediately—right after he fired eight rounds… Call me a cynic but if he wasn’t dead before, he would have been before anyone else could reach him. No loose ends, you know….

This setup is obvious to anyone who has the courage to look. It is also doubtful the perpetrators of this crime will just walk away after this attempt. They will not allow Trump to become President again and they clearly don’t seem to care how obvious they are in their attempts—as long as who “they” are remains unknown.

Conlin can’t even say who cooked up this supposed plot to kill Trump, but he’s damn sure it’s real. Without evidence, these sites are demonizing Democrats and unnamed government officials as murderers and encouraging their readers to think and fear the worst. It’s irresponsible—and just right for the MAGA audience.

Sometimes a retweet is enough to win a nomination for our DCotW contest. Thus, JD Vance was in contention again this week. He reposted a tweet from onetime Trump White House speech writer Darren Beattie, who praised Dear Leader for his performance during Trump’s glitch-heavy interview with Elon Musk. “Trump doing very well,” Beattie observed.

The problem: Beattie was pink slipped at the White House for hobnobbing with white nationalists. Nothing unusual here, right? Just the GOP vice presidential nominee amplifying someone who was too connected to racists for even the Trump gang.

Charlie Kirk appears far too often in this feature. But the judges couldn’t ignore this statement:

Birth control really screws up female brain...It creates very angry and bitter young ladies...That bitterness than manifests into a political party that is the Bitter Party. The Democrat Party is all about, “Bring us your bitterness, we’ll give you free stuff.”

After hearing Kirk say this, Vance, no doubt, wanted to sign him up as a senior adviser.

Richard Burr, the former GOP senator from North Carolina, scored points with reasonable people and enraged MAGA when he became one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump after his second impeachment. That was then. Now he says he will be voting for Trump in November. And this week he offered a bizarre explanation. “My [impeachment] vote on the president,” Burr said, “wasn’t on anything the House [impeachment team] presented… It was on the fact that I thought that the president leaving the vice president, without surging to Capitol Hill a protective detail, to take a vice president with a nuclear football, and to make him secure was a breach of office.”

Oh, so Burr only voted to convict the Big Liar who incited an attack on the Capitol because Trump didn’t provide adequate protection to Vice President Mike Pence?

“Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it,” Burr added. “I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And l like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.”

So it was a bad choice that warranted conviction—which would have barred Trump from again seeking the White House—but not one that was bad enough to prevent Burr from voting for Trump. The judges got headaches trying to figure out this logic.

Ed Martin, the president of the right-wing outfit Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, was also moved while listening to Trump and Musk and felt compelled to tweet: “The most extraordinary, refreshing thing about #ElonXTrump is we are hearing two men who care about truth. And care about America. It's inspiring, and informative.”

Here’s another acute case of Dear Leader-itis. As CNN noted, Trump uttered numerous false statements during this chat, including comments on crime, inflation, tax cuts, and climate change that were lies. Does anyone really believe these two guys care about the truth?

In the face of all this fierce competition, a newcomer walked away with the trophy. Meet Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, who has been working with Project 2025. My pal and former colleague Andy Kroll, who now works at ProPublica, helped uncover training videos produced as part of this right-wing operation that has designed an extremist agenda and game plan for a second Trump administration. One of those videos features Kozma spouting about the evils of climate change:

Climate change allegedly is everywhere. If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere. And according to our intelligence community, the number-one threat facing our country today—drumroll—is climate change. Not Russia Not China Not AI. Climate change. This is how the federal government is all in on this issue. And climate change activists wield a lot of power. This is an issue to pay attention to, as it has infiltrated every part of the federal government. Now when I think of climate change, I immediately think of population control, don’t you? I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the “impact” on the environment… This is part of their ultimate goal: to control people.”

It’s hard to be more dumbass, ill-informed, and paranoid than this. Kozma’s comment shows just how dangerous and bonkers Project 2025 is. For that, she takes the cake.

The recent issue on the psychological underpinnings of the new and revised 2024 election prompted some professionals to write in.

Pamela Blair emailed:

When you speak about elections being about people’s psychological feelings about candidates, one of the things that makes people feel drawn to a candidate is that they feel seen. Trump did this, although beyond seeing their problems (something Hillary denied), he did nothing for them. I think that Harris and Walz must not be just happy warriors, but also must see people—see why they don’t think the economy is as good as it is. For them, it isn’t. High prices for food, especially, hurts, and people feel this. 

They have to see them, and then explain how the problems didn’t begin overnight, how they want to help fix the problems, and (lastly) point to the actual perpetrators of the problem, the capitalists who put profit over people. But first, they have to acknowledge people’s anger. As a psychologist, I know the foremost rule in working with a client is, “start where the client is.” Revise that to “start where the voter is.”

Greg Watson observed:

Since you referenced "psychological factors,” after Donald Trump’s most recent Mar-a-Lago press conference, it seems he has transitioned from someone who just said bullshit without concern if it was true or not, to actually having delusions of grandeur. If a client presented in my office making the kind of grandiose statements he was making, I would include delusional thinking in my assessment, given that the statements have no basis in reality and appear to be believed by the client. 

This deterioration should be concerning to everyone. To have a person who now appears to be delusional serving as president presents unimaginable risks. I don't understand why this isn't being talked about. Just because he has always spouted crazy shit doesn't take away the risk posed by his further psychological deterioration. 

See the lead item above. But I am not certain that delusions of grandeur and his other fantastical lies are new developments for Trump.

Harry Freiberg wrote:

Two thoughts:

Trumpists have been getting screwed since Nixon. The Republicans and their paymasters have been clever enough to persuade Trumpists that it is the “others” who are doing the screwing, not their elected oligarchy-owned Republican representatives at all levels.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (1960), as quoted by Bill Moyers, November 13, 1988, the Washington Post.

Charlotte Dunham shared this:

The most chilling thing you said was your reference to Trump calling his opponents "bugs." That's exactly the language they used in Rwanda to get people to turn on their neighbors and cut them down with machetes. The repeated messages that the "cockroaches" had to be destroyed were broadcast over the radio and led to one of the worse humanitarian disasters of our age. I visited Rwanda about 10 years ago, and the trauma from that period was still palpable. I'm not saying this will happen here, but the message is clear from Trump. The enthusiasm over the Harris/Walz ticket is giving me hope.

Mary Shahbazian was upset with me for going too soft on the media when I critiqued press coverage of Trump:

Really? The media does not “know how” to deal with the threat of Trump? It’s a media “inability”? They “haven’t quite figured out” how to not treat the race like a horse race? Give me a break. Talk about softballing. We do not have a free press in America; we have a bought and paid for MSM that supports what their plutocrat owners tell them to support. The talking head personalities are greedy, shallow, and irrationally arrogant. The current MSM cares of nothing but profit, and Trump is good for business. Luckily with places like Substack and some decent local outlets for current events, one doesn’t have to rely on MSM. But many people don’t have the time to mine their own analysis and expert opinions. The media is willfully committing malfeasance. 

No doubt, some media corporate honchos believe Trump is good for business. But I still say that many of the problems in the media coverage of Trump come from reporters sticking to hidebound conventions and not realizing both-sidesism or horse-race coverage is insufficient for reporting on the threat to democracy and truth posed by Trump.

Heidi Rosvold-Brenholtz was more encouraging:

Thank you for the concise and streamlined talking points I need when engaging in ridiculous conversations about Trump’s candidacy with people who support him.

Glad to be of service.

Several readers cited Lawrence O’Donnell’s lashing of reporters who covered Trump’s recent press conference at Mar-a-Lago. It’s worth a watch:

“You do know the rule that you can’t take a photograph of someone right after they’ve gotten a haircut, right?”
“No, Moxie, I don’t.”
“It’s called The Haircut Rule.”
“I just googled ‘The Haircut Rule,’ and I found nothing.”
“Your Google must be broken.”