Postcards from America
As election day looms, Donald Trump’s behaviour has become more erratic
Is Donald okay?
Americans have been asking that question since the moment Donald Trump glided down his gilded escalator in 2015 talking about Mexican rapists and murderers.
But with less than two weeks left until election day and the race deadlocked, the issue has taken on new urgency.
Trump, 78, has been getting more and more erratic and unfocused in recent weeks. His rallies have become an endless loop of loopy.
This week in the key state of Pennsylvania, Trump talked for 12 minutes about golf legend Arnold Palmer and the size of his penis.
“This is a guy that was all man,” said Trump, speaking in Palmer’s hometown of Latrobe. “When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, told reporters it was an odd way of honouring her father, who died in 2016. “I don’t know what is going through his head… to talk about my dad’s anatomy.”
A few days earlier at another Pennsylvania rally, Trump spent 39 minutes on stage not giving a speech or answering questions, but just awkwardly swaying to music, from ‘Ave Maria’ to Guns N’ Roses.
It was an unusual use of precious campaign time. And it was, as Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, says often, “weird”.
Trump has long said oddball things, including rambles on whether it’s better to be electrocuted or eaten by a shark.
Lately he has called “tariffs” the “most beautiful word in the English language.” He also has darkly threatened to deploy the US military against a vaguely defined “enemy from within”.
More than 200 healthcare professionals who support Harris recently called for Trump to disclose his medical history because his behaviour exhibits “alarming characteristics of declining acuity”. So far Trump has refused.
Will it all make any difference in the race? Trump’s hardcore supporters seem unbothered, saying they admire him for being amusing and shaking up American politics.
But Trump’s mental state could matter in an election that is likely to be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of states.
In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by less than one percentage point in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
When President Biden, 81, showed clear signs of age and decline during a June debate with Trump, it had a swift impact. Biden was pressured to step aside and Democrats rallied around Harris, who turned 60 on Sunday.
Republicans now show no such signs of wobbling about their candidate, who is the oldest major party presidential nominee in history.
He would also be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes his term at 82.
The crowd at his impromptu “Trump: The Musical” show seemed confused and many filed out of the arena. But most stayed and cheered as Trump called out song titles to the campaign aide who controlled the playlist.
At the “Big Arnold” rally, photos showed Trump’s fans, most notably white men in camo and hard hats, laughing hysterically at a good dick joke from the man asking them for the keys to the nuclear arsenal.
A new Washington Post poll found the race dead even at 47 per cent for Trump and Harris among registered voters in the seven most critical battleground states.
Trump has always had strong support among men and is clearly hoping to increase it. More than in any other race in modern history, men and women are supporting different candidates.
The last time a majority of men voted for a Democratic nominee was for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Women consistently support Democrats in greater numbers. But now, the gender divide is widening, especially among younger voters.
In 2020, Biden set a record by winning 57 per cent of the female vote to Trump’s 42 per cent – a 15-point gap.
This year, after the Supreme Court gutted Roe v Wade and abortion rights are a main campaign issue, polls show that Harris is expected to extend that advantage.
In the closing days of the campaign, Trump is ramping up his courtship of the male voters, well aware that if he wins, he will have them to thank. Harris is also increasingly trying to appeal to male voters, appearing on shows and podcasts that are popular among men and even drinking a beer on late-night TV.
On the trail, Harris has been focused on issues and generally speaks for 20 to 30 minutes. Trump has largely ignored his advisers’ pleas to stick to immigration and the economy, which Republicans believe are their strongest arguments. He usually speaks for about an hour and 45 minutes at his rallies, and he often ventures into strange non-sequiturs about windmills and Hannibal Lecter, a fictional serial killer from the film Silence of the Lambs.
In Michigan, he tells audiences that he was once Michigan’s “man of the year,” which never happened. He talks about not needing a teleprompter, while using a teleprompter. He’s getting more profane: over the weekend, he called Harris a “shitty vice president.”
Trump calls his speaking style “the weave,” a deliberate technique to wander through a diverse array of seemingly unconnected subjects and then bring it all together at the end. Harris just calls it “increasingly unstable and unhinged”.
Crazy, or crazy like a fox?
Election day is November 5.
Buckle up.