Here’s my question: Is there anybody in the Republican Party with the presence of mind and the political courage to imitate the Democrats? Persuading Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race was difficult and painful for all concerned. Particularly for Biden himself.
Yet Biden’s age-related infirmities were nothing compared to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s. Prone to stumbling over words and intermittently forgetful, Biden appeared unlikely to carry the burdens of the presidency for another term. Yet when confronted with political reality, he acted appropriately. History will record it as among his finest hours.
Trump, on the other hand, has gone completely around the bend. Some apparent combination of senile dementia and mental illness has rendered him totally unfit for public office. To put it bluntly, the man has lost his marbles. He can no longer follow the plot or distinguish fantasy from reality. Maybe surviving an assassination attempt affected him, but it appears that the prospect of losing an election to a Black woman is more than his diseased ego can bear.
What other explanation could there be for the candidate’s crackpot fixation with the size of crowds drawn to Kamala Harris’ campaign rallies?
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote in one of his mad Truth Social postings. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Supposedly, a maintenance worker at a Michigan airport tipped off Trump to a “fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.
“She’s a CHEATER,” he continued.
By this time, just about everybody with a working TV has seen footage of the Harris campaign’s Detroit arrival, which drew an estimated 15,000 voters to the airport on short notice. No fake photos necessary. The rally was covered live on C-Span, for heaven’s sake.
The Republican nominee went on to boast about the vast throngs that supposedly attend his public appearances. Why, the crowd that gathered outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, greatly outnumbered even those that heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech all the way back in 1963!
Another ridiculous invention. In reality, upward of a quarter-million people gathered on the Washington Mall to hear Dr. King speak during the Kennedy administration. That’s at least five times as many as stood outside the White House to hear Trump whine about losing the 2020 election.
You wouldn’t think the former president would want to remind people about Jan. 6, except that he now claims that shameful event caused no fatalities. History records that four people died after the mob that Trump urged to “fight like hell” stormed the Capitol.
Indeed, Trump’s entire campaign has become a bizarre spectacle challenging all but the most deluded members of the MAGA political cult to deal with the question comedian Richard Pryor once memorably asked, “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”
But what really took the prize during Trump’s near-hallucinatory hour-long “press conference” last weekend was a preposterous tale involving an imaginary helicopter ride that was calculated to shame Harris for having once dated former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
Asked by a helpful reporter if Harris’ political career had been helped along by dating Brown — translation: Did your opponent sleep her way to the top? — Trump responded with a cock-and-bull story about an apocryphal helicopter crash that everybody supposedly involved says never happened.
“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump answered. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought, maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing. And Willie, he was a little concerned. So I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her … But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala … [M]aybe he’s changed his tune, but he was not a fan of hers very much at that point.”
Not a syllable of this is true. Brown insists he was never in a helicopter with Trump and never bad-mouthed Harris to him. Trump himself was involved in a hairy helicopter incident in New Jersey in 1990. Harris was then in her mid-20s, a fledgling prosecutor who hadn’t yet dated Brown. A different Black California politician, Los Angeles city councilman Nate Holden, was on board. Now 95, Holden figures Trump couldn’t tell him and Brown apart.
Mental health professionals call this kind of thing “confabulation” — basically a blending of a real memory with a fantasy. It’s common among patients slipping into dementia.
But then Trump’s always been a world-class liar.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”
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