A Searing Reminder That Trump Is Unwell
His bizarre diatribe at the RNC shows why the pro-democracy coalition is so worried about beating him.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Donald Trump’s bizarre diatribe at the Republican National Convention shows why the prodemocracy coalition is so worried about beating the GOP nominee—even if it means that Joe Biden must step down.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
- It’s official: The Supreme Court ignores its own precedent.
- What the Microsoft outage reveals
- “Hillbilly” women will get no help from J. D. Vance.
Not Comparable
It’s been quite a year in politics, what with President Biden facing calls to drop out of the race and Trump having a meltdown in public after an assassination attempt and …
I’m sorry, did I say a year? I meant a week.
So much has happened, and political events have become so freakish, that we can all be forgiven for losing our bearings a bit. For the past few days, I’ve felt like Homer Simpson after he accidentally turned a toaster into a time machine and came back to find that Ned Flanders was the unchallenged dictator of the world.
But in the midst of all this, two things remain clear:
- Joe Biden is showing significant signs of frailty and faces real opposition within his party to continuing his campaign.
- Donald Trump is emotionally unwell.
These are not comparable problems.
Nor did Biden and Trump have equally bad weeks. Biden is facing a revolt in his own party and is now recovering from COVID. Trump was nearly killed by a young loner.
Biden claims to still be in the race, an answer many elected Democrats have refused to accept. My colleague Russell Berman wrote yesterday afternoon that Senator Peter Welch of Vermont believes that the Biden campaign may be at an end; more telling is that Russell described Welch as the only member of the upper chamber making that argument, but from the time that Russell wrote that article to this afternoon, three more sitting Democratic U.S. senators—Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jon Tester of Montana, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico—called for Biden to step down.
The case for Biden leaving the race is evident to anyone who’s watched him over the past month. He seems to be no better in his public outings than he was during the debate, and has sometimes seemed worse. As I’ve said here, I don’t think that means he can’t run the country for the remainder of his term, but Trump is going to be fired up and on the road, and I doubt that Biden can match that level of engagement, which could be decisive in a race that will be won on slim margins in a handful of states. I suspect that the people voting to save democracy would vote for Biden if he were governing from a cryostatic tube, but the Democrats calling on him to wrap it up have perfectly valid fears that he could lose and take the down-ballot races with him.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Convention was a searing reminder that Trump is a vengeful autocrat with obvious mental deficits who has surrounded himself with a crew of vicious goons.
I approached Trump’s speech with genuine curiosity. I was for most of my life a working political scientist, and I have written speeches for politicians; I think I know a good one when I see one. So I watched last night to see if Trump, tamed by a brush with death, would strike a new tone or, at the very least, try to make peace with one of his most hated enemies: the teleprompter.
No chance. To be fair, some people who watched the speech thought that the first 10 minutes or so, in which Trump recounted being injured, were good, even thoughtful. I thought they were terrible; although Trump and his people have emphasized Trump’s defiance in the moment after he was hurt, his blow-by-blow account of the incident came across to me as creepy and solipsistic rather than brave.
Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, the previous president injured in an attempt on his life. Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post reminded us today that Reagan appeared before Congress a month after he was nearly killed. (His injuries were severe and life-threatening.) Reagan was on the Hill to talk about the economy, but he started by thanking the country for its prayers and good wishes, noting a cute letter he got from a child while he was in the hospital, and paying tribute to the people injured alongside him. This digression took all of four paragraphs, a matter of a few minutes. “Now, let’s talk about getting spending and inflation under control and cutting your tax rates,” he then said.
Trump, however, droned on about how much the human ear can bleed, while the screens behind him showed huge pictures of blood on his face. He then went over to the equipment owned by Corey Comperatore, the volunteer firefighter killed in the attack, and kissed the helmet. Some in the crowd may have loved it, but I prefer a bit more stoicism in national leaders; I’ve always thought that Trump’s penchant for hugging and kissing flags was weird, and planting a kiss on the headgear of a dead man was even weirder.
And then things really went off the rails. If you didn’t sit through it, I can’t blame you; it was the longest presidential-nomination-acceptance speech on record. Basking in the friendliest audience he will ever find on this planet, Trump couldn’t help himself. He was supposed to be like a band at a concert doing a tight set, playing some favorites for the loyal fans, introducing a little new material, and gaining a wider audience. Instead, he blew the chance and ran overtime as he noodled, improvised, and even mangled some of his classics.
The speech wasn’t written that way, of course, but Trump can’t stick to a script. You can always tell when Trump is trying to read the teleprompter: His shoulders tense up, he cocks his head and squints, and he rushes through words he has clearly never seen before. It doesn’t help that Trump’s writers stuff his speeches with baroque constructions that are supposed to be soaring and majestic but that always end up sounding more like dollar-store Churchill imitations. Trump struggles with these complex sentences, and then he abandons them—and that is when the real Trump comes out, in all his whiny and aggrieved glory.
I do not have the space (or the endurance) to relive those moments with you, but they were the ramblings of a man who has serious psychological problems. All of it was on display last night: rage, paranoia, pettiness, desolating selfishness.
I’m always sorry to leave readers with these sorts of observations just before a weekend, but much of the media response to Biden’s troubles and Trump’s madness has been mired in equivalences that obscure what’s happening to both men, and what’s at stake for the nation. (As I was writing this, for example, a Washington Post newsletter arrived in my inbox and told me that the GOP had just wrapped up “an energized, focused convention.” That’s an interesting description of a Republican gathering that featured a sex worker, Hulk Hogan, and a spaced-out Trump.)
Yes, Biden is old, and he’s having trouble communicating. The people expressing serious concerns about him have good reason to worry about both his health and his ability to defeat Trump. He might be out of the race by next week. But Trump is mentally and emotionally unwell. He and his valet, J. D. Vance, are not going anywhere. The real tragedy is that, in a serious country, Biden might step down without incident, and a normal race would continue, because decent people would have banished Trump from the public square long ago.
Related:
Today’s News
- A software update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a digital outage that disrupted airlines, health care, shipping, and many other services on Friday.
- A federal appeals court temporarily blocked a Biden-administration student-loan-repayment plan, leading the Department of Education to pause payments for 8 million borrowers.
- Depending on his recovery from COVID-19, Biden expects to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter is in Washington next week to address a joint session of Congress.
Dispatches
- The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo explores the books that keep readers awake at night.
- Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres asks: What happens when a bot gets too good at its job?
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
How I Faked My Way to Rock StardomBy J. R. Patterson
Before John Fogerty’s life became mine, there was cold. In November 2012, I was 22 and had left the family farm in Manitoba to find work in the oil fields of Alberta. I arrived during a bust and, because work was not immediate, spent the days driving my Ford F-150 around the country surrounding Calgary, listening to AM radio and my small collection of CDs—a few Rolling Stones albums, some outlaw-country records, and the complete discography of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The Ford was what they call a SuperCab, with a rear backward-opening half door and a narrow bench for a back seat. At night, lacking the money for a hotel, I would find a quiet place to park, crawl into the back seat, and stretch out on the bench, my clothes wrapped around my boots for a pillow. I kept my guitars—an acoustic Martin and an electric Epiphone Les Paul—beside me to warm them, lest they crack in the cold. The nights weren’t kind to me either, and I often woke up shivering, the world outside covered with frost or snow. To allay myself, I’d run the engine for a while and put on Creedence.
More From The Atlantic
- The Biden campaign just can’t stop meme-ing.
- The fakest populism you ever saw
- Whoops! The internet broke.
Culture Break
Watch. Twisters, in theaters, squeezes a lot of juice out of the weather-driven disaster flick.
Read. In Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, the promise of exclusivity is a facade.
P.S.
Some of you may have noticed that I don’t particularly admire Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio. (Vance has noticed it too.) I wrote about his RNC speech here. I remain appalled at Vance’s casual betrayal of the people he claims to care about, the poor and working-class whites he grew up with in Ohio.
Perhaps I feel this more keenly because I grew up in a working-class town in Massachusetts, and I think working people deserve a better spokesperson than an opportunistic plutocrat like Vance. You may find it striking to think of New England as a depressed area; people who are not from the region probably think of it as a lovely expanse of college greens and church steeples and foliage. And it is—but much of New England was once home to mills and factories that produced shoes, textiles, and even military swords. (The bronze doors of the U.S. Capitol’s House wing were cast in 1903 in my hometown of Chicopee.) By the late 1970s, many of those workplaces, abandoned as industries moved out of the Northeast and sometimes out of the United States, were rotting hulks.
If you’d like to read a memoir that shows what it was like to grow up in Massachusetts in those days, I’d suggest Townie: A Memoir, by Andre Dubus III, who is near my age and grew up in a mill town much like mine. It’s not a pretty read, but it is evocative—so much so that some passages made me wince. I can affirm that it captures the reality of growing up in a part of America, far from Vance’s hometown, that was also plagued by dysfunction and decline.
— Tom
Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.