Charlie Sykes

https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/what-on-earth-did-we-just-see

Joyless Trump

Normally, I�d rather be eaten by fire ants than sit through a Trump press
conference, but on Thursday, I made the poor life choice of listening to
the former president�s Mar-a-Lago performance.

My quick take: What, in the name of all that is holy, rational, and
coherent did we just listen to?

Most media accounts do not come close to capturing the wretched shambolism
of it all, and some reporters scrabbled desperately for nuggets of
coherence in the former president�s rolling gibberish.

But I want to come back to the main point: What in G-d�s name did we just
watch?

For an hour yesterday afternoon, we were subjected to the maunderings of a
mind utterly untethered from logic, facts, and decency. Trump clearly
suffers from a severe and apparently debilitating case of Crowd Envy; and
we got the customary firehose of bullshit. But that�s hardly new, is it?

This Trump, however, was also something else: a rattled, deflated, joyless,
and frightened figure. There were the usual insults, fabrications, and
lies, but this Trump seemed less menacing than simply old and tired � a man
without a single drop of joie d vivre.

This is Trump losing.

Exit take: If this had been Joe Biden, the media would have been on fire
with speculation and about his cognitive decline and mental health. If
Kamala Harris turned in a performance even remotely like this, it would be
regarded as a full-on disaster. But since this is Trump, it�s just another
Thursday.

**
Some of the savviest takes:

Britian�s Independent captured the moment: �Trump holds seemingly
pointless press conference filled with false claims.�

The Wapo�s Karen Tumulty:

�Unhinged� has become a shopworn word in the years since Donald
Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower. But the former president�s
hour-long news conference on Thursday afternoon from his Mar-a-Lago estate
in Florida might have been a new personal best�

[The] former president on Thursday veered from grievance to
grievance like a pinball.

Susan Glasser:

As the press conference approached the one-hour mark, Trump seemed
to suddenly remember what he was supposed to be talking about. �It�s about
policy,� he said.

The rest of his riff I offer here in full:

It�s about policy. It�s not about her. I think she�s incompetent.
Because I�ve watched her. She destroyed California, she destroyed San
Fran�everything she�s touched has turned to bad things. I�m not going to
use foul language. But everything she�s touched has turned bad. She�s
incompetent. The reason she�s not doing what I do and she�s not doing what
she should be doing . . . She won�t even do interviews with friendly people
because she can�t do better than Biden . . . and he was never, twenty-five
years ago, the sharpest or brightest bulb in the ceiling, that I can tell
you, O.K.? . . . But he could do interviews at least . . . But she�s, she
should be doing interviews. She doesn�t want to do interviews. And the
reason she doesn�t is No. 1 her policies are so bad . . . And it�s not
going to change because it�s really ultimately not about her as much as
about her policies. She wants open borders, she wants to defund the police
.. . . she wants to take away your guns. Anybody that thinks they�re not
going to come after your guns�you know, when I was President, I totally
protected the guns. I think it�s very important.

Substantive stuff, right?

MSNBC�s Chris Hayes:

This is the kind of performance from Trump that, if the Republican
party was still a functioning institution, would have a lot of people
panicked and wondering about how to get him to drop out.

Hayes again:

If you think Trump�s brain is scrambled now, just wait until he�s
82 with the nuclear codes.

**
BONUS MUST READ: Experts: Trump speech patterns hint of potential cognitive
decline | STAT

�Trump keeps losing his train of thought. Cognitive experts have theories
about why.�

This shifting from topic to topic, with few connections � a pattern of
speech called tangentiality � is one of several disjointed and occasionally
incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump�s speech in
recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology,
and linguistics.

Back in 2017, Trump�s first year in the White House, a STAT analysis
showed Trump�s speaking style had deteriorated since the 1980s. Seven years
on, now that Trump has the GOP presidential nomination, STAT has repeated
the analysis. The experts noted a further reduction in Trump�s linguistic
complexity and, while none said they could give a diagnosis without an
examination, some said certain shifts in his speaking style are potential
indications of cognitive decline.

https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/what-on-earth-did-we-just-see