As elections near, Trump�s incoherence seems to be getting worse

Trump�s public appearances tend to follow a pattern. The former president
will have a message he intends to deliver, and he�ll have a teleprompter to
guide his rhetorical path, but the Republican will invariably ramble,
sharing weird and random thoughts about all sorts of things.

hear the GOP candidate tell it, his stream-of-consciousness nonsense only
appears to be incoherent.

�You know, I do the weave,� Trump boasted last week. �You know what the
weave is? I�ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come
back brilliantly together, and it�s like, friends of mine that are, like,
English professors, they say, �It�s the most brilliant thing I�ve ever
seen.��

For one thing, the idea that the former president hangs out with �like,
English professors� is hilarious. For another, there�s no hidden genius in
Trump�s rambling. He seems to enjoy sharing bizarre ideas, theories, and
the details of conversations that occurred only in his mind. There�s
nothing �brilliant� about it.

Elaine Godfrey wrote for The Atlantic this week about one of the GOP
candidate�s latest gems.

During a conversation onstage at a Moms for Liberty event last week,
Donald Trump said something that made even me � a seasoned visitor to
Trump�s theme park of hyperbole � look around in confusion at the people
around me in the audience. Said Trump: �The transgender thing is
incredible. Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few
days later with an operation. The school decides what�s going to happen
with your child.�

Not to put too fine a point on this, but Trump�s claim was plainly
delusional. The is no epidemic of school-based gender-related surgeries.

But while the rhetoric was certainly ridiculous, it wasn�t altogether
surprising.

Trump�s bizarre comments about �the transgender thing� came on the heels of
the former president blaming wind power with people eating less bacon.

You take a look at bacon and some of these products,� he told a Wisconsin
audience last week. �Some people don�t eat bacon anymore. And we are going
to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down � you know, this was
caused by their horrible energy � wind, they want wind all over the place.
But when it doesn�t blow, we have a little problem.�

As my MSNBC colleague Ja�han Jones responded, �I don�t know how you can
even fact-check a tangent like that.�

This rhetoric followed Trump speaking � more than once � about his fear of
sharks, which apparently had something to do with electric boat batteries.
It led author Steven King to note, �This is like listening to your senile
uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink.�

The larger question is whether Trump is actually getting worse.

My MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem presented a persuasive answer this week:
�Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for
so long that it can be easily to forget how far he is from fulfilling the
basic requirement of a politician to speak clearly. Trump�s speeches seem
to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day.�

The New York Times� Jamelle Bouie made a related case, arguing that the
Republican presidential hopeful is unable �not just to speak truthfully
about a topic, but speak coherently about any topic. ... Trump hasn�t just
deteriorated, he�s clearly cognitively impaired, and it is bizarre to me
that this isn�t just a major story.�

For much of the year, there was a spirited public conversation, fueled by
intense media interest, about whether President Joe Biden was too old and
addled to do the job. Perhaps it�s time to renew that conversation, turning
attention to the incumbent�s immediate predecessor and would-be successor?

As MSNBC�s Chris Hayes summarized last week, �It is a little weird that
�age concerns� have disappeared as a constant focus of campaign reporting
and discussion even though the GOP nominee would be the oldest man ever
sworn in to the office and is very obviously sharply declining before our
eyes.�

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/as-elections-near-trump-s-
incoherence-seems-to-be-getting-worse/ar-AA1pZKV6