Alan Zendell, October 20, 2024

As if this election season couldn’t get any stranger, the center point of the presidential campaign has turned to McDonald’s. I understand why people were concerned when Tim Walz appeared to imply that he had carried a weapon in a combat zone, but I’m still scratching my head over why Donald Trump seems obsessed with whether Kamala Harris really worked at McDonald’s in 1983 while she was a college student.

Accusing her of lying and demanding that she produce evidence that she once made fries at McDonald’s is truly bizarre. He’s treating this nonsense the same way he carried on about whether Barack Obama was an American citizen. Anyone else who said such things would be ridiculed. Trump is being ridiculed, but he doesn’t care. Is that part of his ongoing crazy act or is he really losing it?

It’s a complicated question. Trump has always enjoyed portraying himself as eccentric and willing to say things others wouldn’t, always treading the fine line between good taste and outrageous lies and name-calling. It’s central to his brand. Is he doing it because he thinks his base loves it or because he understands how effective it is in keeping the chaos pot boiling? Or are his critics right? Everyone not already planning to vote for Trump finds new reasons every day to claim he’s unhinged, and his behavior seems to feed those criticisms.

If that were all there was, I’d be on the fence about whether Trump is really losing it, but there’s much more to this pattern. Why would someone attend an iconic Catholic event hosted by the Archbishop of New York, tell the audience that Kamala Harris was born stupid and suggest that her husband is likely to hit on white house pages if she’s elected? Why would this man who treats the English language like his own polluted playground, while struggling to read from his notes, suggest that Harris is incapable of “stringing two coherent sentences together?” If anything is clear to voters about Harris, it’s that she is an accomplished orator and debater.

Why would anyone, with seventeen days remaining before the election spend time at a rally telling the crowd how impressive (he thinks) Arnold Palmer’s penis was? We might argue about whether he’s becoming more unstable every day or that’s just part of his weird act. But when we consider that in the context of hundreds of Republicans, including the most influential members of his own cabinet and his Vice President telling us that he is unfit to serve, we really have to wonder. Could all those impressive people who worked closely with or for Trump and all give us the same message be wrong or part of some mythical deep state conspiracy?

Ever since Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump has steadily turned up the volume on his weird behavior. We might attribute that to stress in the final days leading up to an election. But there are literally thousands of people running for office. Except for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, do you hear any serious candidate spout the crazy things that come out of Trump’s mouth?

There’s a much better, defensible reason for Trump sounding more irrational and desperate every day. His likely fate if he loses the election would unhinge anyone, and for someone like Trump who can never be wrong and who suffers from a serious psychiatric disorder, anything the rest of us might do in his situation is greatly exaggerated. Intentional or not, his words and actions are those of someone who has no filters or guardrails. Any discerning observer can see that much of his behavior is unintentional – he’s simply out of control. I can’t imagine a quality that would terrify me more in a president.

When you have to make a critical decision, would you let unbridled emotion overwhelm your ability to think rationally? Thousands of people are being killed in two serious wars right now. In one case, Trump’s response is influenced by his need to think Valdimir Putin respects him, while most of us see that Putin manipulates Trump the way a pedophile uses candy. In the other, Trump’s need to undermine the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war in the Middle East and feel loved by Benjamin Netanyahu take precedence over the future of hundreds of millions of people in the region.

Donald Trump knows that if he loses the election, his legacy will be destroyed. His trials will move forward, and he will almost certainly be convicted of very serious felonies that make his fraud convictions in the Stormy Daniels case look a friendly disagreement. The only way he will avoid spending time in prison is if sympathetic judges consider his mental health and decide that locking him up isn’t worth the problems it would cause.

Does Trump’s behavior make more sense now?