Trump's Worse Now

I checked in -- he's definitely gotten worse

Trump goes off the rails, tumbles into a canyon, and bursts into flames, killing 80, at a speech in Iowa. (screencap from a video on C-SPAN)

When Trump left office, I stopped thinking about him almost entirely. I don’t read his tweets, I don’t click on articles about his latest capers — I honestly think that liberals who follow Trump more than is absolutely necessary have a disorder, like people who can’t stop eating couches. Wasn’t freedom from Trump one of the main reasons to vote for Biden? Tracking Trump’s shenanigans when he’s no longer president seems like mowing the lawn of a house you sold three years ago.

Because the Republican Iowa Caucus is on Monday — on Martin Luther King Day, as Dr. King surely would have wanted — I’ve checked back in on Trump. And folks: He’s worse. Mentally worse, and more nakedly authoritarian. He always scored low on both measures, but not for nothin’: IMHO, he’s absolutely worse now. Now, obviously, I’m not a doctor, nor have I administered the Montreal cognitive assessment test to Trump — I’m just some douchebag covered in Oreo crumbs firing off half-considered opinions (which is to say: a blogger). But I’m telling you: Trump is worse now.

Let’s start with the mental side. At his peak, Trump wasn’t exactly the brightest nuclear explosion in the Bikini Atoll. But if you watch video of him from the ‘80s or ‘90s, his speech was faster and more coherent. By the time he ran for president, Trump’s ramblings could only be considered “sentences” in the same way that a tapeworm could be considered “a pet”. Now, Trump pretty much exclusively speaks in loosely-connected ideas in which the last word of one thought triggers the next thought, like Tracy Morgan in this scene from 30 Rock:

Last week, Trump gave some loony, rambling speeches in Iowa that I would call “worse than I remember”. Now: Maybe my memory is the problem here. Maybe Trump is like musical improv in that you can only truly appreciate how awful it is when you’re experiencing it first-hand. But, watch and judge for yourself — has he lost yet another step?

Trump had a few lines that were real doozies. If I was still writing for a late night show, I would pick this clip to lead the broadcast:

It’s not every day that a former president says something that makes you think: “Did he just plagiarize from the Insane Clown Posse?” Though, to be fair to the Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J — and this blog is nothing if not fair to the Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J — his famous “Magnets, how the fuck do they work?” line at least admits that he doesn’t know how magnets work. Trump thinks he knows how magnets work but is wrong. I applaud Violent J’s intellectual humility — the man who has almost 50/50 odds of becoming president could learn something from him.

Here’s another corker:

I’ll grant you: As far as “putting your foot in your mouth about the Civil War” goes, Nikki Haley still had a worse week. But “the Civil War could have been negotiated” is a dumb thing to say. Trump does have an out in that he didn’t say which civil war he was talking about — maybe he was talking about the Hungarian Civil War of 1264. And if that’s the case: Yes, King Béla IV possibly could have negotiated peace with Stephen V by granting Stephen dominion over lands East of the Danube, especially Abaújszántó and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg. Of course, that would have been an awfully bitter pill to swallow, given Stephen’s illegal dismissal of Ernye Ákos as Voivode of Transylvania — I mean, does the Treaty of Pressburg mean anything to anyone anymore? But I digress; maybe Trump was talking about Hungary. If not, that’s a goofy thing to say.

Trump’s open thuggishness is a bigger concern. It used to be that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies could be gleaned from his fondness of military parades and thirsty descriptions of foreign autocrats. Nowadays, Trump just blurts out nakedly authoritarian goals. He constantly denies the 2020 election results. He’s trying to claim a level of immunity from prosecution that Richard Nixon wouldn’t have imagined in his wettest of dreams. He’s described plans to use the power of the presidency to punish his enemies. Two things should be beyond doubt at this point:

1. Trump won’t concede if he loses; and

2. If he wins, Trump will try to use the state to prosecute his enemies while placing himself above the law.

I don’t think these assumptions are speculation — I think these are clear inferences based on Trump’s own words and actions. A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail asked voters what word they would use to describe Trump’s second term, and the Mail made a word cloud of the responses. That word could featured words like “revenge”, “power”, and “dictatorship.” And Trump apparently liked what he saw, because he posted it on Truth Social. This is the word cloud:

HE POSTED THAT! Nobody made him do it, he didn’t dispute it — he just put it on social media as if to say “pretty cool, right?” Personally, I would not brag on social media if someone made a word cloud of opinions of me and it came back like this:

I don’t know what to say about Trump anymore. It feels pointless to complain about him, because I know that the main thing a lot of people like about him is that he makes liberal heads explode. But I don’t know what anyone sees in him. It feels like a friend is dating a dangerous loser and everyone around her is saying “dump him”, but she won’t because she doesn’t want to admit she was wrong. Or maybe the better analogy is to liken Trumpism to a cult, as many people have. And insane videos like this fan-made Trump commercial — which Trump shared on Truth Social — certainly don’t dispel the “Trump is a cult leader” theory.

I don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know why it’s happening or if/when it’ll stop. All I know is: IMHO, Trump is definitely worse than he was before.

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