This is the week Donald Trump’s fitness for office finally became an issue.
It wasn’t, as we all have been shocked to discover, the treason or the rape or the 34 felony counts or the impeachments that did it though. In fact, the moment Trump crossed the line from extremist maniac to extremist maniac who appears to need round-the-clock care, soft foods and an early bedtime, was not caused by any of his traditional acts of recklessness or mayhem.
Perversely, in fact, what ultimately did him in may turn out to have been the fact that most Americans didn’t think he could get any worse as a dancer than he has been all his adult life…and then he did.
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And oh, the way he did it.
This is a guy, after all, who was known as a true pioneer of the white man’s overbite back in his Studio 54 days. More recently, his Grandpa Used to Know How to Dance Dance, was even more cringe but candidly, I’m not that sure we’d be much more comfortable seeing Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell dance these days either.
But as we discovered this week, his skills have, almost impossibly, faded further. Appearing at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, he resembled nothing so much as one of those battery-operated dancing Santas you might see on the counter at your local hardware store at holiday time. But one whose battery was nearly dead. Who twitched and stared blankly into space.
While such rogue electronic toys have been a scary standard in movies since Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this was something even more chilling. Trump’s spasmodic rocking and peculiar arm movements were the centerpiece of one of the weirdest incidents in modern American political history. As the Washington Post described it in a Tuesday headline, “Trump sways and bops to music in a bizarre town hall episode.”
By now, thanks to countless Internet memes and social media commentary, or an airing of the full nearly 40 minute incident on Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show Deadline: White House, you have probably seen what happened.
Unaccountably, in the middle of what was advertised as a town hall, Trump briefly stopped the program to enable care to be given to two attendees who had medical incidents and then decided he didn’t want to change things up a bit, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make into a music (sic). Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
And for the next 39 minutes as an eclectic variety of hits played over the arena loudspeakers (many apparently without necessary permissions from the artists who recorded them), Trump did his failing battery operated Santa dance. His team encouraged him to take more questions via teleprompter. But he ignored them.
The moderator for the evening, South Dakota governor and noted pet murderer Kristi Noem tried to wrap up the event. But Trump ignored her too. And when she could not persuade him to wrap up, she tried half-heartedly to dance along with him. Hands to the left. Hands to the right. Repeat. She looked pained, like she was hoping someone would put her out of her misery. And for most of this awkward display, Trump stared into the middle distance, alone in a strange and distant world we can only imagine.
It was too strange to ignore. It went on for too long. His flacks tried to spin it as a “lovefest.” But no one who saw it will ever be able to wipe from their memory banks the image of the addled and lost former president unaware of his surroundings or it seemed, just what a candidate for president is supposed to do at a rally.
The optics were made worse by the fact that the next day, Wednesday, Trump cancelled not one but two scheduled media appearances without explanation. Rumors started to spread that even his staff was freaked out by this lengthiest of Trump’s increasingly frequent meltdowns.
Then, he did an event at the Chicago Economic Club at which he could not maintain a thought for all but a few questions and proved unable to answer even the most basic questions much to the consternation of the moderator, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwaite who was forced to fact-check and challenge the loopy ex-president throughout.
But it wasn’t just his incoherence. When he was able to form a sentence, he resorted to threats to turn the U.S. military against American citizens who might be opposed to his views. He called them “the enemy within” and said that if necessary the national guard or the army should be called out to quash them.
Republican presidential nominee former U.S. President Donald Trump dances during a town hall campaign event in Oaks, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 14, 2024.
David Muse/ReutersIt was precisely the kind of thing that resonated with a quote that also garnered headlines this past week, from Bob Woodward’s new book War. In it, General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump was revealed to have described Trump as “fascist to the core” and as the greatest individual threat America faces.
It is fair to state that Americans have never seen such a public meltdown of a presidential candidate nor one that coincided with such increasingly erratic behavior. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a trained psychologist said that he was “decompensating in front of our eyes.” Other experts concurred.
Trump’s opponent in the presidential contest, Vice President Kamala Harris, embraced inventive tactics to drive home the message about how unsuited Trump is to be our commander-in-chief. She actually showed video of Trump’s threats to turn the army on the American people at a rally. In her remarks, she called him, without fear of contradiction, “increasingly unstable,” “unhinged” “a huge risk for America” and out for “unchecked power.”
Her campaign also acidly tweeted an account of the event with just the statement, “Hope he’s okay.”
Because of this confluence of events, although no doubt informed by the cumulative impact outlandish and destructive Trump behavior over the years, it seemed very possible that the seemingly comic episode on the stage in Oaks, Pennsylvania, might actually leave voters and the media concerned about Trump’s fitness to serve in a way that his leading an effort to overthrow the government or his alleged serial sex crimes had not.
The next three weeks will tell. But in my view, Trump’s mental decline will become an ever bigger issue during that time and in the end, will be cited by many voters as the reason they ultimately felt they could not vote for him.
It makes sense. A president can unilaterally launch a nuclear strike that could essentially destroy all humanity. He or she can do it in a matter of just a few minutes. And it is almost impossible to stop him. The fact that Trump is not someone you would trust to drive your kids to school, who seems more likely to be the subject of a silver alert than he is to handle a national security red alert, is a pretty compelling reason to cast your ballot for the experienced, capable, high-character, sound judgement of Vice President Harris.
If all that pans out that way, you may look back on the bizarre dancing episode as an unexpected turning point for the addled president. Indeed, it may be said that in the end the October surprise was that Trump himself revealed himself to be a candidate who would be surprised to find it was actually October.
An earlier version of this story said Kristi Noem is the governor of Idaho. She is the governor of South Dakota.
