Anyone who’s paying attention has noticed that Donald Trump isn’t doing so well. First came the bizarre town hall last week, in which the Republican presidential nominee swayed back and forth to music for 39 minutes to avoid taking questions. Trump followed up last weekend by boring a crowd in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with a meandering 12-minute story about Arnold Palmer, ending with the apparent boast that he’d seen the famous golfer’s genitalia. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, even the loyal rally audience reacted with “stone silence” to most of this. Even the smattering of laughter when Trump marveled at the Palmer penis was, Bunch suggested, mostly a “nervous outlet for this American unraveling.”
It remains to be seen if swing voters know how badly Trump is decompensating. Most people have better things to do than watch his long, strange rallies. His campaign team has canceled a series of press interviews, claiming the candidate is “exhausted.” The press is finally starting to report how much Trump’s behavior aligns with what medical experts cite as signs of age-related cognitive decline: such as disinhibition, confusion and erratic moods. He is sometimes unable to answer a basic question, forgetting what was asked and talking about random nonsense instead. At a different town hall event on Sunday, Trump bragged about his “cognitive tests” before forgetting the host’s name and then seeming to forget his own age, saying he’s “not that close to 80,” even though that’s about a year and a half away.
On CNN, Leigh McGowan suggested that the Trump campaign is hoping to distract voters just enough to get him over the finish line, where presumably he would be managed and possibly replaced by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
It’s terrifying that so many voters are ignorant and indifferent about the fact that this increasingly confused and angry person has a coin-toss chance of once again winning the presidency. That only adds to the terror of knowing that so many people actually back him, despite his past attempt to steal an election, which led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. But there’s a small sliver of hope in this alarming situation: Trump’s mental state will make it much harder for him to steal the election if he loses to Kamala Harris in November.
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Stealing an election is hard work and requires focused leadership. As anyone who watched the Jan. 6 committee hearings or has read some of the indictment materials from special prosecutor Jack Smith can attest, Trump spent the last months of 2020 working the phones, conspiring with lackeys and pushing propaganda with a level of energy and sharpness he can no longer summon up for a 15-minute interview.
Despite his admission there is no evidence of election fraud, the certainty that Trump will attempt a coup if he loses in November is approximately 100%. But he failed in 2020, when he had the power of the presidency. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times wrote last week, “He has no legal authority. If he loses, he’ll be just another private citizen, urging other private citizens to commit state and federal crimes on his behalf.” Melissa Ryan, a researcher who was instrumental in sounding the alarm in 2020, is far more chill about the possibility this time around. “We know what they’re planning,” she wrote Monday, noting that the press now takes those plans far more seriously than they did in 2020. So does the Democratic Party is. The Harris campaign has built a small army of lawyers and election experts to fight Trump’s potential coup, mostly composed of people who cut their teeth demolishing his efforts in 2020.
Politico published a lengthy article on Sunday detailing exactly how Trump plans to steal the 2024 election. As Ryan notes, it’s the same plan he used in 2020: Lean on election officials in swing states to refuse to certify the results, and then send slates of fake electors to D.C. These would be criminal acts, to be clear. Many of the people who participated in Trump’s last coup attempt time are now facing criminal penalties — including Trump himself, who is under both federal and state indictments for election-related felonies.
It was difficult enough for Trump to convince enough people to play along in 2020 — when he was in the White House and before those folks knew that going to prison was a real possibility.
As Bouie writes, Trump’s “ability to reverse a loss is limited to his ability to inspire others to commit crimes on his behalf.” As we learned from the 2020 attempt, that requires him to apply personal pressure to a large numbers of state and local officials. It was difficult enough for Trump to convince enough people to play along in 2020, when he was in the White House and before those folks knew that going to prison was a real possibility. Now the person tasked with bringing together a large-scale criminal conspiracy cannot maintain his focus or contain his temper, both of which are baseline skills for persuading others.
Republican voters may not be paying attention to their candidate’s possible cognitive decline, or may not care. But Republican leaders must know that Trump, who already demonstrates a myriad of personality disorder symptoms, is falling apart. As was widely reported in the months before Joe Biden withdrew from the race, the chatter within the Democratic power class was almost deafening levels, as leaders and party officials spoke behind closed doors about the president’s age-related decline. It’s hard to imagine that the same thing isn’t happening among Republicans, who already have a robust culture of talking smack behind each other’s backs. Add to the mix that Trump frequently holds court at Mar-a-Lago, where a rotating cast of gossipy, power-hungry strivers bears direct witness to his incoherence and unpredictable behavior. That’s not an environment conducive to getting everyone on board with committing a bunch more serious crimes.
Naturally, there are some caveats we must address. It may be that, as progressive researcher Will Stancil argues, “Republicans think Trump will be a vegetable in office, so Thiel/Vance were hoping to puppeteer him.” If that view is widespread, it could be that Republicans reluctant to back the rapidly failing Trump in a coup could muster up the will for the far more coherent Vance. It’s also true that many Republicans who stood in Trump’s way in 2020 have been drummed out of the party, replaced by even more rabid MAGA types. So it would be unwise to conclude that it simply can’t happen. It’s good news that Democrats and the press are monitoring the situation far more than they did in 2020.
Still, Bouie is right: If Trump wants to marshal hundreds — or more likely thousands — of people into risking prison on his behalf, he will need to bring maximal powers of personal persuasion to bear. These people may giggle when Trump rambles through a bunch of unrelated MAGA buzzwords, but that’s because they’re not really listening. They’re mostly excited that his gross and uninhibited talk triggers the liberals. But if they’re forced to focus on committing crimes for this guy, they will likely pay closer attention. His declining ability to generate a comprehensible sentence, much less string together a coherent argument, will raise serious concerns. It’s one thing to back a jumbled, messy figurehead when your principal goal is sticking it to the woke liberals. But when the pressing question becomes “Will I go to prison for this?” a lot of people, MAGA loyalists or otherwise, most people will require some reassurance from somebody who’s capable of making sense.
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