THE OTHER SIDE: Donald John Trump is batsh*t crazy

Kudos to Nikki Haley, the wise sage whose prophecy seems right on the money, as Yahoo News reports:

Speaking to supporters in New Hampshire after losing the GOP presidential primary, 2024 candidate Nikki Haley took a swipe at President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for their age …

‘Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump. The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election. And I think it should be the Republicans that win this election,’ Haley told the crowd.

Unfortunately, her combined ambition and fear prevented her from acting on her own warning. Like her ambitious counterpart, J.D. Vance, who famously wasn’t sure whether Donald Trump was “a cynical a**hole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler,” Haley changed her tune and opted for submission.

As the Harris-Walz team surges, Vance and Haley along, with the most faithful of the MAGA faithful, are once more inextricably bound to a candidate steadfastly determined to ignore his worsening mental decline. Arrogant as always, and in denial, Trump seems unaware that waging his now stale war on his opponents is doomed to backfire. Ranting before fewer and fewer of his followers just ensures that his now-spiraling nervous breakdown will be captured on camera. Having watched Richard Nixon decompensate on television, I would rather not do it again. Because from where I am sitting, I know the man is certifiably batsh*t crazy.

And while I would prefer to sit this one out, I appreciate the mission I signed onto for The Berkshire Edge, and while I might not always get it right, I will try my best to be your faithful commentator. So, why don’t we start with a question many of you might be asking: What exactly leads you to believe Trump is losing his marbles?

True, I am no lawyer. So, too, it is fair to say I am no psychiatrist, psychologist, no psychiatric social worker, and while I have no degree, I have consulted a few therapists—and loved a few more. But why don’t we start with some purely amateurish, anecdotal evidence.

Certainly, Trump has a very long history of lying, but lately his lies, his made-up stories, make less and less sense. In the past, as the pundits say, there was a method to his madness. His lies about Hillary were strategic and effective. He manipulated the story about her emails and private server and, with the help of Putin’s hackers and James Comey, successfully managed to undermine her credibility.

But now … well, why don’t I let Rolling Stone take it from here. They explain how Hannibal Lecter and cannibalism made it into Trump’s stump speech:

What’s clear is that this all began with a simple misunderstanding — or several.

Speaking at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on July 29, 2023, Trump alluded to the film that had introduced Lecter to millions of moviegoers. ‘People are pouring across the border now, disease-ridden people,’ he warned the crowd. ‘And I said it, I said it over and over: people from mental institutions, from insane asylums,’ he claimed, falsely. ‘That’s like Silence of the Lambs stuff. But they’re coming in to our country.’ …

As legal prosecutions of Trump got underway in New York and Georgia last year, many commentators joked about the idea of Trump being confined to the kind of glass prison cell Dr. Lecter inhabits for most of The Silence of the Lambs, or muzzled and straitjacketed … when police are transporting him elsewhere. But Trump himself did not mention Lecter until two rallies in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa … ‘Think of it, the people coming in, think of it,’ he said. ‘They’re from prisons and jails.’ … ‘from mental institutions and insane asylums … like Silence of the Lamb (sic) stuff. That’s serious stuff. That’s Hannibal Lecter. How good an actor was he? How good an actor was he? Did he play a good role, right? But insane asylums, they’re emptying them out.’

Later, in Cedar Rapids … ‘Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television, or one of the — ‘I love Donald Trump. So I love him, I love him.’ Trump went on to joke that even if he were the ‘worst’ actor, ‘I’d say he was great to me.’ …

On May 11, Trump visited Wildwood, New Jersey … ‘The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walked by’ …

Nobody could say for sure whether Trump believed Lecter, the character, had died (he doesn’t in any of the books or movies that feature him), or that Hopkins had (the actor, 86, remains in good health …

By this summer, Trump had found a groove with the Lecter moments, and they grew increasingly detached from the ‘insane asylums’ talking point … he appeared to simply enjoy imagining the cultured and witty serial killer stalking his victims, and reliably described him as the ‘later, great Hannibal Lecter’ even warning supporters in Chesapeake, Virginia, ‘If he suggests, ‘I’d like to have you for dinner,’ don’t go …’

In St. Cloud, Minnesota, he came up with another twist on the formula, singling out a specific person in the audience and joking that Lecter would eat them. ‘He’d love to have you for dinner,’ Trump said, pointing. ‘You, right there.’ …

Some have wondered on social media whether Trump initially conflated the term ‘insane asylums’ with the concept of ‘asylum seekers’ — that is, migrants fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their own countries. The Trump campaign’s description of the GOP nominee as ‘an inspiring and gifted storyteller’ neither confirms nor dispels this theory. But perhaps it’s not so surprising that Trump and his followers identify more with the murderous doctor than the FBI agents who locked him up. After all, Lecter didn’t raid Mar-a-Lago.

As the election grows near, I wonder, how many voters will Hannibal Lecter bring to the polls? Are there enough undecided serial killers out there? At some point, Trump realized Hannibal needed help. While he has often told us how much he hates windmills, this time he brought along dangerous electric batteries and a bunch of hungry sharks to highlight Biden and Harris’ climate-crisis hoax:

What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there? … Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?

So much for being pro-choice.

When Biden finally withdrew, Kamala Harris almost instantaneously unleashed a veritable tsunami of relief and Democratic despair receded in the face of hope and joy. While Donald Trump had had a very good chance against Biden, he was no longer guaranteed the victory he needed to regain power and stay out of jail.

Hannibal Lecter, the murderous millions leaving their insane asylums for the chance to sneak through the holes sleepy Joe Biden had left in the border wall seemed to fall short of the enthusiasm of the many thousands who waited in the blistering sun to see Kamala. And I am guessing even Donald started to doubt green energy electrocution would guarantee him the White House.

So why not fall back onto the old familiar, those slurs he had mastered so long ago? Bye-bye, white serial killers, hello, Black people! Hadn’t MAGA loved “There’s good people on both sides”? Maybe antagonize the National Association of Black Journalists?

Rachel Scott of ABC News asked Trump about the charge that Kamala Harris was a DEI candidate. Did Trump really not know that DEI was Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or had he just not heard her answer? But he quickly launched into this mad, racist response:

I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage … And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. Now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know — is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.’

Which brings me to the always critical question: Do batsh*t crazy people know they are batsh*t crazy, or are they convinced it is really the rest of us missing those marbles? Or, in Donald Trump’s case, does he just play batsh*t crazy on TV? In any event, Trump wasn’t done with the routine: posting a picture of her cooking Indian, calling her a faker or a fakir:

Some commentators chose to rely on rationality. Political pundits point out that it might not be all that smart to accuse our female, biracial vice president of pretending to be Black, earning their inflated fees by reminding us that she had never hidden the fact she was born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father.

Annoyed by the criticism, Trump chose to go all in with a press conference/monologue at Mar-a-Lago. Phony was one thing, but Trump quickly turned the accomplished former district attorney, attorney general, senator, and current vice president and presidential candidate into a stupid female devil. He insisted she and Joe Biden—and you might as well throw Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz into the mix—have turned America into hell:

I think our country is in the most dangerous position it has ever been in from an economic standpoint, from a safety standpoint. Both gangs on the street and frankly gangs outside of our country in the form of other countries that are frankly very powerful. They are very powerful countries. We don’t know what we are doing. We have leadership that has no clue how to handle them or how to handle any other situation. We have a lot of bad things coming up. You could end up in a Depression of the 1929 variety. Which would be a devastating thing. Took decades to recover from it. And we are very close to a World War.

It was a field day for the fact-checkers. NPR assured us:

The U.S. economy has rebounded from the pandemic downturn more rapidly than most other countries around the world. Growth has slowed in recent months, but gross domestic product still grew at a relatively healthy annual clip of 2.8% in April, May and June – which is faster than the pace in three of the four years when Trump was president.

Trump claimed: “Kamala’s record is horrible. She’s a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen.”

In response, NPR assured its listeners:

It’s debatable how liberal Harris is. Some in California didn’t like her record on criminal justice and thought she was not progressive enough. She’s clearly liked by progressives and her voting scores as a senator are on the liberal end of the spectrum, but is she ‘radical left’ and ‘at a level that nobody’s seen’? There are plenty of people alive and in history who would be considered far more liberal and more radical.

Donald went after Walz and then Kamala on immigration:

He doesn’t mind people coming in from prisons … And neither does she, I guess. Because she’s not, she couldn’t care less … She’s the border czar. By the way, she was the border czar, 100%. And all of a sudden, for the last few weeks, she’s not the border czar anymore, like nobody ever said it … But as a border czar, she’s been the worst border czar in history, in the world history … She’s trying to say she had nothing to do with the border. She had everything. She was appointed to head the border. And then they said border czar. Oh, she loved that name. She loved that name. But she never went there. She went to a location once along the border, but that was a location that you would love to go and have dinner with your husband or whoever. That was a location that was not part of the problem. That was not really going to the border. So I– essentially she never went to the border.

NPR explained that Harris had never said she was the border czar, and then reminded us that Biden had actually said Harris had agreed “to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”

Trump added additional charges:

She couldn’t pass her bar exam … She destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed California as the A.G. But as the D.A. She destroyed it. She– San Francisco. … She destroyed– no cash bail, weak on crime, uh, she’s terrible … We have a vice president who is the least admired, least respected, and the worst vice president in the history of our country … The most unpopular vice president.

It was the crowds that hurt Trump so much. Hadn’t those Harris crowds figured out that political asylum was just a fancy way of escaping the mental asylum? Didn’t they realize that, thanks to Biden and Harris, living in a sanctuary city like San Francisco just increased the likelihood you would get eaten for dinner by psychopathic illegal Salvadorans. And what about the sharks and those electric motors?

Listen, Trump told the press:

I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn’t report it … What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people? If I ever had 2,000 people, you’d say my campaign is finished. It’s so dishonest, the press. … When she gets 1,500 people, and I saw it yesterday on ABC, which they said, ‘Oh, the crowd was so big.’ … I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size. And no, they never say the crowd was big … I think it’s so terrible when you say, ‘Well she has 1,500 people, 1,000 people,’ and they talk about, oh, the enthusiasm … So, but on crowd size in history, for any country, nobody’s had crowds like I have, and you know that. And when she gets 1,000 people and everybody starts jumping, you know that if I had a thousand people would say, people would say, that’s the end of his campaign. I have hundreds of thousands of people in, uh, South Carolina. I had 88,000 people in Alabama. I had 68,000 people. Nobody says about crowd size with me, but she has 1,000 people or 1,500 people, and they say, oh, the enthusiasm’s back …

Somehow, January 6 became more about crowd size than the insurrection:

Nobody was killed on Jan. 6th … So, but on crowd size in history, for any country, nobody’s had crowds like I have, and you know that … If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same, everything, same number of people. If not, we had more. …You look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd, uh, we actually had more people.

He lost the sharks but kept the electric motors:

Everybody’s going to be forced to buy an electric car, which they’re not going to do because they don’t want that. It’s got a great market. It’s got a market. It’s really a sub market … We don’t have enough electricity. We couldn’t make enough electricity for that … The weight of a car, the weight of a truck, they want all trucks to be electric. Little things that a lot of people don’t talk about. The weight of a truck is two-and-a-half times, two-and-a- half times heavier … You would have to rebuild every bridge in this country, if you were going to do this ridiculous policy.

Vox chose to focus on what they believe is a critically important issue. If Trump ever understood this issue, it now seemed to elude him:

A reporter asked Trump: ‘Would you direct your FDA, for example, to revoke access to mifepristone?’ referring to one of the two pills utilized in medication abortions … now used in most abortions, and has enabled people across the country to circumvent certain state bans?

‘Sure, you could, you could do things that … would supplement, absolutely,’ Trump said in response. ‘And those things are pretty open and humane. But you have to be able to have a vote, and all I want to do is give everyone a vote. The votes are taking place right now as we speak,’ he added.

Vox offered Trump the benefit of the doubt:

It was an answer that, like many Trump statements, was opaque. Given the phrasing of the question, he seemed to be acknowledging that in lieu of a national abortion ban, there are other ‘things’ the federal government can do to ‘supplement’ state restrictions. Trump didn’t go into detail regarding which of these proposals he would pursue, but his ambiguity led many to interpret his response to mean he would at least be open to limiting abortion pill access.

In a statement clarifying his comments to NBC News, Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, countered that interpretation, arguing that some of the questions at the briefing were ‘difficult to hear,’ and that the former president stood by the stance he expressed at a debate earlier this year. ‘His position on mifepristone remains the same — the Supreme Court unanimously decided on the issue and the matter is settled,’ Leavitt said in the statement.

NPR pointed out that in fact the mifepristone matter is not settled, just postponed:

By a unanimous vote, the court said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the challenge had failed to show they had been harmed, as they do not prescribe the medication, and thus, essentially, had no skin in the game. The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury … As abortion rights advocates were relieved, they know there will be more battles ahead. ‘This is not a sweeping victory,’ said NYU law professor Melissa Murray. It ‘likely is just a resting place, a way station. There will be another challenge to medication abortion.’

But, unfortunately, the mention of mifepristone opened the door for Donald Trump to offer his thoughts about abortion:

I think the abortion issue is written very much tempered down, and I’ve answered I think very well in the debate, and it seems to be much less of an issue, especially for those where they have the exceptions … As you know, and I think it’s when I look for 52 years, they wanted to bring abortion back to the states. They wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade and that’s Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, and everybody. Liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back in the states. And I did that … I think that abortion has become much less of an issue. It’s a very small. I think it’s actually going to be a very small issue. What I’ve done is, I’ve done what every Democrat and every Republican wanted to have done … I think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches. I don’t think it’s of– I don’t think it’s a big factor anymore, really.

Some of us have learned along the way that there is a time to leave well enough alone, but then there is Donald Trump:

Previous to (Virginia Gov.) Glenn (Youngkin), the governor, he said the baby will be born, we will put the baby aside, and we will decide with the mother what we’re going to do. In other words, whether or not we’re going to kill the baby.

If I am not careful, I am going to run out of room here, but I can’t leave the Mar-a-Lago affair without reference to Kamala, the Jews, and the helicopter. Yes, I know she loves and married one but Trump: “She’s been very, very bad to Israel, and she’s been very bad and disrespectful to Jewish people …”

Then there is Willie Brown and the helicopter ride that wasn’t:

Well, I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together and there was an emergency landing … This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was— he was a little concerned. So I know him. I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. He was not a fan of hers very much at that point.

Whatever it was that he imagines Willie Brown from San Francisco told him, he didn’t really hear it. Because he flew in a helicopter with another Black guy, a city councilman from Los Angeles, Calif.

Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist—not you, Elon Musk—to see that Donald Trump just can’t tolerate seeing those packed crowds in states as varied as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, fields and hangars and stadiums filled to bursting. So better not to see them. Rolling Stone explains:

Former president Donald Trump is trying to downplay his presidential opponents’ rally crowd sizes, falsely claiming that ‘nobody was there’ at a Detroit event hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz.

Trump, who is obsessed with the size of his own crowds and frequently exaggerates attendance numbers, is ‘unhappy’ with the number of people who have been attending Harris and Walz’s campaign events … ‘Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?’ Trump ranted Sunday on Truth Social. ‘There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane,’ Trump wrote. ‘She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.’

Which prompted Kamala Harris to respond by revealing how large the crowd actually was:

1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan

2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low energy? pic.twitter.com/VgTfoMAcuk

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 11, 2024

I can remember those very effective TV commercials that featured the motto of the United Negro College Fund: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” And it is never easy to witness the wasting of a human mind. On August 13, 2024, Elon Musk and Donald Trump held what was billed as a conversation on X (formerly Twitter). I am pretty sure the conversation didn’t do either of them any good. But I want to focus in on Donald Trump’s attempt to show how effective he has been and will be when it comes to negotiating foreign policy. The Huffington Post reported on this exchange:

Former President Donald Trump has faced ridicule after explaining to Elon Musk that he tried to persuade Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine.

During the Republican presidential nominee’s rambling, two-hour conversation Monday with the owner of X, formerly Twitter, Trump recounted an attempt to project strength to the leader of Russia, who rolled tanks into neighboring Ukraine about a year after Trump left the White House. By Trump’s reckoning, Ukraine was ‘the apple of his (Putin’s) eye.’

‘I said: “Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s going to be a bad day. You cannot do it,” Trump recalled during his chat with Musk on X. ‘I told him things that, what I’d do, and he said, ‘No way,’ and I said, ‘Way!’

Now, let me acknowledge that I have experienced first hand the real-life consequences of mental illness, on both sides of my Italian Catholic and Hungarian Jewish crazy quilt family and in my later life. Tragically prompted, I imagine, by that severe anguish, several people close to me have killed themselves.

Recently, I have found the never-ending inventions of Donald Trump, the slurred speech, the lies and insults, the truth stretched to breaking, the sharks, the replacement of reality with politically motivated but almost impossible to accept nonsense, deeply worrying. The first thing I did was to try and learn more about what I suspected was happening. Accepting the limits of my knowledge, I turned to the experts. I found a copy of the DSM-5, “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Turns out the American Psychiatric Association wants $170.00 for a copy, so why don’t I summarize some of what I learned. First off, I failed to find a reference to batsh*t crazy. Clearly, my diagnosis was wanting.

Luckily, I moved on from the “Bs” to the “Cs” and found Conduct Disorder.

They may not call it batsh*t crazy, but I knew I was onto something when I read “manifested in behaviors that violate the rights of others or that violate major societal norms.”

I think we can all learn something from Gov. Tim Walz:

And I’ll have to tell you, I know a little something about commitment to people. Some of you heard this. I was born in a small town in Nebraska. And we talk about small towns … But, look, small town was all about community. My mom and dad, they taught us to show some care to your neighbors, show some generosity, work towards a common good, be a decent human being to your neighbors … Look, it was my students – it was my students who encouraged me to run. They saw in me what I hoped to instill in them: a commitment to a common good, the belief – the true belief that one person, one of us in here, can make a difference in somebody’s life …

This idea about a common good, this idea about something bigger than ourselves, this idea of kindness, generosity and compassion …

Good old-fashioned compassion and caring for your neighbors. From where I am sitting, Donald Trump is getting worse. I am not sure what works best when you are dealing with batsh*t craziness, but I can tell you that pretending it isn’t happening is bound to fail. The other day, Donald Trump’s advisors convinced him to give a speech about the economy in Asheville, N.C., to stay away from attacking Kamala Harris’ race and focus on an important issue in the campaign. It didn’t take long for the batsh*t craziness to surface. It was obvious that he was having trouble reading the teleprompter. It was obvious he wasn’t really familiar with the subject matter. It was obvious that what he most wanted to do was attack and attack some more. So that is what he started with:

They put in a candidate and we beat him badly. How did he do in the debate? Then they put in another candidate. This is like you have two fighters. One guy is losing, you say, come on out. Let’s put in another one. So then uhh, they put in another, and we are doing very well. Considering the fact that she has the greatest press. She went from being totally disrespected person six weeks ago. Nobody thought she had a chance – and I don’t think she has a chance – and I don’t think she can possibly win. If she does our country is finished. Totally disrespected. The most unpopular Vice-President in the history of our country … then they decided to get politically correct. They put her in. Now they are putting her on the covers of Time Magazine, with an artist’s sketch …

He must have looked down at the teleprompter because he tried his best to pivot:

Everything Kamala Harris touches turns back. It all turns bad …She breaks everything. Just like she broke the border. Broke our economy. But soon we are going to fix every problem Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have created … We are going t save our country. We are going to save America … Now this is a little bit different day. This is talking about a thing called the economy. I wanted to do a speech on the economy. A lot of people are very devastated with what’s happening with the economy … what’s happened with inflation and all the other things. So we are doing this as an intellectual speech. You are all intellectuals today. Today we are doing it and we are doing it right now. And it’s very important. They say it is the most important subject. I think crime is right there. I think the border is right there. Personally we have a lot of important subjects because our country has become a third world nation. We are literally a third world nation. We are a banana republic in so many ways and we are not going to let that happen because we are starting a freefall. But from today and from the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again. We are going to make it affordable again. Under Kamala Harris and Crooked Joe Biden the American Dream is dead. You don’t hear about the American dream anymore. It’s dead. Her radical liberal policies have caused horrific inflation, decimated the middle class and gutted the finances of millions and millions of American families.

When he did return to focus on the economy, he revealed he couldn’t afford bacon anymore.

What do they call it when we refuse to see what’s happening to those we know? It could be the problems our children have with learning or more problematic illnesses like alcoholism, drug abuse, or the recent unwillingness of Democratic leaders to see how Biden was losing it and how unenthusiastic potential voters had become with having to choose between two aging white men. Well, not only are the Republicans now afflicted with a similar unwillingness, but the mainstream press isn’t willing to honestly inform its readers that Donald Trump’s memory, his mental capacity, his judgment, and even his speech are severely compromised.

Here are the headlines that reveal how reluctant our newspapers are to accurately report what really happened in Asheville:

Let’s start with USA Today:

Here is The Washington Post:

And, only marginally better, there was this headline in The New York Times:

None of them told it like it was. Denial doesn’t help. Neither will Don Junior or Eric. Certainly, not Melania. We are all in this together. The first step is always the hardest. But the sooner we face this, the better off we will all be. So let me be the first to say it: Donald John Trump is batsh*t crazy.