Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office?
But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country.
While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.
Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead over Biden evaporated, with Harris opening up a clear, if narrow, lead. The vice-president’s tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.
Since Harris assumed the mantle of the presumptive Democratic candidate, Trump has claimed to be better-looking than the vice-president, questioned whether she is really Black and attacked her laugh as that of “a lunatic”.
The former president has also characterised Harris as both a communist and a fascist, and described Harris as “dumb” but then told CBS he didn’t mean it as an insult because it was “just a fact”.
“I don’t think she’s a very bright person. I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that,” he said.
Trump seems particularly obsessed with the size of the crowds at Harris’s rallies, drawing derision for falsely claiming she used artificial intelligence to fake the turnout.
When he’s not worried about size, Trump is vexed by Harris’s looks. After the vice-president appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Trump compared her appearance to Sophia Loren and his wife, Melania, before drawing a comparison with his own features.
“I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he declared to an audience of thousands who were more amused than convinced.
Melania’s reaction to her husband’s implicit claim that he is better-looking than his wife is not known.
Trump has sought to court Black voters in recent months as he attempts to win enough of their support to swing key states such as Michigan. But he will have done his own cause no good by questioning whether Harris, whose mother was born in India and father in Jamaica, is really Black – all while giving an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, and to the astonishment of just about everyone in the room.
“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Trump also claimed to “have been the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln”.
In a similar vein, the former president sometimes veers off the written script to have an open debate with himself about how to pronounce names, whether Kamala or the first name of the CNN presenter Dana Bash at a recent rally.
At a rally in Pennsylvania a week ago, Trump went as far as rambling on about rambling.
“I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he told the crowd.
Even some of Trump’s most loyal fans were disturbed by that performance. Joan Long travelled from New York with her husband, Billy, to see the former president speak.
“I honestly can’t say I know why he starts talking about how to pronounce names. What does that have to do with the election?” she said. “And I wish he would stop talking about Kamala’s looks.”
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Leading Republicans are similarly disturbed. Senator Lindsey Graham pleaded with Trump to stay focused on the issues that play best for the former president, such as the economy.
“His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” Graham told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Nikki Haley, the Republican former presidential candidate who denounced Trump as unfit for office before supporting him, said he “is not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is” or by calling her “dumb”. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican former speaker of the US House of Representatives, told Fox News that Trump should stop making the race about personalities and “stop questioning the size of her crowds”.
Trump, to no one’s surprise, has ploughed on regardless. He told reporters that he was “very angry” at Harris for calling him weird and was “entitled to personal attacks”.
Harris also appears to have hit a nerve with Trump by comparing her history as a prosecutor with his recent status as a convicted criminal. “Some people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you be nice?’ But they’re not nice to me – they want me to be in prison,” Trump told reporters.
All of this is a notable contrast to the weeks following Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. Trump apparently listened to his advisers for once, as he took a step back from the relentless personal attacks and largely let the press and public opinion lead the questioning of the 81-year-old president’s fitness for office.
The former president briefly looked as dignified as he was ever likely to. The attempt to assassinate Trump in Pennsylvania in July did no harm to his standing. Polls put Trump on the front foot, and his campaign advisers openly gloated about the prospect of a landslide win in November. But the energy unleashed by Harris’s entry into the presidential race drew out the old Trump again.
When the focus was on Biden’s mental acuity, Trump said every presidential candidate should be required to take a cognitive test. Pressed this week by CBS News on whether he has done so himself, Trump claimed to have recently had a “perfect score” on two cognitive tests.
“I got everything right. And one of the doctors said, ‘I’ve never seen that before, where you get everything right,’” he said.
Many Americans are not so convinced. Earlier this week, a JL Partners poll for the Daily Mail showed the number of American voters who have confidence that Trump is able to fully digest national security briefings, maintain attention in meetings and remember the names of world leaders he is talking to – and who have confidence that he will still be alive in four years – has dropped sharply since March.
In just a few months, concern about fitness for office has shifted from Biden to Trump, who is now the oldest US presidential candidate in history.