Donald Trump is completely insane.
In case you haven’t guessed, this is my weekly election politics update, which I actually haven’t written in more than a week. I try to write about the pro-life movement and Ohio politics separately, and just have one snarky post about the week’s political news, but I’ve been putting this one off because I wanted to wait until after the vice presidential debate this evening, in case anything interesting happened there (it did not).
Please keep referring back to my boilerplate explanation of why it’s not a sin to vote your conscience. There simply isn’t a Catholic political party. You are not required on pain of sin to vote for the guy pretending to be against abortion– especially since, in this election, nobody really is. People who claim you should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if you don’t vote for Trump are just spiritually abusing you. Anybody caught trying to do that in my comment box will have their comment edited to say “I am a supersonic idiotic brain infected disconnected booger pickin’ piece of chicken.” No exceptions. And now, we’re off to the races.
The vice presidential debate was very boring. Vance did better than I thought, and Walz was a bit disappointing. If I didn’t know who either of these people were or whether they were lying, I’d assume that Walz was kindly and a bit dopey at debates while Vance was oily and a little bit of a droning bore. It wasn’t a knock-down drag-out like the debate last month. Vance lied and Walz told the truth, but I don’t see it changing anybody’s mind at this point.
Now, can we go back to the fact that Donald Trump is completely insane?
In these speeches, Trump has slurred and rambled even more than usual. He’s looked angrier than he ever has before. His trademark thick orange foundation shimmered as he sweated profusely. And what he said made far less sense than it ever has. At one point he seemed to be insinuating that a fly buzzing around the podium was brought there by immigrants. He claimed hardly anybody knows what a phone app is, but Kamala Harris has a special app which allows her to move immigrants. He insisted that said immigrants are so murderous that “they’ll walk into your kitchen and slit your throat,” and that they are so strong that no Hollywood actor could play them in a film because Hollywood actors have “no muscle content.” He suggested that there be a day of extreme violence against shoplifters, who he thinks are stealing refrigerators by carrying them on their backs. It’s become a bit of a trope that spectators leave the Trump speeches early, but at one point I saw one of the people who are selected to stand behind the podium get up and leave on camera. The rest of the spectators looked exhausted and embarrassed.
And then there are the things he’s saying about women.
Somewhere along the line, someone must have told Trump that his favorability ratings among women are low. Lord knows why this could be. Perhaps women are terrified because mothers have died due to fallout from the abortion bans that went into effect after Dobbs. Maybe they don’t like him because he was determined in a court of law to be liable for pulling a woman into a dressing room to rape her, and then defaming her for speaking about it. Maybe it’s because another jury determined beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed fraud to cover up his dalliances with a porn star, who was traumatized by the event, while his third wife was pregnant. It could be because he bragged about sexually assaulting women all those years ago when he didn’t know he was being recorded. Maybe it’s the many other women who have come forward with their own stories of Trump’s serial sexual abuse. But somehow, the ladies don’t like him. The gender gap in all the polling lately has been gigantic.
Trump attempted to put out the fire by adding a blurb about how he wants to protect women to his usual stump speech: “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” And why won’t we be thinking about abortion? “Because I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector.” Seeing that this might be taken as disingenuous, at one of his rallies in the past week, he also remarked, “I always thought women liked me. I never thought I had a problem. But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it.”
I believe it, Mr. Trump. Men like you are the reason I carry mace. You’d have to be insane to think this would help– which does seem to be an accurate description of your behavior.
Trump’s handlers also seem to think he’s insane, because he’s suddenly canceled his appearance on next week’s episode of 60 Minutes. No candidate has done that in fifty years.
Trump’s mental deterioration matters immensely.
It’s about time to admit that Donald Trump is not really the Republican candidate for president. Trump is deteriorating so quickly that if, God forbid, he wins a second term, the Oval Office will be in Vance’s hands by July of 2025. This is a race between Kamala Harris and J. D. Vance. Vance has flip-flopped so much that we don’t know precisely what his values are, but we’ve witnessed how angry he can be. We know that he does not care anything for his constituents and deliberately lied to malign them, exposing them to hatred and threats of violence, because he wanted to create a moral panic. He’s suggested that most of American culture needs to be “ripped out like a tumor” and ingratiated himself to tech bros who praise dictatorship. And tonight, in the boring debate, he refused to admit that Donald Trump lost in 2020. Those things matter.
Neither Trump nor Vance ought to be within a hundred miles of the Oval Office. Neither of them should hold an elected position again. This isn’t about whether you’re liberal or conservative; it’s about whether we want to live in a democracy or not.
We have just about a month left to decide.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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