Trump’s demented lunacy is getting worse

So here are three things that have happened in the last week:

(1) Last Thursday, Donald Trump confabulated a bizarre story about nearly crashing in a helicopter with Willie Brown, who told him bad things about Kamala Harris. When journalists investigated this, they discovered the following: Contrary to Trump’s claims that he knows Brown “very well,” Trump has met Brown exactly once in his life, per Brown, when Brown came to New York in 1990 to discuss a proposed renovation of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel. That same meeting was attended by Nate Holden, another California legislator who is per his own description a tall black man from Los Angeles, while Brown, Holden says, is a short black man from San Francisco. Prior to that meeting Trump and Holden did ride in a helicopter that had to make an emergency landing.

So that’s the source of Trump’s story, which he continues to insist is true: he was raving at Maggie Haberman and threateing to sue for libel, claiming that he had flight logs and maintenance records to prove it. Of course there are no such records, since the true story is now clear, but nobody cares, so this will now simply be dropped. The other interesting thing about this is that Trump does in fact seem sufficiently confused and delusional at this point that he really does believe his own story: he wasn’t just doing some bullshitting riff. (The stuff about Brown telling him bad things about Harris is obviously fabricated out of nothing, but in Trump’s mind it’s probably true because Brown would have told him those things if Brown had known Harris at the time Trump and Brown met, which he didn’t but that’s just a detail).

(2) On Sunday Trump claimed that the 15,000 people who showed up to Harris’s rally at a Detroit-area airport weren’t really there, and that the crowd shots were AI-generated, since “nobody” met the plane. This lunatic claim was debunked by various journalists who were at the same rally themselves. This story too is going nowhere, because there’s apparently nowhere for it to go: Trump said something insanely delusional, the media pointed out it was false, and that was that. (The media could, I admit, do a better job of emphasizing that it’s false in the sense of “complete ranting lunacy” as opposed to false in the sense of “I didn’t inhale,” or “read my lips: no new taxes.”)

(3) Yesterday Trump gave another bizarre rambling press conference, featuring various crazy bits about dead birds being slaughtered by windmills etc., which is getting some attention, but what’s being almost completely ignored are some even crazier remarks he made at an event earlier in the day to “highlight anti-Semitism:”

Former President Donald Trump lauded a wealthy donor on whom he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom as having gotten the “better” award compared to the top military honor, the Medal of Honor, because those recipients are often deceased or injured.

Speaking at a campaign event intended to discuss antisemitism, Trump was introduced by Miriam Adelson, a wealthy Republican donor and widow of Sheldon Adelson, who pumped millions of dollars of his own money into electing Republican candidates. He died in 2021.

“I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” Trump said at his New Jersey resort.

“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump continued, referring to the highest military honor bestowed for valor in combat. The Medal of Honor is often mistakenly called the Congressional Medal of Honor. 

“But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” Trump concluded. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for — and that’s through committees and everything else.”

Trump is extremely squeamish about even being around wounded veterans, so it’s not surprising on some level that he would much prefer to bestow a fake purchased award on a grotesque creature like Miriam Adelson than contemplate the fates of Medal of Honor recipients.

But again, this is just totally insane stuff: the Presidential Medal of Freedom — in this particular case, a fake purchased medal, which is about as valuable as a prostitute’s smile — is, according to Trump, actually “better” than the nation’s highest award for valor in combat.

And it’s not even a story! Because look at all this other stuff, not to mention the three things that will happen this week that will be just as bad or worse as these three, which will as a consequence make them almost impossible to remember.

I don’t really have a point here, other than to chronicle where we are right now as a country, and to note that the media haven’t figured out how to say “Donald Trump is a raving lunatic” in a way that will actually impact voter perceptions, to the point where we aren’t at serious risk of putting a raving lunatic (not hyperbole) back in the Oval Office, with the ability to launch thousands of nuclear weapons etc. etc.