Sanewashing Trump’s mental deterioration

One of the keys to the Trump era is that Trump’s increasingly demented ramblings are as a matter of routine cleaned up by not just the right wing media, but by the legacy media that pointed out a few million times that Joe Biden’s debate performance raised serious questions about whether he should continue to be president of the United States.

Here’s the thing unfiltered:

Trump: “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now? Okay, what if they broke it? I don‘t know. They broke it with Biden because Biden didn‘t respect him. They didn‘t respect Obama. They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia … You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony. That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn‘t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden‘s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden‘s bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said, oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia. The 51 agents The whole thing was a scam. And he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff. All I can say is this: he might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did maybe, maybe he didn‘t. I don‘t know what happened, but he didn‘t break them with me. He wants to make a deal…

…The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States. And your people are very brave, but you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty, but you’ll fight it out, but you don’t have the cards, but once we sign that deal you’re in a much better position. But you’re not acting at all thankful and that’s not a nice thing, I’ll be honest. That’s not a nice thing… All right. I think we‘ve seen enough…

“This is going to be great television. I will say that.”

This is morally depraved, but it’s also incoherent paranoid ranting, at a level that makes Biden’s verbal stumbling during the debate — which was, to be clear, really bad — sound relatively innocuous by comparison.

People get used to pretty much anything over time, and what we’ve gotten used to is that, in addition to all the other things that make Trump the worst president in US history, some combination of aging and Adderall, and/or whatever other drugs he’s abusing, is gradually transforming him into a demented old man. A happy family would take the car keys away from him; our unhappy national family will apparently have to deal with this in its own idiosyncratic way.

I really don’t think anything like four years of this is sustainable, even by our sclerotic and decadent political institutions. How they will eventually rid themselves of this turbulent grifter remains to be seen.