One of Kamala Harris's closing arguments is that Donald Trump is showing his age and becoming more unhinged and unstable.
There's plenty of evidence to support that. His recurring references to Hannibal Lecter, his discussion of sharks and the dangers of getting electrocuted in an electric boat, and over the past weekend, his ruminations about the size of Arnold Palmer's private parts.
Add to that the facts that his seemingly incoherent ramblings, what he calls doing the weave, are twice as long as his already lengthy 2016 speeches. And he's lacing his speeches with much more profanity about Vice President Harris. I'm sure those are characteristics of somebody who's losing it fast.
But Ezra Klein offered another explanation for Trump's rhetoric in a piece in this morning's New York Times. It's that Trump exhibits disinhibition. In other words, Trump says what a lot of people and lot of politicians think about immigration, about trade, about political adversaries, among other things, but they're afraid to say.
Trump is completely uninhibited in what he says and according to Klein, that's both the strength — it's why he has such a cult-like following — and a weakness.
It really doesn't matter who's right. To me, it all adds up to Trump being an existential threat to democracy.
I find the interviews that Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, gave yesterday to the Atlantic and the New York Times, in which Kelly talked about Trump's admiration and fascination with Adolf Hitler, particularly chilling. In them, Kelly said that Trump told him he needed the kind of generals that Hitler had who would obediently follow any order that Trump gave.
Those statements should be an anathema to patriotic Americans and should on their own disqualify Trump from ever occupying the Oval Office again.
But given what's already happened in this campaign, I doubt very much that they'll make much of a difference.
I'm always concerned about myself using political hyperbole. But even before the Kelly interviews, I've had this uneasy feeling about Trump's recent racist, hateful rhetoric in that it's laying the groundwork for setting up scapegoats and carrying out retribution after the election. He said this election incidentally was going to be about retribution.
Think about his racist comments about Haitians eating dogs and cats. Now that may sound ridiculous and crazy, but let's not... forget there's a racial element to using to going after Haitians.
His statements that Jews who vote for Harris are out of their mind and if that if he loses Jews will be responsible. He's made similar statements about Hispanics and other ethnic groups as well.
And most importantly his recent attacks on his political adversaries. He calls them the enemies within naming people like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and saying that they can be taken care of by the National Guard or even the military. No wonder Trump likes Hitler's generals.
All of those statements should be beyond the pale of American democracy. What makes them worse is to see Republicans like Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununo, so-called moderate or establishment Republicans, deny the statements were made or dance around these anti- (small d) democratic statements, implying that somehow there's an equivalence in some policy statement that they disagree with that Kamala Harris has issued.
I understand that the Republicans have serious policy differences with Vice President Harris. Those policy differences should be debated, though the tone that Trump has set in the campaign makes serious policy discussion almost impossible.
But the stakes in this campaign, as Liz Cheney has repeatedly said, are much higher than the difference on any specific policy. Democracy, the future of the American experiment, is on the line.
I'm reminded of what my friend, the late Tom Donahue, the longtime president of the US Chamber of Commerce who died last week, told me at the beginning of this campaign. He said, he tells his Republican friends, if we elect a Democrat and we don't like his or her policies, we can throw them out in four years. If we elect Trump, we may never have another election again.
