Donald, Don’t Stop Talking

There’s no spinning this deterioration

diminished

Here’s some advice I never thought I would give Donald: Talk more.

Personally, I’d prefer he keep hiding and leave our exhausted, terrorized nation alone. But after watching him meltdown on national television this afternoon, I’ve changed my mind. The more America sees this vicious, broken man, the better it will be for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz. The better it will be for all of us—because his unremitting darkness and unrelenting negative have to be wearing people out.

Donald would never admit this, but the fact that he can’t draw big crowds anymore is making him crazy. That’s an even worse fate than getting knocked off the front page of every newspaper he reads. Having ceded the spotlight to the positive and hopeful campaign of the Harris/Walz team, he’s in desperate need of attention.

He obviously misses campaigning against President Joe Biden. Then the media focused almost exclusively on Biden’s age while Donald’s violent and delusional rhetoric went unscrutinized. But he’s running against Kamala Harris now.

And what a difference 18 days makes. Actually, what a difference five days makes. At his rally in Atlanta last weekend, Donald was a rambling and incomprehensible as he usually is, but he had the kind of bullying energy—focused mainly on extremely popular Republican governor Brian Kemp—that has led a lot of people to believe he’s still cognitively intact. Today, standing alone behind a podium in an echoey ballroom in front of a small gaggle of reporters, he seemed lost and unfocused.

As he meandered from one unrelated topic to the next, he repeated his greatest hits—20 million immigrants released from prisons and insane asylums! World War III!—and reminded us just what a nihilist he is. He flailed and he fumbled, the desperation coming off him in waves.

He regained his footing somewhat after the questioning started. It helps to have a pool of hand-picked corporate-media reporters present who will hold the safety net under you; it’s easy to feel confident when said reports are already in the tank for you. This is his comfort zone—when the game is already rigged in his favor.

Even with the promise of softball questions and lack of follow up, the press conference itself was a train wreck. He bragged that his crowd on January 6^th was bigger than the crowd that came to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech; he accidentally admitted he’s open to banning abortion medication and claimed erroneously that abortion isn’t much of an election issue; he pretended to defend Hillary Clinton but then, in a threatening tangent, said “I could have done things to her that would’ve made your head spin.”

He even alluded to his “beautiful sofa” without seeming to realize that sofa is a synonym for couch.

We can’t get complacent. The more Donald slips in the polls, the more the Harris-Walz movement grows, the more dangerous Donald and his followers will become. We need to hang onto the joy and energy Harris and Walz are bringing to this campaign, but we can never get complacent and we must remain vigilant.

At the same time, his cruel, hateful act has gotten old, and he’s gotten old, and we should talk about what a joke Donald is—how weak, how feckless, how pathetic. We can’t write him off—despite Harris’ surge in the polls, the electoral college will keep things close—but we can mock him without mercy.

The more America sees that side of him, the better it will be for all of us. This afternoon it was evident that Donald is fighting against the reality of his new situation—a bitter, vengeful man sliding into irrelevance—if the corporate media and the Republican Party would only let him. That’s why he almost only grants interviews on propaganda networks. That’s why he only does town halls in front of friendly audiences who applaud him in all the right places. But as we saw today, even controlled environments aren’t enough to keep him safe from his lack of discipline and impulse control.

So, keep talking, Donald. Get be among the people—your people—and let them get a good look at you. Let them hear what you have to say. Please.