We're puzzled because Anne Applebaum's puzzled!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 2024

Applebaum listens to Trump: Anne Applebaum gives voice to the germ of a highly valid point in a recent essay for The Atlantic.

Her essay appears beneath the headlines shown below. The headlines do a decent job of stating her basic thesis:

Suddenly Trump Looks Older and More Deranged
Now the Republicans are the ones saddled with a candidate who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence.

It's true! President Biden's apparent decline was relatively easy to peg as some form of "dementia" or "senility"—more generally, as some familiar form of cognitive decline, of a type which often comes with advanced age.

Now that President Biden is out of the race, Candidate Trump is the candidate who's very old by historical standards. Also, he may perhaps seem to be "deranged," though his form of mental disorder has always seemed to be harder for mainstream journalists to name or report or describe.

What explains the crazy statements and crazy proposals Trump is inclined to make? On Monday, July 1, the New York Times reported the latest episode, one which struck us as remarkable:

Trump Amplifies Calls to Jail Top Elected Officials, Invokes Military Tribunals

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.

One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”

Really? As president, Trump would want a televised military tribunal for Lynne Cheney? He had now "called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals?"

For various reasons, these apparent proposals may indeed seem "deranged." But the episode came and went with little attention from the mainstream press. For whatever reason, the mainstream press corps seems to lack a way to react to such crazy proposals.

For starters, just a guess:

In part, this reflects the refusal by the mainstream press to consult with medical or psychological specialists about Trump's mental and /or cognitive health. 

We've discussed this abdication of duty about a million times by now. For today, we'll leave it at this:

Our high-end career journalists aren't super-sharp. Beyond that, they aren't always super-honest. 

To appearances, they simply aren't willing to enter this dangerous conceptual territory. This leaves them with no obvious way to describe or report this man's apparent or possible madness.

In recent months, elements of the mainstream and Blue American press began behaving as if Trump's behavior was a mirror image of Biden's. You see that reflected in the headline atop Applebaum's essay, in which it's said that Donald J. Trump "can't finish a sentence."

We've seen Donald J. Trump finish plenty of sentences in the past few months! To some extent, that type of description seemed to go the heart of President Biden's apparent difficulties. The apparent madness of Donald J. Trump is a phenomenon of a different kind.

Having said that, we'll add this:

 We were puzzled to see that Applebaum was puzzled by certain excerpts from Trump's convention address. In her essay, she includes two brief excerpts from that endless speech which she describes as "pure gibberish."

After presenting the excerpts and describing them as gibberish, she says that Trump's "performance seemed deranged, sinister, and frightening." For now, we'll just tell you this:

The excerpts in question may (or may not) be viewed as borderline crazy. But the excerpts don't strike us as "gibberish" at all, let alone as gibberish of the pure kind.

(The fact that a major typo appears in one excerpt doesn't help Applebaum's case.)

The excerpts in questions may (or may not) be scored as borderline crazy—but why would Applebaum, an extremely important major writer, see them as gibberish? Tomorrow, we'll return to this topic, and we'll show you the excerpts in question.

In our view, something is wrong with Donald J. Trump. Also, something is keeping our major journalists from being able to say what it is—for being able to say what it is right out loud.