This New Hampshire primary, like the Iowa caucuses before it, was a dud, with no real contest on either side. But that is not to say it was without value.
For New Hampshire showed us, beyond all doubt, that Donald Trump is very, very confused.
In October, in a speech in Derry, N.H., he informed his audience that Viktor Orban, the strongman who rules Hungary, is “the leader of Turkey.”
In November, in a speech in Claremont, N.H., he advised the crowd that the current leader of the United States is “President Obama.” (He later claimed this mistake, which he made on several other occasions, was actually him being “sarcastic” — get it?)
Then, on Friday night, at a rally in Concord, N.H., Trump confused his Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed that Haley was “in charge of security” during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that she refused all of his offers of help, and that she destroyed the evidence.
ADVERTISING
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s own U.N. ambassador who was neither in office nor in Washington on Jan. 6, responded: “They’re saying he got confused … When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”
I went to Trump’s rally on Saturday night in Manchester, where he didn’t address the Haley-Pelosi mix-up but assured his supporters that he “took a cognitive test” and “I aced it.” He has previously boasted of his ability to identify an image of a “whale” on said assessment, but, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and Dan Diamond pointed out, there is no such marine mammal on any version of the test. (Maybe he was being “sarcastic” about the whale, too.)
But I listened carefully to Trump that night — no easy feat because he went on for 100 minutes — and noticed that, even though his text was fed to him through a teleprompter, he told many of the same stories over and over again, repeating some lines almost word for word in the same speech, with no apparent awareness that he had done so.
Unlike so much of what Trump does, his memory lapses aren’t disqualifying — only hypocritical. Trump routinely calls President Biden, 81, “cognitively impaired,” but the 77-year-old Trump seems also to have lost a step. He mangles names and words — a visiting foreign dignitary becomes a “foreign dignity” — and occasionally just talks nonsense.
Many in the news media don’t make much of this; while they focus on Biden’s mental acuity, in Trump’s case they rightly focus more on his authoritarian outbursts and gratuitous racism. Last week, for example, he bastardized Haley’s Indian name and falsely suggested she’s disqualified from the presidency because her parents weren’t citizens.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...mc_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...mc_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...c_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_19
In fairness, the Trump of four and eight years ago was also plenty erratic. But a closer look at his public performances — his courtroom outbursts and on the stump — suggests the very stable genius is off his game. He’s propped up by a very professional campaign, which he didn’t have before, and more insulated from questions and spontaneous exchanges. Yet he’s still saying and doing the sort of things that, had Biden done them, Republicans would cry: dementia!
“Each drug dealer kills on average 500 people during his or her lifetime,” he informed his audience early in his speech.
“Each dealer is responsible for the deaths during their lives of over 500 people or more,” he informed them late in his speech.
He told them early in the speech about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell, right, where the 51 intelligence agents said, oh, no, it was from Russia.”
He told them late in the speech that “Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation,” according to “51 intelligence agents.”
During the Trump presidency, he declared, “Hamas, Hezbollah, they didn’t have any money because Iran had no money to give them.”
Later, he announced: “Iran was broke under President Trump. They didn’t have the money to fund Hamas, Hezbollah.”
Near the top of his speech he vowed to end “Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” because the vehicles “don’t go far. That’s true: They don’t go far.”
Near the bottom of the speech, he complained that “we are a nation whose leaders are demanding all-electric cars, despite the fact that they don’t go far.”
Some stories were so good he told them three times.
“We’ll end up in a world war because of this guy,” he said of Biden.
Later: “We have the serious danger of going into a World War III.”
Still later: “We’re going to end up in World War III with this guy running.”
This was somewhat of an improvement for Trump, who in September warned an audience that, under Biden, we will soon be “in World War II.”
Trump similarly told and retold a tale about Biden’s competence. “He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump said, for “a couple of reasons. But, you know, the first reason why, he’s grossly incompetent.”
“He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump repeated later.
And again, still later: “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy for a number of reasons,” primarily because “he’s grossly incompetent.”
Sounds as though somebody needs a nap.
And it wasn’t just one off night. At a rally the next night, Trump mispronounced the name of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), his devoted ally who had just come to campaign for him in New Hampshire. He mentioned the name of a pollster — his pollster — Tony Fabrizio, with an Italian accent, then asked, “Is he a relation to Al Capone?” The following night, he served up this puzzler: “We are an institute and a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”
It’s perhaps easy to lose all this in the grotesque carnival that is a Trump rally.
There’s the abuse offered by Trump, his warm-up acts and his supporters whose shouted epithets get woven into the performance: CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a “pervert.” Nikki Haley is a “birdbrain,” a “globalist fool” and “Hillary Haley” backed by “radical left communists.” Ron DeSantis got “a new pair of high heels.”
There are the gratuitous, extravagant lies. There were but 4,500 souls in the arena, which has a maximum capacity of 12,000, but Trump told them they “set every record” for attendance. Turnout in the Iowa Republican caucuses was only 15 percent, the lowest in years, but one lawmaker Trump called onstage announced that Iowa just voted in “record numbers.” Trump falsely complained that the state’s anti-Trump Republican governor, Chris Sununu, “allows Democrats to vote in the Republican primary” to help Haley; state law has long allowed independents (not Democrats) to vote in either primary.
There are the barely veiled appeals to white nationalism. A video played on the big screen before Trump takes the stage had the tagline: “Make America Great For Us Again.” Of his political opponents, Trump told the crowd: “This nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage.”
Above all there was his apocalyptic description of America, now recited over orchestral music. Trump told his followers: “We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years, where banks are collapsing. … We are a Third World nation. … Fake news is all you get, and they are indeed the enemy of the people. … We are a nation that, in many ways has become a joke. … We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked.”
Maybe he just couldn’t remember that, the day before, the stock market had hit a record and consumer sentiment had seen the largest two-month jump in more than 30 years. Perhaps he forgot that inflation had been tamed, that supply-chain problems eased long ago, that unemployment is near historic lows.
“I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago,” he told the crowd, promising them: “I’ll let you know when I go bad. I really think I’ll be able to tell you.”
There, there now. I’m sure you will.
For New Hampshire showed us, beyond all doubt, that Donald Trump is very, very confused.
In October, in a speech in Derry, N.H., he informed his audience that Viktor Orban, the strongman who rules Hungary, is “the leader of Turkey.”
In November, in a speech in Claremont, N.H., he advised the crowd that the current leader of the United States is “President Obama.” (He later claimed this mistake, which he made on several other occasions, was actually him being “sarcastic” — get it?)
Then, on Friday night, at a rally in Concord, N.H., Trump confused his Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed that Haley was “in charge of security” during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that she refused all of his offers of help, and that she destroyed the evidence.
ADVERTISING
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s own U.N. ambassador who was neither in office nor in Washington on Jan. 6, responded: “They’re saying he got confused … When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”
I went to Trump’s rally on Saturday night in Manchester, where he didn’t address the Haley-Pelosi mix-up but assured his supporters that he “took a cognitive test” and “I aced it.” He has previously boasted of his ability to identify an image of a “whale” on said assessment, but, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and Dan Diamond pointed out, there is no such marine mammal on any version of the test. (Maybe he was being “sarcastic” about the whale, too.)
But I listened carefully to Trump that night — no easy feat because he went on for 100 minutes — and noticed that, even though his text was fed to him through a teleprompter, he told many of the same stories over and over again, repeating some lines almost word for word in the same speech, with no apparent awareness that he had done so.
Unlike so much of what Trump does, his memory lapses aren’t disqualifying — only hypocritical. Trump routinely calls President Biden, 81, “cognitively impaired,” but the 77-year-old Trump seems also to have lost a step. He mangles names and words — a visiting foreign dignitary becomes a “foreign dignity” — and occasionally just talks nonsense.
Many in the news media don’t make much of this; while they focus on Biden’s mental acuity, in Trump’s case they rightly focus more on his authoritarian outbursts and gratuitous racism. Last week, for example, he bastardized Haley’s Indian name and falsely suggested she’s disqualified from the presidency because her parents weren’t citizens.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...mc_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...mc_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...c_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_19
In fairness, the Trump of four and eight years ago was also plenty erratic. But a closer look at his public performances — his courtroom outbursts and on the stump — suggests the very stable genius is off his game. He’s propped up by a very professional campaign, which he didn’t have before, and more insulated from questions and spontaneous exchanges. Yet he’s still saying and doing the sort of things that, had Biden done them, Republicans would cry: dementia!
“Each drug dealer kills on average 500 people during his or her lifetime,” he informed his audience early in his speech.
“Each dealer is responsible for the deaths during their lives of over 500 people or more,” he informed them late in his speech.
He told them early in the speech about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell, right, where the 51 intelligence agents said, oh, no, it was from Russia.”
He told them late in the speech that “Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation,” according to “51 intelligence agents.”
During the Trump presidency, he declared, “Hamas, Hezbollah, they didn’t have any money because Iran had no money to give them.”
Later, he announced: “Iran was broke under President Trump. They didn’t have the money to fund Hamas, Hezbollah.”
Near the top of his speech he vowed to end “Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” because the vehicles “don’t go far. That’s true: They don’t go far.”
Near the bottom of the speech, he complained that “we are a nation whose leaders are demanding all-electric cars, despite the fact that they don’t go far.”
Some stories were so good he told them three times.
“We’ll end up in a world war because of this guy,” he said of Biden.
Later: “We have the serious danger of going into a World War III.”
Still later: “We’re going to end up in World War III with this guy running.”
This was somewhat of an improvement for Trump, who in September warned an audience that, under Biden, we will soon be “in World War II.”
Trump similarly told and retold a tale about Biden’s competence. “He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump said, for “a couple of reasons. But, you know, the first reason why, he’s grossly incompetent.”
“He’s a threat to democracy,” Trump repeated later.
And again, still later: “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy for a number of reasons,” primarily because “he’s grossly incompetent.”
Sounds as though somebody needs a nap.
And it wasn’t just one off night. At a rally the next night, Trump mispronounced the name of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), his devoted ally who had just come to campaign for him in New Hampshire. He mentioned the name of a pollster — his pollster — Tony Fabrizio, with an Italian accent, then asked, “Is he a relation to Al Capone?” The following night, he served up this puzzler: “We are an institute and a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”
It’s perhaps easy to lose all this in the grotesque carnival that is a Trump rally.
There’s the abuse offered by Trump, his warm-up acts and his supporters whose shouted epithets get woven into the performance: CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a “pervert.” Nikki Haley is a “birdbrain,” a “globalist fool” and “Hillary Haley” backed by “radical left communists.” Ron DeSantis got “a new pair of high heels.”
There are the gratuitous, extravagant lies. There were but 4,500 souls in the arena, which has a maximum capacity of 12,000, but Trump told them they “set every record” for attendance. Turnout in the Iowa Republican caucuses was only 15 percent, the lowest in years, but one lawmaker Trump called onstage announced that Iowa just voted in “record numbers.” Trump falsely complained that the state’s anti-Trump Republican governor, Chris Sununu, “allows Democrats to vote in the Republican primary” to help Haley; state law has long allowed independents (not Democrats) to vote in either primary.
There are the barely veiled appeals to white nationalism. A video played on the big screen before Trump takes the stage had the tagline: “Make America Great For Us Again.” Of his political opponents, Trump told the crowd: “This nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage.”
Above all there was his apocalyptic description of America, now recited over orchestral music. Trump told his followers: “We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years, where banks are collapsing. … We are a Third World nation. … Fake news is all you get, and they are indeed the enemy of the people. … We are a nation that, in many ways has become a joke. … We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked.”
Maybe he just couldn’t remember that, the day before, the stock market had hit a record and consumer sentiment had seen the largest two-month jump in more than 30 years. Perhaps he forgot that inflation had been tamed, that supply-chain problems eased long ago, that unemployment is near historic lows.
“I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago,” he told the crowd, promising them: “I’ll let you know when I go bad. I really think I’ll be able to tell you.”
There, there now. I’m sure you will.
