Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
At a certain point on Monday evening, Donald Trump was done answering questions. Two audience members had required medical attention at his town-hall event, so the 78-year-old former president turned instead to his beloved playlist. “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said. For over a half hour, he swayed along to “Ave Maria,” Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and “Memory” from the Cats musical, among other selections. The Washington Post called this “a somewhat bizarre move” on Trump’s part, given the election is three weeks away.
But Trump has always had a tendency to go off script. He rambles and bloviates, meanders and threatens. Monday’s strange event recalls another appearance from last week. Last Thursday, he sounded uniquely unhinged, telling his Detroit audience that “I could be right now in the most beautiful ocean, on the sand, exposing my really beautiful body — so beautiful — to the sun and the surf.” He added, “Skin cancer, right? To the sun and the surf all over the world. Or I could be in Detroit with you, and I’d rather be in Detroit with you, okay?” Remarkably, this is not the first time that Trump has discussed his “beautiful body” during a campaign stop. During an earlier appearance in Reading, Pennsylvania, he said that he “could be on a beautiful beach,” with “the sun beaming down on this beautiful body in a bathing suit. The sun would be beaming down, the waves would be crashing into my face. Instead, I’m here with you in Pennsylvania, and I’d rather be doing that!” Doubtful.
Though braggadocio is a familiar Trump quality, much like his reluctance to stick to his prepared remarks, he is arguably getting weirder — and more disturbing — over time. Trump’s speeches are so outlandish, so false, that they often pass without much comment, as the New York Times reported earlier this month in a story about his age. Yet a change is noticeable. “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical,” the Times noted, adding that his speeches have become much longer on average, and contain more negative words and examples of profanity than they previously did.
Age spares no one, and certainly not Trump. If his faculties have begun to decline, then the makeup of his prospective administration should be of paramount concern. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio is more than Trump’s running mate; he’s one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists in American public life, spinning falsehoods about Haitians in Springfield and denying that Trump lost the 2020 election. He is comfortable with other conspiracy theorists, too. He appears on their podcasts and follows them on X; he recently praised Marjorie Taylor Greene hours after she claimed that “they” were controlling the weather to create hurricanes like Helene. Vance is an extremist, too, a self-identified Catholic post-liberal with ties to the nationalist far right. He’s expressed support for a national abortion ban in the past, which puts him far out of step with the average voter.
A disintegrating Trump puts Vance a heartbeat away from the presidency, but there’s more than Vance to fear. Although Trump has publicly disavowed the architects of Project 2025, any distance between him and the scheme is a mirage. We know, for example, that at least 140 people who once worked for his administration have contributed to the plan, which was orchestrated primarily by the Heritage Foundation. Vance even wrote the forward to a book written by Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Trump has to fill a second administration somehow – and for years, his allies in Washington, D.C., have been strategizing for just such an occasion. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” said Russell Vought to a pair of undercover British journalists this summer. Vought, a former Trump official, is widely considered to be a candidate for Trump’s prospective chief of staff. He added that “we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
People like Vought may prove key to Trump’s stated objectives, including the mass deportation of immigrants and a theoretical assault on “the enemy within,” as the former president calls his liberal critics. Trump’s decline may be superficially amusing, but in truth it ushers the country from one form of danger to another. He remains a stark threat to American democracy not just because of what he would personally accomplish, but also because of who he’d empower if he wins a second term. Even if he is unable to govern, he almost doesn’t need to; he’s surrounded by people who are more than happy to work through him if necessary. He always represented forces much larger than himself. A victory for Trump is a victory for a radical movement that wants to reshape America in its own image. The truth is more bizarre than fiction.
