The Oldest-Case Scenario

One of many unusual things about this year’s presidential race is that the two campaigns are facing the same strategic dilemma in the home stretch.

That’s rare. Typically a problem for one side is an advantage for the other. 

The common dilemma is this: The Republican candidate is losing his mind in plain sight—but it’s not clear if that’s hurting him with voters.

A few days ago, I questioned the conventional wisdom among supporters of Kamala Harris that “the more people see her, the more they like her.” That said, I’m also skeptical of the flip side of that assumption: “The more people see Trump, the more they hate him,” a Democratic strategist recently assured Semafor, “so letting him decompensate on national TV while she goes and makes a positive case for herself to persuadable voters is a great strategy.”

Is that so? Where’s the evidence?

“The more they see him, the more they hate him” is a chestnut left over from the 2016 election, when Trump’s polling seemed to tick up whenever Hillary Clinton replaced him on center stage in the news cycle. Never Trumpers cling to the idea to this day because, well, it’s comforting. If it’s true that Americans recoil from Trump whenever they’re reminded of his existence, then they haven’t lost their civic bearings completely. They have an attention deficit, not a moral deficit. They still recognize an ogre when they see one.

The flaw in the theory is that this particular ogre is more popular now than he’s been at almost any point in the last nine years. Last October, his favorability rating was a hair below 40 percent; today, after months of him seething about “retribution” against “the enemy from within” at campaign rallies and in interviews, it’s … a hair below 45. We’ve seen a lot of him this year, especially lately, and he’s never sounded uglier. Yet never once during his presidency was his rating as high as it is at this moment.

Harris followed the conventional wisdom about Trump for her first two months as nominee, hiding away from the media and leaving the ogre alone in the spotlight. The more voters see him, the more they hate him, right? But a funny thing happened: Her lead began to shrink. She and her team were forced to consider that the great and good American people like Trump a lot more than patriots wish to believe.

So her campaign has adjusted, launching a media blitz by their candidate and attempting to seize the spotlight from him by driving the daily news cycle. Less than three weeks from Election Day, though, a strategic debate among Democrats continues to rage, per Semafor. As Trump behaves more erratically and menacingly than he ever has, are they better off focusing public attention on him or promoting their own message instead? If they frame the race in their closing argument as a simple choice between a disjointed fascist and someone who isn’t a disjointed fascist, would swing voters choose responsibly?

The fact that the answer isn’t certain is what a national civic breakdown looks like.

But because it isn’t certain, Trump’s advisers are facing the same conundrum. How much do they want their very old, undisciplined, irrational, and incoherent demagogue in front of the cameras in the campaign’s closing days as late deciders are making up their minds?

Are they willing to bet everything that a critical mass of Americans, even amid a civic collapse, can no longer recognize an ogre when they see one?

Low energy.

“I am the most stable human being,” Trump declared on Friday during an appearance on Fox & Friends.

The evidence that that’s untrue has grown so overwhelming, particularly over the last month, that even his friends in Russian state media have felt compelled to say so. “I have to acknowledge that the former U.S. president, and possibly a future one, often keeps repeating himself in his speeches,” an election correspondent for the network Russia-1 recently told viewers. “He gives lengthy speeches. He indeed gives a cause to doubt his mental abilities. He is 79 years old. He isn’t far behind the current president, Joe Biden.”

As the correspondent spoke, footage played of Trump “dancing” onstage during the bizarre musical conclusion to his recent town hall in Pennsylvania.

Trump is 78, not 79—it’s Russian state media, so there had to be a lie in there somewhere—but the rest is accurate. The candidate’s speeches aren’t just “lengthy,” they’re much longer than they used to be. “Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016,” the New York Times reported earlier this month. “Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like ‘always’ and ‘never’ than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.”

His habit of rambling from topic to topic has also gotten noticeably worse. From another Times piece:

At the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, he answered a question [from Bloomberg News] about whether he would break up Google by complaining about a Justice Department lawsuit against Virginia election officials. When he was reminded the question was about Google, he said he “called the head of Google the other day” to grouse about the difficulty of finding positive news stories about his campaign on the company’s search page.

During that same interview, the host “pointed out that Mr. Trump had started talking about reserve currency and then moved to a story about President Emmanuel Macron of France, among other digressions.” Trump would have us believe that his endless rambling is a deliberate rhetorical strategy, but there are obvious, less charitable possibilities.

Trump’s grasp of policy was weak even on his best days as a newbie candidate in 2016. But as he approaches 80, he no longer makes any pretense of understanding how or why his agenda would work as intended. Some of his responses to simple policy questions need to be seen to be believed, and his fascination with tariffs as a cure-all for every ill has come to resemble religious faith more than considered economics. They’ve become the same sort of magic-bullet solution to complex problems that hydroxychloroquine was for him in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, on subjects where Trump is coherent, his thoughts are frequently hair-raising. On Friday, he compared the convicted January 6 rioters to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. In a town hall with Univision, he slipped and referred to the insurrectionists as “we.” Earlier this week, he blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when he complained that Zelensky “should never have let that war start.” During his Fox & Friends appearance, he repeated the point and wondered why Abraham Lincoln hadn’t somehow “settled” the Civil War peacefully before it began.

Imagine a persuadable Cheney Republican listening to that, wondering how President Trump would have reacted to the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland at the end of the 1930s.

If you’re a Trump adviser, what should you do about all this?

You’re not going to convince your candidate to be more disciplined. Even if he were willing, which he isn’t, his ability to do so has plainly declined with age. If you run him out there to do challenging interviews with adversarial hosts—like Harris did a few days ago with Bret Baier—you run the risk that he might expose himself as an enfeebled old clod at the very moment undecided voters are paying attention. But if you don’t run him out there, you risk being accused of hiding his deterioration by resorting to a Biden-esque “basement campaign” in the race’s final days.

Trump can’t afford to be seen as “low energy,” yet he seemingly can’t muster the ability to be “high energy” for any length of time anymore. What should you, his adviser, do?

The campaign’s solution, it appears, is to run him out there and not run him out there.

He continues to do interviews with sycophantic media like Fox & Friends and right-aligned podcast bros, which is where he made his comments about Zelensky and Japanese internment. They won’t ask him difficult questions or press him for specifics on policy, and if he says something nutty, the soundbite will be more or less quarantined among an audience that will forgive him anything.

But Trump’s days of doing neutral media appear to be winding down. The Univision town hall and the chat with Bloomberg News both produced bad moments for him and he can’t afford more of those now. So he’s begun canceling interviews: Chats with NBC News, CNBC, and 60 Minutes have all been scrapped in recent weeks, joining his second debate with Harris in the rubbish bin. One Trump aide reportedly gave “exhaustion” as a reason—a plausible but surprising admission for a candidate who prides himself on bravado—but the truth is likely a matter of basic risk management. The old man can’t hide his decline anymore so he’s opting to hide himself from swing voters as much as he reasonably can.

That’s the second time that’s happened in this campaign, you may recall. Yet, despite his senescence, Trump is on the cusp of winning while Joe Biden had become an all but certain loser by the time he quit. Why?

Another absentee president.

The unsatisfying answer to that question, I suspect, is that Biden simply looks the part of a diminished old man more than Trump does.

The president’s white hair long ago receded, his thinning skin appears translucent in places, and he shuffles feebly when he walks. His cognitive hiccups are classic symptoms of someone elderly “losing it.” He speaks softly, often trailing off, and at times seems confused by his surroundings. And when he whiffs on what he’s trying to say, he really whiffs. When he said, “We finally beat Medicare” at this summer’s debate, I could have died from pity and embarrassment.

Trump doesn’t look the part. His hair is bottle-blonde, and the amount of bronzer he’s been using lately is approaching blackface levels. He’s not soft-spoken; he’s loud. And the decades he’s spent cultivating an image of virility are probably paying off in boosting perceptions of his vigor. Even in his dotage, he has beautiful women by his side and isn’t too old to notice that certain high-ranking officials in his party are “fantastically attractive.”

His policy promises in broad outline are also energetic. He’s going to round up the illegals, build the wall, slap tariffs on everyone, and scare the bad guys abroad so badly that they’ll wet themselves. He’s not losing awareness of his environment as he ages, as we imagine when we think of decline. What he’s losing, it seems, is his capacity for linear thought and control over his inhibitions—just what one wants in an authoritarian.

On the latest Dispatch Podcast, my colleagues speculated that a candidate’s foibles hurt more when they jibe with stereotypes that voters already hold about his party. That also might explain why Biden’s age has been more of a liability than Trump’s. If you view Democrats as “weak,” especially on foreign policy, having the party’s leader grow physically and mentally weaker before your eyes might hit harder than when the same thing happens to the Republican nominee.

Still, after what the country went through this summer, you would think voters would be very reluctant to hand the White House to a decompensating geriatric. Instead, the odds range from fair to good that in four years’ time, Americans will once again be fretting over the conspicuous and concerning unfitness of an 81-year-old president. 

Which raises a question: When we debate the best- and worst-case scenarios for a second Trump term, shouldn’t we also consider—for lack of a better phrase—the oldest-case scenario?

Amid all the speculation of how good or bad or really, really bad another Trump presidency might be, one not-unlikely possibility is that an age-addled Trump ends up being less of a factor in his own administration than anyone expected. As David Frum put it a few days ago, “The most interesting question about a second Trump term is how rapidly and totally a Vice President Vance and his cabal of billionaire backers will be able to wrest power from the elderly and ailing Trump.”

By “wresting power,” he doesn’t mean using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Vance wouldn’t dare challenge the cult leader directly. No, what Frum is envisioning is Trump declining further and becoming increasingly susceptible to suggestion by his worst advisers, to the point perhaps of acting as a de facto figurehead for the biggest postliberal cretins in his inner circle.

Coincidentally, the best-known cretin among Vance’s billionaire backers was in Pennsylvania on Thursday, babbling at a campaign town hall about powerful ideologues using the current president as a “puppet.” “As far as I can determine, there isn’t any one sort of puppet master. It’s more like there are a thousand or—I don’t know—a lot,” Elon Musk told his audience. “But it’s just obvious that Biden isn’t in charge. It’s obvious that Kamala isn’t in charge. I mean, with Kamala, they just replaced the Biden puppet with the Kamala puppet, very obviously.”

I don’t buy the dark left-wing theories circulating on social media that Musk views Trump as his ticket to becoming “shadow president” in a country where he’s barred by the Constitution from being elected himself, but populists do have a habit of exaggerating the left’s corruption and then using it as a pretext to engage in the same extreme corruption themselves. That’s how Fox News, which was founded as a “fair and balanced” alternative to liberal media bias, ended up sounding less objective about Trump’s deficiencies than Russian state TV.

And Elon has already been promised a role in Trump’s new government. Why wouldn’t that role logically expand and become more influential as the president enters his 80s and a more Biden-esque stage of decline?

It’s strange to imagine a politician with the most intense, obnoxious cult of personality in modern American history becoming a puppet for the Mos Eisley cantina of misfits surrounding him, but it’s a nonzero proposition probability-wise. Frankly, I think the misfits are counting on it. There are a thousand terrible people with a million terrible ideas in Trump’s orbit, and they’re all jockeying for position as he prepares to return. Putinistas, xenophobes, Christian nationalists, redpilled crypto chuds, the stupidest protectionists you’ll ever meet—they’re all at the table hoping to serve the old man. And doubtless hoping, as he gets older, that he’ll serve them.

One would think all of this would make Trump’s age and mental deterioration a pressing issue for voters, especially since the guy who’ll replace him if he dies in office is shockingly young by presidential standards, has less than two years of experience in government, and isn’t well liked. But that’s what a civic breakdown looks like, I suppose.

In fact, maybe the real reason Biden’s cognitive decline has become more of a liability than Trump’s is this simple: Trump has always seemed demented, whereas Biden didn’t used to, so voters are more attuned to the latter’s deterioration than the former’s. Only in modern post-civic America could consistent nuttiness be less damaging politically than emerging nuttiness. Whether you want Trump to win this election or not, you’ll never convince me that we don’t deserve him.