TOI Correspondent from Washington: He’s been called weird, bizarre, and crazy. Yet nothing can adequately capture Donald Trump‘s latest descent into human anatomy and physiology, the latest of which involves public reflections on a dead golfer’s manhood amid growing concerns that the MAGA supremo is losing his marbles.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump spent a full 12 minutes droning about golfing legend Arnold Palmer, after whom the local airport is named, before concluding with startling insights about his anatomy.”Arnold Palmer is all man. I mean no disrespect to women, I love women, but he was all man. When he took showers with the other pros they came out saying ‘Oh my God. It’s unbelievable,” the Republican candidate for the US Presidency said.
Why that was germane to his MAGA supporters is hard to fathom, but such bizarre digressions in recent days is worrying even his own associates who are repeatedly urging him to stay focused on issues where he has better ratings than Kamala Harris. Democrats meanwhile are going to town with his meandering speeches, stretching nearly two hours in some cases, saying he’s fast losing it.
“You would be worried if your grandpa was acting like this…I’m not joking… You’d call up your cousins and say, ‘have you noticed?’” former President Barack Obama observed wryly at a rally in Arizona in support of Harris, who is also starting to question Trump’s mental acuity with greater frequency and urgency. “In a senile moment, Donald Trump is rambling about the size of Arnold Palmer’s private parts. This is insane,” her campaign noted after Trump’s latest digression. The liberal flock has also made fun of his purported incontinence.
Harris turned 60 on Sunday, and while she does not match the gold standard of a Clinton or Obama in terms of public speaking, few doubt is certainly more coherent and focused, despite MAGA efforts to characterize her remarks as “word salad.” Trump calls his elaborate babbling a “weave” — even though they make little sense — insisting his supporters love to hear him. At the Latrobe rally, he also waxed physiological, spitting out that Harris is a “shit vice-president,” who should “get the hell out of here,” while his supporters cheered.
Trump’s latest musings about a golfer’s anatomy came on top of his pulling out the word “schong” — a Jewish word for a man’s penis or genitals — as a malapropism while discussing the fate of sex predator Harvey Weinstein. “I was so amazed that he got schonged, he was hit as hard as you can hit, because he was the king of the woke, right?” Trump said on a podcast on Friday.
Trump has previously used the term, notably in relation to Hillary Clinton, prompting language maven Stephen Pinker to note “given Trump’s history of vulgarity and misogyny, it’s entirely possible that he had created a sexist term for ‘defeat’”
Trump’s bizarre way of courting voters also saw him address male voters as “fat pigs” at another rally on Friday. Invoking a fictional woman named Jill (which is also the name of the current First Lady). Trump said, “Jill, get your fat husband off the couch. Get that fat pig off the couch… Get him up Jill, slap him around, get him up… get him to vote for Trump.”
In other strange utterances, Trump said at a tv show that he’s the “father of IVF” enraging women who are already chafing at old white men regulating women’s freedom of choice, and who fear in vitro fertilization will be the next target. Asked by a nine-year boy to name his favorite farm animal on a Fox show, Trump, who loves beef and has a line of steaks named after him, said he loves cows, before going off into another crazy rant about how “you won’t have cows anymore” if Kamala Harris is elected. At another rally where two of his supporters fainted due to heat, he asked, “Does anyone else want to faint?” before stopping the event and swaying to music from his playlist for almost 40 minutes.
None of this appears to have diminished support from the MAGA faithful to the man who once boasted he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose any support. While the presidential race remains tied with leads changing within the margin of error, there growing concern in his camp that even a minor shift among the sliver of undecided voters turned off by his bizarre ways could tilt the elections towards Harris.