Donald J. Trump has never been a model of impulse control. But even by that low standard, the approach of the midterm elections has brought out a whole new level of disinhibition.
This week, the president of the United States:
- Went to Ohio to campaign for Sen. Jon Husted but wound up giving the crowd a homoerotic description of the lawmaker: “I started examining his body. … I looked and I watched up and down, and I looked at his ass.” He had Husted stand up and told the crowd: “Look at that jawline.”
- Declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to a partial ceasefire, only for both sides to say they had agreed to no such thing. “They agreed because I said they agreed,” Trump insisted.
- Posted two videos online of lions and tigers attacking people, including footage of a man’s killing in Britain. He followed this with an AI video of him wrestling and taming a tiger.
- Hired a new press secretary, reportedly without consulting or even informing his chief of staff, and without vetting her enough to discover that this self-described lawyer hasn’t passed a bar exam.
Lately, he has taken to insulting his own supporters as he addresses them at rallies.
“I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap,” he told a crowd in Tennessee. (Fact check: True.)
He told a crowd in Arizona that “there are few people in this audience that can” pass a standard cognitive test, but “I can, because I’m a frickin’ genius” — so much so that his doctors said “holy shit” when he recited five words in the correct order.
In front of that same audience, he said the doctors he travels with wouldn’t help any of his supporters if they fell ill. He singled out “that person right over there, friend of mine, he looks like shit, actually. He looks like he’s ready to have a heart attack.”
What accounts for this preelection crescendo of crazy? I am not qualified to judge Trump’s mental fitness. But the eminent medical authority Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s own secretary of health, has declared that artificial intelligence is “better informed than any doctor in the country.”
So I asked Dr. Claude what condition could explain this growing disinhibition, and the chatbot gave me six possibilities:
- Behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia
- Other dementias, including Alzheimer’s
- Bipolar disorder during mania or hypomania
- Brain injury, stroke or a brain tumor
- Delirium from an acute medical problem
- Psychiatric or developmental conditions
Or maybe Trump has no condition at all. Maybe he simply enjoys walking in a serpentine pattern between Air Force One and Marine One and wearing gloves on a mild day.
My greater worry is that all the people around Trump are also acting as if there’s no tomorrow. Given the polls, I can see why they might think that. The effect is a whole range of administration officials shedding whatever modicum of self-control they had in the first place.
Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth took a break from raising the troops’ testosterone to order up an al-Qaeda style livestreaming of the Fort Hood shooter’s execution. (Even Trump found that one out of bounds.)
On a tarmac in Texas, Vice President JD Vance launched into a gay smear, telling a person in the audience: “I love you too sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”
Trump ally Elon Musk, who is spending an unheard of $276 million to buy the election for Republicans, promoted the fabricated slander that Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, had entered a psychiatric facility.
The Justice Department, jettisoning its own rule about election-season political probes, raided the home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a favorite Trump target. DOJ also escalated its attacks on the press, launching an antitrust investigation into five major television networks related to Trump’s attempt to bar CNN from the “pool.”
The FBI reportedly plans to hire UFC fighters to teach agents hand-to-hand combat.
In the latest instance of unchecked violence at ICE, prosecutors in Houston say an agent intentionally struck a fleeing suspect with his car.
The Department of Homeland Security continued to fund, with taxpayer dollars, political campaign ads touting Trump, allegedly running them 570 times after a court ordered the ads to stop.
The Interior Department, just in time for Halloween, undertook a chainsaw massacre of more than 400 trees at Washington’s East Potomac Park without giving a federal judge adequate notice, as required. The judge accused Trump lawyers of doing “your absolute worst” and threatened contempt proceedings.
Trump’s ambassador to Greece, former Donald Trump Jr. fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, was fired after The Wall Street Journal reported that, among other things, she tried to get a Trump donor to pay her $100,000 AmEx bill (“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today”).
Two of Trump’s top political consultants, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, went to the Balkans to advise a pro-Russian government. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ daughter’s firm is reportedly representing the same government.
Staff at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission flagged suspicious trades involving multibillion-dollar bets that oil prices would fall, just 15 minutes before Trump said he would not strike Iranian power plants, Bloomberg News reported. But higher-ups ordered the staff to drop the inquiry.
Then there’s the deadliest act of the preelection impulsivity: The White House abandoned any pretense of defending Ukraine from Vladimir Putin.
Defying Congress, the administration suspended sanctions to allow Russia to export diesel to the United States — even though the amount of fuel would only extend supplies by a few hours’ worth. Blaming Ukraine for the spike in diesel prices caused by the Iran war, the administration also appears to have cut intelligence sharing and satellite communications help. Ukrainians are dying as a direct result.
***
“With no October surprise in sight, Republicans try to save themselves” was the headline atop a piece in Politico this week.
It’s true that Trump hasn’t produced anything to help Republicans, but it is not quite right to say there has been “no October surprise.” He has already produced more surprises than a normal president would come up with in a year of Octobers, and the month is only half over. Some of his surprises are downright shocking. But they aren’t working.
He pardoned guys who violated the Clean Air Act, saying this “means you’re as clean as a newborn baby’s ass.”
He mocked a woman who heckled at one of his rallies and was repeatedly punched by a man in the crowd: “He’s a fat guy. Wow.”
He referred to the Democratic nominee for Senate in South Carolina as “Annie Trannie” and called $4.36 per gallon gas “a small price to pay.”
He employed racist slurs against Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, calling him “Mohammed” and “a radical jihadist.”
He signaled his interest in renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, saying, “We’ll call it ‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas.’”
He announced that “leakers should be shot.”
He asserted, just weeks after threatening at the U.N. to “annihilate” Iran, that “there’s never been anybody in the history of the Nobel Prize that deserves it more.”
He talked loosely about Iran bombing Los Angeles and San Diego, and he revived his threats against Greenland just weeks after reaching agreement on the Danish territory.
He informed a Montana crowd that “Dum-ocrat communists” would take away their guns, to the delight of “the wild animals you have up here that like eating you.” (On the positive side, Trump could post videos of their deaths on social media.)
And he sent his unprepared new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, into the briefing room with instructions to extol his greatness. Judging from her delivery, the punctuation marks had been distributed randomly throughout her script.
She apparently did not have time to prepare for questions either, for when Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked her about the news of the day (whether Trump cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine) she replied, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” A question about her family induced her to refer to her husband as “my president” before correcting herself.
She had even more difficulty when later asked to identify the state in which she passed the bar exam. “When I moved to China,” she answered.
The little-known Chinese bar exam! Trump’s October grows more surprising by the hour.
And that’s on top of his genuine attempts to shift the direction of the election, such as the $5,000 bribes he keeps offering Americans if they return Republicans to power in Congress, and his mailing of one-time $500 Obamacare “rebate” checks to nearly a million Americans — mostly in battleground states.
But nothing seems to be moving the needle. Voters simply don’t believe Trump anymore. Only one in five believe that Trump would follow through on his $5,000 bribe if Republicans win. Even most Trump voters don’t buy his claims that life has become more affordable on his watch.
Undoubtedly there will be more surprises to come, and possibly some unpleasant ones. The Supreme Court on Wednesday handed Republicans yet another victory, this one increasing their spending advantage in the campaign’s final weeks.
Trump sent nerves jangling last week when he mentioned Project 2025 architect Russ Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, would “have some big surprises coming in another few weeks” and said Vought is “going to be one of the very important people in the history of our country.”
This was ominous. Was he plotting to send ICE agents and troops to polling places? (National Guard members have already been seen loitering at a D.C. ballot box, though they weren’t “guarding” the ballots.) Would the administration start raising its usual preelection alarms about some migrant caravan? (It already has.)
Or was Trump hinting at some postelection mischief? The Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, published an argument this year that the GOP-controlled Congress could “declare elections invalid and order a new election” in states where alleged “fraud” has occurred. These (Democratic) states would “pay the penalty … by not having representation in the U.S. House or Senate.”
But a group of sane lawmakers has already anticipated such insanity and is moving to block the possibility before it even begins. As the Journal reported, three of the more normal House Republicans signed a letter pledging to oppose any such attempt. With all Democrats on board, this should put an end to the matter.
At this point, the only true October Surprise Trump could deliver would be to do the right thing. End the tariffs. Support Ukraine. Work with Congress. Try to get Iran back into a nuclear deal like the one he ripped up.
But would he ever do that? You can bet your ass — or, if you prefer, Jon Husted’s — that he won’t.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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