October 19, 2024

A number of people telling me we all need a night off had almost convinced me not to write tonight. 

But then Trump spoke at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he told a long, meandering story about golfing legend Arnold Palmer that ended with praise for Palmer’s… anatomy. 

He went on to call Vice President Kamala Harris—whose name he deliberately mispronounced—“a sh*t vice president. The worst. You’re the worst vice president. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here, you’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.”  

As Trump’s remarks got weirder and weirder, the Fox News Channel cut away and instead showed Harris being cheered at a packed, exuberant, super-charged rally in Georgia. 

Trump’s speech comes on top of his repeated backing out of interviews and his bizarre appearances. Last night, his advice to an audience in Detroit to vote took its own wild turn: “Jill, get your fat husband off the couch,” he said. “Get that fat pig off the couch. Tell him to go and vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country. Get that guy the hell off our— get him up, Jill, slap him around. Get him up. Get him up, Jill. We want him off the couch to get out and vote.” 

Trump’s performances over the past few days seem to confirm that the 2024 October surprise is the increasingly obvious mental incapacity of the Republican candidate for president. 

It seems clear that a vote for Trump is really a vote for his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who if he becomes president will be the youngest American president in our history. At 40 years old, he is two years younger than Theodore Roosevelt was when he took office in 1901 at 42. Vance would also be one of the least experienced presidents ever. His 18 months in the Senate has given him only slightly more experience in office than Chester Alan Arthur, who succeeded James Garfield in 1881. Arthur was a political operative who had never held elected office at all before becoming vice president. 

I’m going to leave you tonight with my friend Peter Ralston’s image of Maine’s Atlantic puffins, in whose expressions I am reading the consternation that speaks for me right now.

I’ll be back at the wheel tomorrow.

[Image by Peter Ralston, “Four Razorbills with Puffins.”]

Notes:

You can find Peter and his wife Terri at the studio in Rockport, Maine, or at www.ralstongallery.com

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-arnold-palmer-comments-ibaffle-1971769

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