What just happened?
Last night Donald Trump went on the Joe Rogan show and did one of the most low energy, confused, ineffective interviews I’ve ever seen a presidential candidate do. It was so bad that at one point even Rogan was laughing out loud at him. Then Trump used this one hour podcast appearance as an excuse to show up three hours late for his own rally, by which time a huge chunk of his own people had already given up and gone home.
This is an implosion the likes of which we’ve never seen. I’ve been saying all along that Trump’s worsening dementia was the story of the 2024 election. The media has done everything it could to prevent it from being the story. But when you’ve got a candidate coming off as 100% senile and 75% dead during his “big push” interview down the stretch, and then basically no-showing his own rally because he couldn’t handle the fact that Kamala Harris was drawing a larger crowd size, that’s about as close to a dementia-based forfeit as a candidate can get.
What is even happening? We’re ten days from the election and the Republican nominee for President is pretty much just quitting. He’s giving up. He’s canceling half his events. His focus isn’t there at all for the events that he does show up to. This is a guy who has given up, perhaps not only on the election, but on life.
It’s just surreal that the Republican Party allowed this guy to have its nomination, given that everyone knew he was a cognitive corpse who was going to turn moldy down the stretch. Yet here we are.
Of course presidential elections have a way of remaining competitive even when they’re lopsided, and so here we are with ten days left, still needing to put in the work and run up the score just in case. But Trump, for his part, is almost trying to lose – as if he thinks he’s already lost. Let’s put in the work and prove him right.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report