Trump’s ‘Crazy Shit’ Keeps Piling Up
The Biden camp has loads of, er, material, to work with.
“President Biden himself personally instructed some of his top campaign aides to be even more aggressive in highlighting some of President Trump’s more inflammatory and wild comments. We’re told that the thrust of the president’s direction was to significantly ramp up the campaign’s efforts to highlight the crazy shit that Trump says in public.”
—CNN reporter MJ Lee, live on the air and without a bleep, February 20, 2024
TO: Joe Biden
FROM: Concerned citizen
DATE: Now!
SUBJECT: Missed opportunities
YOU DON’T KNOW ME, Mr. President, but there’s something very important I must tell you. I heard on CNN a while back that you instructed your campaign staff to ramp up its efforts to highlight the “crazy shit” that your opponent, Donald Trump, is wont to say. It’s a great suggestion, but I am afraid your team is letting you down. That’s because a whole heck of a lot of crazy shit seems to be falling through the cracks and just sort of piling up. And stinking.
Now, I did see your new ad, part of a $50 million campaign, calling attention to the fact that Trump has “been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.” You’ve made some hay over Trump’s delusional claim that “everybody wanted” individual states to decide just how hard it is for women to have an abortion, which he is proud to have brought about, even as Republicans are getting clobbered over this issue. And, of course, your campaign has noted Trump’s support for white supremacists, his vow to be a dictator “on Day One,” his plan to free the hooligans who laid siege to the Capitol on January 6th, and his talk about how “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
It’s all very well and good, Mr. President, to point out stuff like this, but it really falls short of conveying just how deeply deranged the former and would-be-future president truly is. It’s not for nothing that one source referred to Trump’s comments at the Capitol Hill Club on June 13 as “rambling” and “like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.” That’s how he is all the time. Trump churns out an almost nonstop torrent of goofs, gaffes, solecisms, malapropisms, and utter nonsense. And then, maddeningly, he and his followers go bonkers if you so much as stand oddly still for a few seconds. He has conniptions if you lose your train of thought, and then drives his own train into a 271-word pileup from which there are no survivors.
Look, Mr. President, since you don’t know who I am, I might as well be frank: Everybody can see it. You’re old. You’re slow and stiff. You make mistakes when you talk. But here’s the thing, here’s why I’m trying to help you now—when you talk, it’s not crazy shit that comes out. I know that’s a low bar, but your opponent can’t clear it.
TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, Trump’s insane proclamation that “the late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man.” Who would say something like that? And his grasp of public policy is just as unhinged. Take what Trump said on June 15, the day before his 78th birthday, while speaking at a black church in Detroit. After telling his audience, which for some reason was mostly white, that immigrants were taking black people’s jobs, he declared:
One hundred percent of the net jobs created under Biden have gone to the illegals. Did you know that? One hundred percent of the jobs created have gone to illegals. Uh, and then you’re supposed to vote for this guy. And he doesn’t know the difference. You’re not talking about him. You’re talking about people that control him—fascists, Communists, people that want to see our country destroyed.
That, in my opinion, would make for a great ad. Just that. You don’t even have to say it’s not true, because it’s so nuts. Just play the clip and say, “I’m Joe Biden, and I approve this message.”
Here’s another clip from the same event where your opponent says some bonkers things about immigrants:
We’re being inundated. Think of it. Millions of people are coming in from prisons, from mental institutions, they’re terrorists at levels that we have never seen before. In ’19, let’s see, one year, yeah, 2019, we had a survey done, how many terrorists were coming in, that was a Trump year, 2019, they said “none.” Now I don’t even believe that. I think that’s too good. That. I wish the fake news wasn’t fake then, but it was done by Border Patrol, et cetera. And they said no terrorists came in in 2019. I can’t believe that. But as soon as they took over, they have thousands of terrorists coming into our country. And we’re all going to be hearing about that.
You’d need a sixty-second ad to get all this in, but it would be worth it. Nobody could hear that and not want to do everything possible to keep this lunatic from becoming president, could they?
AS I MENTIONED, Mr. President, one of Trump’s campaign themes is to question your mental acuity. After his star turn in front of white people in a black church, Trump spent the latter part of his day in Detroit before an even whiter crowd at a Turning Point Action convention. (I’m not sure if you saw the headlines, but this is the event where other participants unfurled a “White Boy Summer” banner and tossed out T-shirts bearing this message to attendees.) Trump, during his talk, claimed you “[don’t] even know what the word ‘inflation’ means” and challenged you to “take a cognitive test like I did”—and then immediately misidentified his former presidential physician as Ronny Johnson; his actual name is Ronny Jackson.
You guys posted about it on social media, and the late-night comics had some fun with it, which is all well and good. But that wasn’t even the craziest shit Trump said at this event. He also said a lot of stuff like this, where he fulminates against faucets:
I’ve had the experience—I take a shower, I want that beautiful head of hair to be nice and wet; lather. I want it to be lathered beautifully. And I get the best stuff you can buy, and I dump it all over, and then I turn on the water and the damn water drips out. I can’t get this stuff out of my hair, it’s a horrible thing.
And this, about violent sadists being employed by the federal government:
The other thing we did is, we had civil service, 9,000 people that were crooks and thugs and sadists, a lot of sadists. They enjoyed beating up our wounded warriors in less than primetime. You know, in primetime, they would’ve gotten the hell beat out of them, but our people were in bad shape and they would beat them up. We had sadists. Can you believe this is a country? But it’s the way it is.
And this, where he jokes about one of his own devoted lieutenants being violently murdered:
Has anyone heard of Alphonse Capone? Scarface. He was so mean that if he had dinner with a person and if he didn’t like him, he would kill the person, they would never find him again, like Mike Lindell. He wouldn’t like Mike. You know why? He’d say, “Those ads, they are driving me crazy. Let’s get rid of this guy.”
I could go on, but my point, Mr. President, is that all you have to do to discredit this guy is let him talk and then hit playback.
Trump himself seems to know this. That’s why he recently suggested that he might deliberately lose his debate with you later this week to make sure you are not removed from the Democratic ticket. He’s coming up with a preemptive excuse: If you do relatively well, it’s because he dumbed down his game on purpose. (Dear God, what would that even look like?) As the Church Lady used to say, how convenient.
PERHAPS THE CRAZIEST SHIT that Trump says comes out when he is talking about science, as was driven home during the pandemic.
Earlier this year, Trump made the truly bizarre claim, refutable by anyone, that magnets no longer work if they get wet, saying, “Now all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” More recently, during a June 9 rally in Las Vegas, he weighed in on the danger of electric boats.
I know what follows is too long for a TV ad, but maybe you could do a digital ad. (Perhaps something like this uncut version with a pitch-perfect soundtrack.) One way or another, Mr. President, this torrent of verbal diarrhea really has to find its way to the very top of the crazy shit pile. Here’s a transcription:
So I said, “Let me ask you a question.” And he said, “Nobody ever asks this question,” and it must because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. I say, “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now under water, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there”—by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? Lotta shark—I watched some guys justifying it today, “Well, they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were . . . not hungry but they misunderstood what—who she was.” These people are crazy. He said, “There’s no problem with sharks, they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming,” no, really got decimated and other people, too, a lot of shark attacks. So I said, “There’s a shark ten yards away from the boat, ten yards, or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, “You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, “I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.” But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time.
Given just how brilliant a question Trump thought up, all by himself, about electricity versus the shark, it’s sort of amazing that it did not also occur to him to ask why the electricity in the water wouldn’t just kill the shark. More amazing still is that this wasn’t even the craziest shit Trump said at this rally. The craziest shit he said, suitable for ad use, was this:
“These are sick people, and I hope the militer, I hope the militer-y revolts at the voting booth, and just says, ‘we’re not going to take it.’ They can say anything. They’re a party of misinformation, disinformation.”
I hope the military revolts at the voting booth? What does this even mean? Is he calling for a coup? Again? How is it that your team is not all over this?
And then there was Trump’s talk last Saturday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference of Christian groups in Washington, D.C., where he broached the idea of creating a “migrant league of fighters” to square off against mixed martial arts professionals (billing it, plausibly, as “not the worst idea I’ve ever had”); struggled unsuccessfully to say the word “rebuttal,” offering up “refuttal” and “refutle” as options; retold the story of the electricity and the sharks, insisting that his earlier telling was “not rambling”; claimed his earlier mixup of Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi was “pure genius”; asserted that “the books” are being rewritten to say he is the worst-treated president in history, topping Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln, whom he describes as the former frontrunners for that title; lauded the mandatory display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, with nary a nod to how often he breaks them; told his audience he doesn’t need their votes in November, only that they “guard our vote” and “stop the steal”; suggested that the U.S. military might be renaming one of its forts after the Rev. Al Sharpton; and told the crowd, to raucous applause: “And I will shut down the federal Department of Education, and we will move everything back to the states, where it belongs and where they can individualize education and do it with the love for their children.” (All of this, and much more, has thoughtfully been compiled into a video clip by Ben Meiselas of the pro-democracy news network MeidasTouch.)
Another such list of precious Donald Trump moments could be compiled from his talk later that day in Philadelphia—in fact, that’s what Meiselas did here—but I think that you get the idea.
In fact, Mr. President, there is so much crazy shit spewing from the former president’s mouth that nobody can keep up with it. But, for the sake of the country, I urge you to try.
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