Sharks, Donald Trump claimed, were attacking more frequently than usual (not true) and posed a newfound risk because boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which would cause them to sink because they were too heavy (really, really not true...)
... Trump, undeterred by truth or science, invoked his intellectual credentials by mentioning his “relationship to MIT.” (Trump’s uncle was a professor at the university, pioneering rotational radiation therapy, which seems a somewhat tenuous connection for conferring shark- or battery-related expertise to his nephew.)
This is pure Dunning-Kruger-ism -- Trump doesn't have any expertise on these subjects, but he thinks he does. He's been like this for years. Plus he thinks this is tremendously entertaining.
I don't see this as a sign of dementia. I see it as a sign that Trump's happy place is being an amateur observational comic, the wittiest guy at the dinner after the country club's senior golf tournament.
Trump's happy place is not policy. It wouldn't have been policy if he'd been a serious candidate for president thirty years ago. Tom Nichols writes:
... Trump’s staff tries to put just enough policy fiber into Trump’s nutty verbal soufflés that they can always sell a talking point later, as if his off-ramps from reality are merely tiny bumps in otherwise sensible speeches. Trump himself occasionally seems surprised when these policy nuggets pop up in a speech; when reading the teleprompter, he sometimes adds comments such as “so true, so true,” perhaps because he’s encountering someone else’s words for the first time and agreeing with them.I fear that Trump will be elected in November, but this is what gives me a small glimmer of hope.
We know that one of the things that rankled Trump during his presidency was the fact that aides and underlings sometimes wouldn't do exactly what he wanted them to do. J.D. Vance talks about this in his new interview with Ross Douthat:
I first met Trump in 2021. One of the stories he told me was about how some of our generals were changing the timings of troop redeployments in the Middle East so that they could tell him that the troop levels were coming down when in reality they were just changing the way in which troop levels jump up and down in the short term.We've been told that he's solved this problem -- everyone in his second administration will be a Trump loyalist. However, we're also told that the underlings will be ideologues committed to the mad schemes of Project 2025.
... The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.”
We think it will be a sign of loyalty to Trump if his aides and underlings relentlessly pursue the Project 2025 goals. But what if Project 2025 isn't what Trump wants? Remember, his people have a boilerplate answer whenever someone in the press writes a story based on the assumption that he shares his advisers' and allies' goals:
Campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement, “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”What if, this time, he decides that being a religious-right policy zealot is what constitutes disloyalty to him, because the zealots' priorities aren't his priorities? What if he just wants freedom from legal troubles, a little racism (mass deportations, a Muslim ban), and money flowing into his bank accounts? What if he doesn't care about advancing the cause of Christian nationalism or dismantling the administrative state? What if all that bores him, because he just wants to be America's emcee, telling shark jokes while taking bribes and getting revenge against an enemy or two, with a Get Out of Jail Free card thrown in?
If Trump wins, I think that's the best-case scenario.
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