TRUMP IS BIDEN, IF BIDEN WERE A STUPID, NARCISSISTIC RIGHT-WING HATEMONGER

You won't like this one, but here goes.

Politico Playbook is acknowledging the obvious signs of Donald Trump's struggles in the late stages of this campaign:

Recently, it’s become something of a pattern: Trump is scheduled for an interview with a neutral media outlet, the date nears and then ... things fall apart.

It happened just this week to planned Trump sit-downs with NBC in Philadelphia and CNBC’s “Squawk Box” — and that’s on the heels of him backing out of a “60 Minutes” episode earlier this month.

So why is this happening?

Playbook has learned that yet another outlet was given an explanation by Trump’s team for why their own interview wasn’t coming to fruition: exhaustion.

The Trump campaign had been in conversations for weeks with The Shade Room about a sit-down interview. The site, which draws an audience that is largely young and Black, hosted an interview with Harris just last week.

But as no interview materialized, Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign....

In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

I keep telling you that I don't believe Trump is experiencing serious dementia yet -- some impairment, yes, but he can still function most of the time. Last night, at the Al Smith dinner, he seemed perfectly capable of delivering a version of his stump speech, with some new jokes (written by "a couple of people from Fox") and a few ad-libs. But maybe that's no surprise -- Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, kept giving speeches until 1994, five years after he left office, even though he'd been displaying signs of mental decline for a decade before that.

For now, I think Trump doesn't have enough energy to maintain a full campaign schedule, so we get moments like his bizarre decision earlier this week to end a town hall early and turn it into a DJ party.

Trump will probably be in a state of full-blown dementia eventually, though I'm not sure when. Now I think he's where Joe Biden is -- minus Biden's obvious intelligence, mastery of facts, empathy, and decency, none of which Trump ever had.

The fact that The New York Times became utterly obsessed with Biden's age in the first half of this year doesn't take away from the fact the paper eventually published a story about Biden's mental state that was detailed, blanced, and, to me, persuasive. It appeared shortly after his bad debate with Trump, and it portrayed the president as often clear-headed, perceptive, and knowledgeable:

In the days since the debate debacle, aides and others who encountered him, including foreign officials, described him as being in good shape — alert, coherent and capable, engaged in complicated and important discussions and managing volatile crises. They cited example after example in cases where critical national security issues were on the line.

Aides present in the Situation Room the night that Iran hurled a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel portrayed a president in commanding form, lecturing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone to avoid a retaliatory escalation that would have inflamed the Middle East. “Let me be crystal clear,” Mr. Biden said. “If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.”

Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks. “You do this,” Mr. Biden said forcefully, “and I’m out.” Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response.

But frequent travel and sheer exhaustion impairs him:

Mr. Biden’s trips to Europe were marked by moments of sharpness in important meetings — including a complex session on diverting income from Russian assets to aid Ukraine — mixed with occasional blank-stared confusion, according to people who met with him. At some points, he seemed perfectly on top of his game, at others a little lost....

But when it came time for the president’s own speech on D-Day, he delivered it forcefully and clearly, gathering momentum and ending on a vigorous note.

Biden was struggling to deal with multiple crises while running an underdog campaign for president. No wonder he was tired. That would be a strain on a younger person.

Biden starts with a knowledge base that's much greater than Trump's. He's been a serious man dealing with serious national and (especially) global issues for half a century. He's spent a lifetime absorbing real information, not the simplistic, bias-confirming junk Trump gets from Fox News. Biden is still quite capable of tapping into that knowledge base and making sound judgments. (Trump has never been capable of making sound judgments, except when he's trying to attack an enemy or keep his name in the papers.)

Biden is humane and empathetic. Trump has always been a hate-filled bigot and narcissist.

Take away everything that has made Biden a gifted public official, add hate and an off-the-charts level of egotism, and you have Trump a decade ago. Then add the same level of impairment to each, and you have Trump and Biden now.

And Trump was always a glib, trash-talking motormouth, while Biden always struggled with public speaking. They've both declined, but Biden's decline leaves him grasping for words. Trump gives us word salad, but he just keeps talking. Unfortunately, to many people, he comes off as more articulate as a result. (I don't just mean his superfans. Remember that the Trump voters who don't love him but just want egg prices to be lower tend not to be the best-informed voters in America, so they can't tell that his "weave" monologues are a bunch of malarkey.)

If Trump is elected, he's likely to decline further -- or he'll keep a very light schedule, maybe even lighter than the schedule he kept when he was in the White House, and his handlers will manage to squeeze four years out of him, the way Reagan's handlers managed to get him to the end of his second term.

Trump is declining. It's just not clear how fast. The way most liberals talked about him when he was president, by now he should be marking his third or fourth year on a locked memory-care ward. Instead, he's still functioning, more or less. And he might eke out a few more years, as an evil, stupid man in slow but persistent decline.