Detached from reality: Uproar grows over Trump's late-night shouting matches

What kind of delusion would prompt Donald Trump, hired in a job to protect this country, to suggest that Iran “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego?

On Monday, at a campaign rally in Nebraska, where a successful president should not have to beg voters for support in such a Republican state a month before elections, Trump once again promised a “tremendous election victory” amid adverse polling.

Then, he suggested in his 90-minute ramble that high prices due to the war with Iran were a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe – keeping our country safe” – just before adding that the Iranians “can take out a city. . . Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.”

The crowd applauded.

What exactly were they applauding? Wiping out 5 million Americans? Punishing California for voting blue? The $8 per gallon gas tank prices? Were we supposed to understand that this was a joke, to offer up targets to Iranian attack?

Obviously, local officials, including the governor, the mayors of both cities, and the internet did not see anything like humor in the remark. Charitably, observers saw an untamed tongue putting partisan political smacks over the job of being president.

At the White House, Stephen Cheung, communications director said,“The media freakout . . . is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. Apart from the fact that Iran lacks any ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, San Diego is a major Navy port, the Marine base at Pendleton, and countless defense contractor sites are in Southern California.

Meanwhile, the war is not over, the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, prices remain high as a result, and Trump just announced he wants to deploy a third aircraft carrier group to the region.

Trump’s Strange Election Stances

The discussion about Trump has become open speculation about his mental capacity.

Multiple reports each week now show that Trump has trouble staying awake during meetings or events in the Oval Office, or reading what is before him, or confusing whether it was Brazil or India that just held elections this week. He announced an executive order allowing farm equipment use of a weakened red-dye diesel fuel without being able to explain publicly what it was, and asking for help from those gathered nearby.

In his speeches, Trump continues to preach that the country is in its “Golden Age,” without acknowledging economic hardships from high prices or health care cutbacks. He has said repeatedly that Iran has been defeated, only to then add that they will cave the week after the election. He glorifies autocratic leaders in Russia, China and North Korea while launching inexplicable trade wars with Canada and Europe.

We’re hearing that reports about moving rallies into high school gyms to look full and the choice of a supposedly unflattering photo of Trump playing golf are what sets Trump off on angry shouting matches rather than, say, the fact that AI chip imports are worsening trade deficit figures.

This week, after plenty of negative pushback about using public tax dollars to float millions of dollars’ worth of Trump “image” patriotic advertising – the dissembling term for Trump campaign ads in a year when he is not officially on any ballot, Trump decided his overstuffed PAC could pay for ads going forward. More than $10 million in taxpayer-funded ads have run since September, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking service – but Trump said last night that he would not reimburse those payments.. The ads on cable and network television were paid for through a $20-million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security.

Rather than acknowledge that using government money for “publicity or propaganda purposes” is a violation of federal law, Trump made it sound like a moment of personal generosity – after having credited himself with ordering the ad campaign with the tag “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

Guardian columnist Steven Greenhouse noted last week that “Trump’s delusional statements on the economy show that he is becoming more detached from reality and from rational understanding of how the world works.” It seems to apply to far more than trade deficit math.

The simple fact is that at this point – and maybe for a long time – Trump is unable to distinguish between what serves his personal appetites and what his job is as president of the entire country.

What a widening population sees is a delusional man, perhaps starting to show signs of mental deterioration, who cannot see foreign affairs except through transactions that benefit himself or his family, who cannot acknowledge the ill effects of his policies on economics and immigration, who cannot seem to distinguish between fact and non-fact.

Why isn’t Trump’s mental state — and the failure of his administration to deal with it — the leading issue of the election?

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.