Trump has always done offensive things, and said ignorant, incoherent, or insane things. But I don’t think he used to say or do them every day.
One thing I’ve heard about aging, which I can verify from my own life, is that it doesn’t change your character so much as magnify it. Whatever you’ve always been, you’ll be moreso as you get old.
This week revealed that pattern in 78-year-old Donald Trump, who did something stereotypically Trumpy every day from Monday to Saturday.
Monday. He started the week with a bang, by desecrating the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery to film a campaign TikTok video. You can dive into the long explanation of what ANC’s rules are, why those rules exist, and how Trump violated them. Or you can take another long dive into the flim-flam he, Vance, and his campaign spread to excuse his inexcusable behavior. But all you really need to do is look at this photo:
Trump giving an inappropriate thumbs-up is becoming a meme, like this image of Thumbs-Up Trump at Jesus’ crucifixion. I’m hoping Thumbs-Up Trump becomes as ubiquitous as Bernie in his mittens.
Tuesday. Trump announced a new line of NFT trading cards showing him in fantastically heroic settings — in superhero armor, wielding a lightning bolt — and looking slimmer and more muscular than he has in many years, if ever. For a mere $99 you get one digital file of a card-image. If you buy 250 of them ($24,750), you get one physical card, two tickets to a Trump-attended dinner at his golf club (I assume the one in New Jersey), and a piece of the true cross suit he wore when he debated Biden.
But MAGA isn’t a cult and Trump isn’t a grifter. It’s totally unfair to say that the man who made these cards or the people who spend money on them are weird.
Wednesday. Trump unleashed a series of Truth Social posts that were extreme even by his standards. He reposted memes that
- called for “public military tribunals” to try Barack Obama,
- suggested indicting the House January 6 Committee for sedition,
- commented on a photo of Harris and Hillary Clinton together that “blowjobs impacted both their careers differently”,
- pictured Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Gates in orange prison jumpsuits with the caption “How to Actually Fix the System”.
When he’s called on stuff like this, the usual excuse is that he didn’t create the memes, he just reposted them. But reposting without criticism is endorsement. It says, “I think more people should see this.”
Thursday. At a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he blamed wind energy for people eating less bacon.
Look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. And we are going to get the energy prices down. You know, this was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem.
Also Thursday, he began a two-day flip-flop on abortion, an issue that he insists voters don’t really care about. Currently, Florida bans almost all abortions of fetuses more than six weeks old. (Embryos, actually. They’re not considered fetuses until eight weeks.) NBC News asked Trump how he (a Florida resident) planned to vote on an upcoming Florida referendum to guarantee abortion rights “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider”.
He replied: “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” That sounded like a Yes vote on the referendum, which would repeal the six-week ban. A No vote would leave it in place.
In that same interview, he said that in his next administration, the government would pay for all IVF treatments (which are very expensive) but didn’t say what program would cover them or where the money would come from.
Friday. A busy day. After a freakout from Evangelical “Christians”, he walked back the previous day’s statement on the Florida referendum, announcing that he would vote No. The anti-abortion faction hates his IVF proposal too, but so far he hasn’t walked it back.
(Naturally, though, it’s Harris who gets bad press for changing the position she held on fracking five years ago, and for not providing details of her proposals. It would be completely unacceptable for Harris to change her position on some major issue from one day to the next, or to announce an expensive new program with no supporting details.)
Also Friday, he shared this insane dark fantasy with a Moms For “Liberty” gathering:
The transgender thing is incredible. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And then many of these childs [sic] 15 years later look back and say “What the hell. Who did this to me?”
This kind of stuff deserves to be judged by the Greyhound standard: If you were sitting next to a stranger on a cross-country bus, and he said something this detached from reality, you’d get up and move, wouldn’t you?
Friday night in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, Trump was introduced by Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, who (like Kamala) is Black. When Trump got on stage, he said:
That one is smart! You have smart ones and you have some that aren’t quite so good.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, I heard lots of people say things like this. But usually those statements explicitly included the N-word rather than just implying it. So I guess there has been progress.
Saturday and Sunday. His interview with Mark Levin aired on Fox News.
He confessed to “interfering” in the certification of the 2020 election, but claimed
Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering in a presidential election when you had every right to do it?
As MSNBC’s Joyce Vance noted, “There’s no right to interfere in a presidential election.” And former prosecutor Elizabeth de Vega added: “Keep talking, moron.”
On the trade deficit with China, he claimed “I had them down much smaller”, which is a fantasy. Here are the actual year-by-year US trade deficits with China. Note the peak in 2018, a Trump year, and the low in 2023, a Biden year.
He also claimed “China paid me hundreds of billions of dollars.” That might be a reference to tariffs, which Trump imagines are paid by foreign exporters rather than American importers. Ultimately, of course, tariffs are passed on to US consumers the same way that sales taxes are.
In the same interview, Trump called Kamala Harris “nasty” for the way she treated Mike Pence, presumably during their vice presidential debate in 2020. However, Harris supporters have never called for Pence to be hanged, as Trump supporters did on January 6.
But today begins a new week. Who knows what marvels it will reveal?
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
There was a lot of discussion after John McCain called Barack Obama “that one” in 2008. Some pundits viewed that as racist, but most had other angles. I see it as dehumanizing, robbing someone not only of being referred to by name, but not even by pronoun.
Trump’s been washed up for years now, but it’s nice to see he can still disrespect the troops with the best of them o7
I follow the news pretty closely, and heard/read most of the “stereotypically Trumpy” things that TFG said last week – except the bit about Rep. Donalds being one of “the smart ones”. I continue to be amazed about how he gets away with that and the other things you cite (e.g. the “transgender thing” and schools) not being made more out of or having any consequence. My test is to think ‘What if Harris (or Biden) said that?’ – it would be all over the NYTimes p.1. There continues to seem to be special allowances for Trump, no pushing cognitive tests etc., and doing the “both-sides” thing. Margaret Sullivan had a great post this week about what she called this “false balance” in her American Crisis substack.
But the NYT saw fit to publish the assertion “Trump Can Win on Character”, so who are we to misunderstand his behavior?
The piece wasn’t saying that Trump can win on his own good character. It was saying that his best tactic was attacking Harris’ character. Still a fairly stupid piece, but not quite what the headline suggested.
This blog is so helpful! I read it every week.
I have a minor nitpick about the way pregnancy is addressed in this article. You describe Florida law as banning “almost all abortions of fetuses more than six weeks old” (for which you correctly note the correct term is embro). This language overstates the amount of time women have to obtain an abortion, however, because the Florida law bans abortion not from conception, but from the beginning of the pregnancy as medically defined. As you probably know, “pregnancy” begins with the date of the last menstrual cycle, around two weeks before the embryo is actually conceived.
Florida’s ban is on abortion of embryos over four weeks old (or thereabout), not six.
I don’t think that’s possible to know when conception actually happened. It could happen anytime after the last menstruation.
True, and that’s why doctors count from the date of menstruation. What we do know for sure is that the date we begin counting pregnancy from is definitely earlier than the date pregnancy begins, and so women definitely don’t have a full six weeks. This choice of language has got to be deliberate on the part of the Right; it serves their interests for the public not to understand that six weeks doesn’t mean six weeks.
In the photo at the grave site at ANC, two of the women are holding out their index finger and little finger on their right hand. Is that some kind of right-wing symbol, like the upside-down flag?
Texas Longhorns, “Hook’em Horns.”
Aside from devil worship, I don’t know what else it might mean.
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