Is it just me or is Donald Trump getting crazier by the day?
How is it possible for a man who is a congenital liar, a convicted felon, a con man and a fraud who happens to be emotionally and mentally unstable still in a tight race for the presidency? Crazy as it sounds, “Crazy” is one heartbeat from the White House — again.
There’s no questioning that Trump’s rallies are getting weirder. One of his followers physically attacked a member of the press at the Johnstown, Pa., rally Aug. 31. Video of the incident shows Trump actively encouraging the man as he was being tackled by security. Trump called the attack, “beautiful.” Then he said, “That’s alright. That’s OK. No, he’s on our side.”
The Associated Press reported: “The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to declare, ‘Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?'”
Trump, of course, is a longtime critic of mainstream media — meaning any media outlet that does not bow down to him. Then as now, he has called journalists “the enemy of the people,” and his people believe that because to believe the media reports would require them to accept that they are following a crazy man.
Trump and his Magadonians actively encouraging and cheering a fellow supporter for an act of violence certainly registers as crazy.
I would like to imagine Trump’s new penchant for saying the craziest possible things will finally flip the switch and cause some of his supporters to desert him. Or failing to lose a single Magadonian, perhaps people thinking about voting for Trump will change their minds and say, “He’s crazy.” I am not convinced it will make much difference, but I am determined to make a gargantuan effort.
I have devised (with a helping hand from something known as The Rapture Index) what I label The Crazy Index.
Donald Trump pauses while speaking after officially accepting the Republican presidential nomination on stage on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wis. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Crazy Index
The Crazy Index attempts to keep track of the number of crazy statements made by Donald Trump. These remarks are factored into a cohesive indicator. The Crazy Index is designed to measure the increasing danger posed by Trump descending into crazier and crazier rhetoric.
The Crazy Index is the Dow Jones Industrial Average of crazy statements, indicating the diminished mental acuity of Trump.
The Crazy Index currently has 35 categories of crazy comments made by Trump recently. Each category receives a numerical value of 1 to 5. The crazier the statement, the higher the number the category receives.
If Trump made crazy statements in all 35 categories and each statement rated a score of 5, The Crazy Meter Score for Trump would be 175. All politicians engage in less-than-truthful comments, hyperbole or stretch the truth with stories. The average among American politics is 20%. That would be a score of 35.
The higher the number, the faster we’re moving toward the Republican nominee for president being too crazy to be our president.
Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John’s Church across Lafayette Park from the White House Monday, June 1, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
‘I’ll take a baker’s dozen of crazy’
Immigration. “Why is it that millions of people were allowed to come into our country from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums, even insane asylums, that’s a — it’s a mental institution on steroids. That’s what it is.”
“Why is it that millions of people were allowed to come into our country from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums.”
Previously Trump referred to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of real Americans. No one missed the Nazi language. In case someone missed the connection, Hitler provided a “symbolic rebirth,” and “a symbolic change of lineage” from the “Hebrew prophets” as the “spiritual ancestors of Christianity.” In doing so, “he renounces this ‘ancestry’ in a ‘materialistic’ way by voting himself and the members of his lodge a different ‘blood stream’ from that of the Jews.”
This is crazy because on the day he announced his run for the presidency, Trump already was crazy: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Magnets. At a rally in Iowa, Trump went off on a strange tale about magnets. “Think of it, magnets,” he said. “Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets. Why didn’t they use John Deere? Why didn’t they bring in the John Deere people? Do you like John Deere? I like John Deere.”
Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief for Meidas Touch, said, “Dementia Trump is riffing on his magnets in a water story, then tries to pander to the Iowa audience by bringing John Deere into the story because what’s in his head to repeat in IA over and over is ‘John Deere,’ and the whole deal just short circuits into an addled, sweaty mess.”
Kamala Harris: Trump used his social-media website to amplify a crude remark about Vice President Kamala Harris that suggested she traded sexual favors to help her political career. The post, by another user on Truth Social, was an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in 2016. The text read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.”
The remark was a reference to Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and an unfounded right-wing contention that Harris’ once-upon-a-time romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco whom she dated in the mid-1990s while he was speaker of the California State Assembly, fueled her political rise.
Trump’s response to his own vulgarity and lack of decency will be his favorite defense: “I didn’t say it. I simply reposted it.”
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Hannibal Lecter. “Silence of the lamb! The late great Hannibal Lecter. It is a wonderful man.” Trump repeatedly has said Hannibal Lecter, a fictional serial killer, is a “great man” who deserves our “congratulations” — so why keep him out of the U.S.?
He seems confused about whether Hannibal Lecter is a character or the man who played him in a movie. He’s remarked, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?” Trump has said he loves Lecter because the actor once said, “I love Donald Trump” in a TV interview.
By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. Yet Trump just loves yelling “Hannibal Lecter!” at his rallies, even if it is crazy.
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg and the pirate Jack Sparrow. In an April rally, after describing the Battle of Gettysburg, in which about 50,000 soldiers died, in Trump’s words, “so beautiful in so many different ways,” he delivered a fake quote from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in a bad Captain Jack Sparrow voice: “Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice it? He’s no longer in favor. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill.” He said, “Wow, that was a big mistake.” He lost his big general. “Never fight uphill, me boys,” but it was too late.
Tim Walz. “His nickname is Tampon,” Trump told an audience full of National Guard members, many of whom wore their camouflage uniforms. “Tampon Tim Walz,” he said later, alluding to a Minnesota bill that Walz, as governor, helped pass requiring access to menstrual products in public schools.
I think Trump has been reading old Putin speeches. Putin once defended the Motherland (Russia) as a “man’s affair” and telling women he did not need to engage in public debates on which was better, “Tampax or Snickers.”
Inflation. If he were still president, “there would be no inflation,” Trump claims. “A lot of great things would have happened, but now you have millions and millions of dead people. And you have people dying financially, because they can’t buy bacon; they can’t buy food; they can’t buy groceries; they can’t do anything. And they’re living horribly in our country right now.”
Among other things, Trump is lying about the price of bacon. Maybe it is because Kamala Harris could have starred in that television ad from the 1990s. The woman says, “I can bring up the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and still make you feel like a man.” Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do about strong, intelligent women. And his understanding of the American economy is crazy.
“I think the abortion issue has been very much tempered down, and I’ve answered I think very well in the debate.”
Abortion. “I think the abortion issue has been very much tempered down, and I’ve answered I think very well in the debate, and it seems to be much less of an issue, especially for those where they have the exceptions,” Trump said. “As you know, and I think it’s when I look for 52 years, they wanted to bring abortion back to the states. They wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade and that’s Democrats, Republicans and Independents and everybody. Liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back in the states. And I did that.”
In addition to saying all Democrats wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, Trump continues to accuse Democrats of killing babies after they are born. “Previous to (Virginia Gov.) Glenn (Youngkin), the governor, he said the baby will be born, we will put the baby aside, and we will decide with the mother what we’re going to do. In other words, whether or not we’re going to kill the baby.”
His account simply isn’t happening. It’s fiction.
Trump also declared his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”
He has been pro-choice and anti-abortion. He has bragged about getting rid of Roe and now wants to be for reproductive rights. He is a high-speed yo-yo on a string. He’s doing loops and tricks.
At the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump kisses the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company helmet of Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
The attempted assassination of Trump. “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault,” he said of the attempted assassination against him last month. “They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”
Election denial and indictment. On Fox News, Trump offered what sounded like a confession. “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up.”
Putting on his pants. “First they say, ‘Sir, how do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?’” Trump mused. “And I say, ‘Well, I don’t think about it too much.’ I don’t want to think about it because if I think about it too much maybe I won’t want to do it, but I love it because we’re going to do something for this country that’s never been done before.”
“First they say, ‘Sir, how do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?’”
Digital trading cards. Nothing says “crazy” like the former president marketing digital trading cards for $99 each in an effort to raise cash. The images of Trump on the cards make him Superman. The man who would be president has side hustles selling gold athletic shoes (the Wicked Witch of the West would be envious), Bibles and trading cards. The digital trading cards are the clearest evidence of a man who has gone down the rabbit hole.
Women as voters. While his polling with women falters, Trup praised his supporters’ husbands for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them. “Somebody said, ‘Women don’t like Donald Trump,’” he said in Johnstown, Pa., Aug. 30. “I said, ‘I think that’s wrong. I think they love me.’ I love them.”
He pointed to a group of women from North Carolina who have attended 227 of his rallies: “They’re wealthy as hell. Look at them. They’ve got nothing but cash. Their husbands are great. But they allow them to go all over the country.”
He recalled a conversation with some of their husbands where he asked, “How do you put up with this? Your wives are traveling all over the place. Do you mind?”
The husbands told him: “‘We trust our wives, sir. We trust them implicitly.”
Trump’s response was to say the women are “always perfectly coiffed … they’re beautiful.”
On Feb. 12, 2000, Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife), former model Melania Knauss, posed with financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
A box of doughnut holes to go with your baker’s dozen
That baker’s dozen alone blows the top out of the Crazy Index, but there’s more, so much more.
There are his crazy statements about interest rates, the economy, oil prices, climate change, the stock market, leadership, Israel, Ukraine, guns, liberalism, how crazy Kamala Harris is, crime rates, civil rights, the food supply, gangs, a nation in decline, the border, sharks and Nazis.
My fear is that as lying hasn’t hurt Trump, he will still be the MAGA sweetheart when he has “gone around the bend” — if he hasn’t already.
Yes, I want Trump’s Achilles heel to be his own crazy words. As he descends into illusion, excess hyperbole, deep-rooted demagoguery and self-praise, as he says crazier and crazier stuff, I want to see his poll numbers drop into Dante’s last hell. By my math, Trump’s Crazy Index Score already is 165. He’s crazy.
Instead of profanity, a strong push for rational thought, deliberation and debate should return to the center of our politics. As long as Trump keeps saying stuff like this at his rallies and on Truth Social, and as long as his defenders — including JD Vance — keep showing up on national news shows to defend his insane statements, we will remain stuck in the crazy cycle. And that’s exactly where Trump wants the nation to be.
He insists he isn’t incoherent; he’s just misunderstood. “The fake news will say ‘Trump is rambling,’” he declared recently in Philadelphia. “No, it’s genius what I’m doing up here, but nobody understands.”
There it is in a nutshell: We say, “Crazy.” Trump says, “I’m a genius.”
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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