I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to pantomime the act of giving fellatio.
I could have put it differently. I might have said that “a cognitively impaired man, who has long been showing signs of serious emotional instability and has a history of sexism and racism, engaged in crude behavior in front of a large audience.” But that wouldn’t capture an important reality:
This deeply impaired man is tied in the race to become the next president and could be holding the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal in less than three months.
I don’t know if this bizarre display will move votes away from Donald Trump. Nothing seems to dent the loyalty of his base. Trump voters are resolute in their determination to minimize his ghastly antics, or even to scrub them from their minds. (As one commenter said on social media today, Trump’s new mantra might be: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blow somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”)
Besides, it’s always difficult to single out one terrible moment at a Trump rally when there are so many from which to choose. Last night, for example, he insisted that he won Wisconsin twice. (He didn’t.) He also took a veiled racist shot at the Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is Black. “Your team is very good,” Trump told the crowd. “I would say the Greek is a seriously good player. Do you agree? And tell me, who has more Greek in him, the Greek or me? I think we have about the same, right?” Antetokounmpo is of Greek and Nigerian parentage, and was born in Athens. I am a half-Greek myself (my mother was Irish American), and the Bucks star is as Greek as I am, but we all get the joke: A Black Greek! Get it? He’s Greek …and Black!
Trump is white, and we know this, by the way, because he told us so. During a stop in Michigan before he got to Wisconsin, Trump explained that he could have been living an easier life on the golf course had he chosen not to run for president:
That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned, beautiful.
This was not the first time Trump had made comments about his skin. But I digress, because I’d rather be talking about Trump’s clumsy racism than his hummer on a mic holder.
Look, my Greek father lived to be 94 years old. He might have found the idea of a Black Greek basketball player kind of amusing, and he might have laughed about it among his poker buddies. My dad was a working-class, shot-and-beer guy who told more than his share of sexist and racist jokes.
But if my father in his late 70s had simulated a blow job in mixed company—never mind in front of an audience that included children—I’d have brought him in for a complete neurological workup. Despite an ability to swear that rivaled the Old Man in the movie A Christmas Story, he deeply disapproved of men who swore or were crude in front of women and kids. When I would go out drinking with him, I occasionally saw him go over and caution other men whose language was getting out of hand. (He was a former cop and worked as a bouncer for a time.) Dad was not exactly Emily Post, but there were limits.
Trump, by most reports, has always been a vulgar and ignorant man. This creepy moment in Milwaukee will add to our national and international humiliation if he is returned to office. But more important, manifesting this kind of disinhibited behavior in public more and more often is a warning sign that he is simply not stable enough to sit in the Oval Office.
I do not know if Trump’s erratic behavior, his apparent physical decline, his bizarre rambles and their mental cul-de-sacs are part of a larger illness. Trump’s critics claim that he has dementia and other afflictions. I am not a doctor, and I cannot reach that conclusion. But I know this much: If Donald Trump were your father, your husband, your brother, your uncle, or merely your friend, you would insist that he see a doctor, and you would likely shield him from large gatherings where he could become an object of ridicule. You might even suggest that family or friends look in on him more often.
Whatever small mercies and considerations you might offer to a man acting like Trump, you would certainly not place him in positions of pressure or responsibility, or inflict situations on him in which he would be called upon to make speedy and important decisions. You definitely would not make him the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and place the safety of billions of innocent human beings in his hands.
The rally crowd, ever faithful and willing to do its part, laughed as Trump pretended to pleasure a piece of equipment. But for the rest of us, the laughter has to stop, and the horror of what might happen in a few days must take its place.