A Looney Candidate lost in time and space

Trump tires of town hall questions in Pa. and mutates into a silly old disc jockey.

There are a lot of things to read about and think about in the New York Times. Blood sugar in the Science section, big names in the arts in, of course, the arts! Life expectancy for those who are worried about adding  themselves to the data on death.

In fact, you could spend all day just thinking about what The Times presents. Ukraine, Gaza, new pandas heading here from China!

What an immigration crackdown could mean for cheap milk. Chefs who don’t want restaurants anymore.

But when you dive a little deeper, it is inevitable you will run into something like a headline that reports: “Trump Has Become Unmoored in Time.”

What the hell does that mean?

I didn’t know, but because it came from Paul Krugman, who I respect and have read for years, I had to look into it.

Why?

What more do we need to know than the suggestion that Haitians are eating people’s pets in Ohio, or the “Kamala Harris Administration” is encouraging the world to send us its mental patients, its murderers, so the housewives of America should look out for swarthy people with knives who want to rape them or kill them?

Those things have already been put into the record by Trump’s increasingly desperate campaign, so why add anything else? If you don’t know he is out of control and should not win your votes, what is wrong with you?

Krugman’s point is that Trump just seems wedded to subjects like crime that he raised long ago, ignoring the fact that crime is on the decline, and has been for quite a while. Same with inflation, the economy, the jobs markets, the price of food in those mysterious places I am certain he has never visited, supermarkets.

Doesn’t matter. He just keeps hitting the themes, like time never happened and scary, bad things lurk around every corner.

We are all used to that by now, although it is remarkable that so much of it still works with his “base.”

The hits just keep on coming, literally.

Just the other day in Oaks, Pa. He was holding a town hall when it was interrupted by two medical events in the audience. He stopped taking questions and cued up the music track he plays back at Mar-a-Lago.

“Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”

Well, perhaps the people who came to the event. Instead, Donald Trumps hit parade rang out while he bobbed and danced on stage.

For more than 30 minutes.

This did not deter his loyalists, some of whom found it quite peachy. The prospect of a fat old man “getting down” (Yikes, the very thought of it!) did not put them off.

The rest of us?

The man is nutty as a bag of bolts.

 It is astounding he has the polling numbers he has received. He and Vice President Kamala Harris have been neck to neck or trading leads every couple of days. That’s so hard to believe, you know?

We’re running out of time.

And hopefully, out of patience, too.

Charlie Madigan was a reporter and editor for 40 years at United Press International and The Chicago Tribune. He lives and writes in Evanston. His latest novel “MINE” Is available on Amazon.com. Audio versions are on Facebook and here on Substack.