Trump’s Cacophony of Chaos Continues

Call it chaos in a blender.

The last week before the general election finds president Donald J. Trump crisscrossing the country visiting swing states where he trails, issuing bilious threats and spewing lies wherever he goes.

He’s also sounding more and more paranoid and believes the media, even his formerly beloved Fox News, is out to get him. On Tuesday he tweeted, “Until November 4th., Fake News Media is going full on Covid, Covid, Covid. We are rounding the turn. 99.9%.”

Meanwhile, during the past two weeks the U.S. saw more new cases of coronavirus than at any other two-week period during the entire pandemic. Trump had a response to that too. On Tuesday he issued a press release that said, “President Trump’s coronavirus response has saved over 2 million lives and outperformed other nations.”

Facts matter little to Trump. It’s all about the show, and his chaotic shitshow is confusing and rattling voters.

On a one-week road trip through West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and western Maryland, I spoke with dozens of Americans. Many of them plan to vote in this election for the very first time. Others told me they won’t vote at all. But most said they’ve voted in multiple presidential elections and plan to vote in this one too.

I was surprised to find several people who said they voted for Trump in 2016 but cannot do so in 2020, even though they consider themselves dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. They plan to sit out this presidential election. “I can’t give him my vote because he’s a liar and a traitor,” one aging white male voter in West Virginia told me. “But I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my entire life. So I’m not voting for president.”

From Maryland to Missouri, many diehard Trump supporters told me they welcomed the election. One man said he was “caustically optimistic” Trump would win. I’m sure he meant “cautiously.”

“Why do you love Trump so much?” I asked a 40-year-old man in central Missouri.

“He keeps his promises,” he told me.

“Which ones?” I asked.

“The wall,” he said. “The fake media makes fun of him, but he built the wall.”

“How do you know he built the wall? Did you see it?” I asked the blonde father of three.

“No. I read about it in the news,” said the man. He wore a denim jacket and what looked to be a three-day-old beard.

“But that’s fake media, right?”

“No. Not that,” the voter explained.

“When is it fake?” I had to ask.

“When it makes fun of him,” he said with a straight face.

In Illinois I ran into voters who were angry and resentful because Trump hasn’t recognized the problems of the pandemic. “He can say what he wants, but I know people that are sick,” one person told me. Although I couldn’t find anyone who thought we have “rounded the turn” on the pandemic, I did talk to more than a dozen people who laughed off Covid-19. “Look how easy the president beat it,” I was told. “It’s just a case of the snots. Flu is worse.”

I pointed out the mortality rate is higher for the coronavirus than for the seasonal flu, and the president benefited from more than $100,000 in treatment, including experimental medications made possible through fetal stem-cell research. One self-identified evangelical voter told me the president gets a pass on that “because he’s doing God’s work.” Multiple voters told me some variation of, “If the president gets better health care than we do, he deserves it.”

When I asked one woman how the average pandemic patient could expect to survive a serious case of the virus without having a hospital staff on standby, she told me, “The president will take care of us all.” She proudly wore a Confederate-flag hat with a MAGA sticker stapled to it.

In Indiana I ran into a pair of voters who said they were sticking with Trump through thick and thin because of the “damned immigrants” and the fact that “Trump is finally treating white people with some respect.”

In Louisville, Kentucky several voters told me they don’t like Trump—whom they acknowledge enjoys “enormous white privilege”—and aren’t voting for him. They were also angry about the Breonna Taylor case and how the Louisville mayor handled it. “She was no angel,” I was told.

“You’re saying she should’ve been shot?” I asked.

“No, but when you hang around the wrong people that can happen.”

“Wait. Plenty of white people hang around the ‘wrong’ people. When was the last time you heard of a white person getting shot like Breonna Taylor?” I asked.

“I can’t think of a time.”

Outside St. Louis, Missouri the man behind the counter at a gas station wanted to know why I wore a mask. I asked him why he didn’t.

“I’m not going to get the ’rona,” he said with a huge amount of disdain. “It’s all a hoax. The flu’s worse.”

Then there was the young man I met in Columbia, Missouri. He was in town, he said, to visit relatives, but planned to vote as soon as he returned to Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Donald Trump is the best thing this country’s ever had, and if he loses, you bet there’s going to be violence,” he told me. I asked if he planned to take part in any violence.

“No,” he said. His wife of five years is a liberal Democrat, and he loves her dearly. “Life is better when we all treat each other with love. We need to unite instead of divide. You know, like the John Lennon song.”

He was at a loss of words to explain how violence would help “Give Peace a Chance.”

Peace is the last thing Trump wants. He thrives on the ignorance, bellicosity and anger of chaos.

Mary Trump, the president’s niece who wrote the recent book Too Much and Never Enough, told me this week there is a method to his madness.

“He always hedges his bets,” she said on my podcast, Just Ask the Question. Donald Trump is terrified of losing, and she believes he is trying to create a scenario in which he can storm off, claiming the country doesn’t deserve him. “He’ll do something really important, like open Trump Television News,” she said.

Trump remains the little boy who needs a hug. He’s the man who desperately wants to be loved. The man who believes he’s the embodiment of the song lyrics, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

But there is little understanding to be had in this country, and even less sense. The source of this chaos is four years of President Donald J. Trump. In my 37 years as a reporter, I have never run across more hypocrisy from a president or more confusion among the electorate than I have in 2020.

The president is attending three rallies a day. He screams, rants and raves to crowds that eat it up, for reasons most sane people cannot understand. As the pandemic deaths spread across the American map like a bloodstain, Trump’s base stays loyal and incoherent. The rest of the country is inconsolable and increasingly numb.

Mary Trump says her uncle should be held in The Hague for crimes against humanity—for “willfully getting people sick”—should he lose the election.

And there is continued talk that the Southern District of New York may indict Trump—along with Ivanka, Eric and Don Junior—once he is out of office. Trump must pay mounting debts, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion—a neighborhood he may not be able to afford.

Win or lose, it will be years before the dust settles on Donald Trump. As Mary Trump puts it, he’s in for a “very rough ride.”

But a week on the road in this country shows that what Trump has put asunder in four years may take far longer to heal. He has ripped apart the fabric of the nation, aided and abetted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has empowered Trump and supported him so the GOP can have a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The win-at-any-cost attitude of Trump, McConnell and the GOP has brought the country to the very brink of dissolution. The babbling, uninformed nonsense of many voters; the continued unhinged ranting of a man who shouldn’t be elected to run a PTA, much less a country; and the greedy power grabs of the party of Lincoln show the United States of America in 2020 to be in the middle of a political Dark Age.

It’s medieval times, complete with the working poor as modern-day serfs—plus computers, central AC and questionable health care. Panicked, fearful and malevolent, Donald Trump drowns us in the cacophony of chaos as often as he can, trying to secure his fiefdom for at least another four years.

Yet at times Trump seems either resigned to losing or uninterested in a second term. At his Monday rally in Pennsylvania he said, “By the way, nice trucks. You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away? I’d love to just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this.”

I guess we’ll find out next week.