As the election is getting closer, Donald Trump is sounding nuttier.
In recent weeks, he accused President Joe Biden of trying to assassinate him, demanded a drug test to see if Biden uses drugs to improve political performances, hailed a fictional murderer as “a great man” and called the nation’s bloodiest Civil War battle “beautiful.”
To be clear, none of this is true.
Meanwhile, his campaign, in what officials contended was a staffer’s mistake, issued a video linking a potential Trump victory to “the creation of a Unified Reich,” the latest invocation of Nazi memes by a man who once said, “Hitler did some good things.” And not for the first time, he suggested he yearns to serve beyond the constitutional limit of the second term he is seeking this November.
If anyone still sees the 2024 presidential race as a standard clash between a Republican and a Democrat, a closer look at what Trump is saying should disabuse them of that belief.
Many Trump supporters dismiss the crazier things he says as “typical Trump” and suggest they won’t matter. “It’s baked into the cake,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told The Washington Post, calling it “par for the course.” This is reminiscent of those post-2020 election reassurances from top Republicans that Trump would soon accept the result, something he still has not done nearly four years later.
