Oct.08

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Trump Gone Wild

There was an interesting article this week in Knowable magazine, about birds that practice obligate brood parasitism. That's a fancy way of saying that they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds (often entirely different species), tricking the nesting birds into doing the hard work of raising the egg-laying birds' offspring. Author Sofia Quaglia observes, among other things, that this evolved at least seven times independently (as opposed to being influenced by one of the other obligate brood parasitic bird species). There are 100 or more bird species that do it in this way.

What does that have to do with U.S. politics? We will get to that. For now, we'll note that while Kamala Harris is conducting her carefully planned, very measured media blitz, Donald Trump is all over the place. And we don't just mean that in the sense of "he's criss-crossing the country." We also mean that he keeps demonstrating his lack of restraint and his apparent lack of mental discipline, and issuing forth with all sorts of whackadoodlery. A rundown of the "highlights" from just the last few days:

• Over the weekend, Trump addressed a group that supports school vouchers. It took him 33 minutes to actually get to that subject, while his entire speech was a melange of words and thoughts and assertions that made virtually no sense to anyone in attendance. The New York Times tends to clean things like this up; they've done it often enough that there's now a term for it: "sanewashing." To its credit, The Washington Post did not do this, skewering the address under the headline "Trump mixes up words, swerves among subjects in off-topic speech."
  
  
• This one wasn't actually that recent (it's from August), but it did become public over the weekend. Trump did a fundraiser in Colorado, and went off the rails while tearing into immigrants. In particular, during a harangue about 22 people he claims fled to the U.S. after being released from prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Trump declared: "We said, 'Where do you come from?' They said, 'Prison.' 'What did you do?' 'None of your fu**ing business what we did.' You know why? Because they're murderers."
  
  
• Yesterday, Trump called into the Hugh Hewitt radio program to share some more choice thoughts about immigrants, and about Kamala Harris' approach to them:

  She wants to go into government housing. She wants to go into government feeding. She wants to feed people. She wants to feed people governmentally. She wants she wants to go into a Communist Party-type system. When you look at the things that she proposes, they're so far off. She has no clue.
  
  How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they're now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer—I believe this—it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn't be here that are criminals. And, you know, one of the worst has 325,000 young children are missing. Can you imagine if that was Biden? No, no, can you imagine if that was Trump?

  Wow. We assume most folks realize this without our pointing it out, but that "bad genes" stuff could very well come right out of Mein Kampf. That's why we started this item with the stuff about birds. Is Trump actually getting this stuff from Mein Kampf, or from people who have read Mein Kampf? Or is his mindset just so similar to the mindset of Hitler and the Nazis that he just so happens to come up with the same things independently? Just like the seven different times that multiple bird species happened to discover the same reproductive strategy?

It's really shocking how far he's declined. And if he gets reelected, can you imagine where he'll be at, mentally, 4 years from now? And you thought we would wait for Halloween to try to frighten you.

This item is kind of a downer, and the next one is not much better. So, since we are on the subject of Trump nuttery and Nazi-ry, let's share a meme, courtesy of the legendary New York Times pitchbot account:

The fellow who runs the account says the three best answers he's seen are: (1) Assault and Prepper, (2) 2 Live Coup, and (3) Nazi by Nature.

We thought we might extend it to all music groups, not just hip-hop, and let Electoral-Vote.com readers take a crack. If we get enough good ones, we'll run a list later this week. Send your suggestions to comments@electoral-vote.com, with subject line "Trump-Musk Band." (Z)