*This* is the man who is the frontrunner to be the next president

Update: There is no bottom.

(Donald Trump)

I woke up in Lisbon on Thanksgiving morning, rolled over, grabbed my phone, opened Twitter X (I know, I know) and saw this:

(I follow a Twitter account that reposts everything Donald Trump puts on his Truth Social site. It’s here if you want to follow it too.)

Now, Trump has done this sort of thing before.

There was this on Memorial Day 2015:

And this on New Years’s Day 2019:

And even this (later-deleted) tweet from September 2013:

So, yeah.

Given his history of, er, commemorating holidays, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by his Thanksgiving message.

And yet and yet and yet.

Maybe it was because I was abroad — looking at the U.S. from 3,500 miles away. Maybe it was because it was early in the morning. Maybe it was because I was still jet lagged.

But, regardless of the reason, my first thought was: THIS is the guy who is currently the leader to be the next president of the United States? Really? (And, yes, Trump is a slight favorite over Joe Biden right now.)

I mean, aside from the overall WTF-ness of the entire message (and that he would think it’s ok to send this out on Thanksgiving!), I have a few thoughts:

1. He sent this out at 2:03 am. Now, we know that Trump is not big on sleep. “He’s just one of those people, I think, that just does not require a lot of sleep,” then-White House physician Ronny Jackson (yes, that Ronny Jackson) said about Trump in 2018 after an annual physical. Trump himself has acknowledged his lack of need for sleep, saying: “You know, I’m not a big sleeper, I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.” (Presumably this latest post on Truth Social was part of that “beep-de-beep.”)

   Kidding aside, do you really want your president to a) be awake at 2 am and b) be posting to social media? This sort of thing can be written off as (mostly) harmless when Trump is a private citizen. But, as president? Am I alone in worrying that a tendency toward (very) late-night posting isn’t a recipe for future success?

2. The post is literally unintelligible to average person. Aside from Trump’s ever-confusing use of punctuation and capitalization, his Thanksgiving message reveals a man waaaaaaaay down the rabbit hole. I mean, maybe people know who New York Attorney General Letitia James is. But, there is NO chance the the average person knows judge Arthur Engoron — much less his court clerk (who Trump name-checks in the post). This post is not unusual for Trump. In his campaign speeches, he regularly goes deep into the minutiae of his legal problems — assuming, I think wrongly, that his audience has any idea what he is talking about. Unless you are reading EVERYTHING written about the various legal machinations surrounding Trump (and I can’t imagine that’s a lot of people) the majority of this post just makes no sense to you.

   Also, not for nothing, the post is all just one run-on sentence. Like, WHAT?!?!?

3. The language. I continue to believe that the apocalyptic terms in which Trump talks about the country — and the debasing way he speaks about his opponents — drastically raises the temperature in the country and bodes nothing good for 2024.

   To that end, this line very much stood out to me:

   “Crooked Joe Biden, who has WEAPONIZED his Department of Injustice against his Political Opponent, & allowed our Country to go to HELL; & all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”

   “HELL.” “Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS.” “DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”

   This stuff has an impact. It suggests that the stakes of 2024 aren’t just about an election. That it’s about whether the country survives (or not). To be clear: Trump doesn’t actually believe any of it. He just knows it works as a piece of political rhetoric. But you know who does believe it? The people who ardently follow him. (Proof? How about January 6, 2021?)

As best as I can tell, Trump’s Thanksgiving Truth Social post drew — at most — a small-ish amount of press attention. People wrote about it but it wasn’t anything more than a single-day story.

Which, I get. As I have said and written many times (including in this space), Trump says and does SO many out-there things that it becomes hard to cover them all. If everything is a mountain, are there no molehills left?

Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at University College London, put it well in an October Substack post. He wrote:

My view is this: if someone wants to vote for a cruel sociopathic authoritarian, they should do so without being able to pretend they don’t know what they’re supporting. There should be a social stigma for voting for Trump, because what he stands for is so far outside the bounds of acceptable democratic politics anywhere else in the world. But that can’t work unless everyone is aware of Trump’s increasingly violent, deranged insanity.

Instead, the press has succumbed to the numbing effect of the Banality of Crazy, once reporting on every single Trump tweet in early 2017 because it was unusual, but now ignoring even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world—precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.

To me, Trump’s Thanksgiving post is something that merited more attention from the mainstream media. What kind of person thinks this stuff — much less says it publicly? And what does it say about us as a country that this man is the betting favorite (at least as of today) to be the next president of the United States?

Answer: Nothing good. And something very scary.