In any normal election cycle, 2024 would be a blowout win for Democrats.
Take your pick of any one of former President Donald Trump’s campaign events that happened in October, and any individual one could count as a critical mistake that would have already buried any typical candidate. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tanked his 2012 campaign by suggesting to a roomful of rich people that the poorest 47% of Americans were contemptible freeloading leeches. In 1988, Michael Dukakis — another former Massachusetts governor who ran an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency — made the mistake of agreeing to an ill-advised photo-op riding a tank. In 2008, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) praised George W. Bush’s “strong” economy in the midst of a historic financial crisis. These of course are all remarkably quaint in comparison to anyone watching this election.
Donald Trump has been committing forced errors on an unprecedented scale with an “October Surprise” happening seemingly multiple times a week. One particularly jaw-dropping town hall event quickly unraveled when, after several Trump supporters in the audience had medical emergencies, Trump stood onstage for nearly 40 minutes and awkwardly swayed to his campaign playlist. Supporters in the audience went from cheering for him to slowly trickling toward the exits by the end of it.
“Can you imagine if I did that?” Former President Barack Obama said while campaigning for the Democratic ticket in Arizona. “You would be worried if your grandpa was acting like this.”
As Trump’s campaign grows increasingly bizarre, his team appears to be more tightly controlling his movements and carefully scripting his public appearances to minimize the negative impact his erratic behavior may have on undecided voters in swing states. The fact that the election is still essentially a coin flip in all of the major battleground states is a testament to both the power of Donald Trump’s cult of personality, and of his campaign’s intense focus on preventing their candidate from dooming his chances of victory by simply being too visible in these final weeks.
Donald Trump is not OK
Vice President Kamala Harris has spent October conducting a spree of high-profile, high-stakes interviews with everyone from SiriusXM’s Howard Stern, to 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker, to the Breakfast Club’s Charlamagne Tha God, and Fox News’ Bret Baier. She’s been blitzing battleground states like Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The 60 year-old released medical records from her White House doctor with a not-so-subtle jab questioning her opponent’s mental and physical fitness to be president. She continues to challenge Trump to debate her again after their September 10 face-off on ABC News, and just conducted a nationally televised town hall event on CNN. Basically, the Democratic nominee is doing what any normal candidate would do in the month before voters head to the polls.
Meanwhile, Trump has done the opposite. He continues to refuse calls to debate Harris again. He backed out of his previously agreed-upon 60 Minutes interview. He abruptly canceled an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, which could be considered relatively friendly territory. He reneged on a promise to sit down with the Detroit News after the newspaper asked him about his claims about urban crime (violent crime rates are at a 50-year low despite Trump’s insistence that cities have uncontrollable levels of crime). He cited an unspecified “scheduling conflict” as the reason for a last-minute cancellation of a National Rifle Association-sponsored campaign event in Georgia. And the former president gave no reason for canceling a Pennsylvania event with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Trump’s team has instead opted to keep his public appearances constrained to safe spaces, like far-right network Newsmax and Fox News host Harris Faulkner’s town hall packed full of female Trump supporters (the network did not publicly disclose that the room was full of voters already firmly in his camp). But even Dan Bongino’s sit-down with the ex-president on the far-right platform Rumble — which was even broadcast from Trump Tower in New York – was too much for the GOP nominee, who ended the softball interview early because he was fatigued.
The Trump campaign even told the influential Instagram account the Shade Room — which is popular with young and Black voters — that the former president was too “exhausted” to do an interview. They stipulated, however, “that could change” at any time. This prompted Harris to once again call Trump’s stamina into question.
“Being the president of the United States is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world. And so, we really do need to ask: If he's exhausted being on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?" Harris said of her opponent before a campaign rally in Michigan.
Trump’s exhaustion could likely be the reason he’s not making sense in the few public appearances his campaign is allowing. Before Trump’s Pennsylvania town hall ended in 39 minutes of him swaying to his campaign playlist, he gave an unintelligible answer to a question about how he would lower grocery prices. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump transcribed the former president’s full, 1,004-word answer and provided footnotes to fact-check his false claims, though how anyone is expected to make sense of his rambling is left to the imagination.
That wasn’t the first time Bump published Trump’s full, unfiltered, off-the-cuff response to an audience question. While speaking to the New York Economic Club in September, Trump answered a question about how to make child care more affordable with a confusing 300-plus word soliloquy. The former president referenced his eldest daughter Ivanka, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), “trillions of dollars” from new tariffs, “having no deficits within a short period of time,” and “mak[ing] America great again” because “right now we’re a failing nation.” He did not once talk about specifically how he would make child care more affordable.
If this happened just once or twice, it could perhaps be chalked up to the 78 year-old Republican nominee not having enough rest or misinterpreting a question. But this is a consistent pattern that has persisted in subsequent interviews and appearances. While in friendly territory on Fox & Friends earlier this week, Trump answered a question about how he would address public education in the Bronx by claiming without evidence that students were getting sex reassignment surgery at school without parental consent. In response to another question about how he would get harmful foods banned in urban communities, Trump simply praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“So, Bobby Kennedy, right? Everybody likes Bobby Kennedy. And he’s so big into the health food and women things, everything. He wants to do things, and the environment — and he endorsed me. The first time a Kennedy has ever endorsed a Republican. Maybe it’s gonna be the last but I doubt it,” Trump said. “And he’s a great guy. He would be so perfect. He doesn’t like artificial foods and he doesn’t like pesticides and all the stuff they put on them.”
It bears repeating that if President Joe Biden, or Harris, or any Democrat had even one of these embarrassing moments happen during any of their own speeches, interviews, or town halls, their campaigns would be declared doomed by the entirety of the beltway press. The fact that Trump continues to be competitive in polls is both a failure of media outlets to hold him to the same standard as they do for Democrats, but also of his campaign team’s success in minimizing damage by rigidly controlling the tempo and venue of his scant few public appearances. This could be due to an undisclosed medical condition.
As Occupy.com has previously explored, Trump has been increasingly exhibiting symptoms of frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. The Cleveland Clinic estimates the lifespan of an FTD patient is approximately 7.5 years.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, some of the main symptoms of FTD include loss of inhibitions (particularly the loss of a “filter” in a patient’s speaking), lack of respect for others, impulsive actions and behaviors, and loss of executive function. FTD patients have also exhibited what’s known as primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The Cleveland Clinic explained that frontotemporal dementia patients display two types of PPA (emphasis ours):
Nonfluent variant (nfvPPA). This type involves problems with grammar and forming words. Individual words and simple sentences are understandable, but complicated sentences could cause confusion.
Semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). This type involves problems with choosing and understanding words. People with this often say things that don't make sense or can't understand what other people are saying.
Because Trump has not released current medical records despite promising to do so, whether he has been diagnosed with FTD remains unknown. But his increasingly garbled speech and confusing behavior has led to more than 200 medical professionals calling on the ex-president to release current, up-to-date medical records “given his advancing age.”
"Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," the 238 doctors, nurses, and other healthcare experts wrote in an October 13 letter published by CBS News. "In the limited opportunities we can examine his behavior, he's providing a deeply concerning snapshot."
Even if Trump doesn’t die before his term ends, the possibility remains that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and the rest of the cabinet could potentially invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. They could cite any number of valid concerns about his health, his fragile mental state, and the very real danger presented by an octogenarian commander-in-chief handling sensitive foreign policy crises around the world.
In that scenario, Vance — a 40 year-old one-term senator with no prior experience in any elected office — would suddenly become the most powerful person in the world without winning a single electoral vote. It’s difficult to imagine, but a Vance presidency would likely be far more destructive even in the short term than Trump would be over four years.
President Vance would fast-track Project 2025
JD Vance has shown himself to be incredibly malleable to whoever offers him money and power. After he wrote his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” he was frequently invited onto cable news shows as a “Trump whisperer.” Vance spent the better part of Trump’s first term lending liberal audiences concerned about the 45th president a sympathetic ear.
In fact, as journalist Jamison Foster observed on his Substack, it’s likely none of us would have ever heard of JD Vance were it not for elite liberal institutions like Yale University and the New York Times. Foster quoted multiple professors who knew Vance at Yale and described him as “unremarkable.” Yale professor Amy Chua (who was sanctioned by the university in 2021 for hosting drunken parties with students and federal judges) convinced Vance to write a memoir, introduced him to her agent, and obsessively emailed cable news hosts and producers to get Vance on TV.
In early 2016, conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat cited an op-ed Vance wrote for the conservative National Review, leading to Vance’s first byline in the Times’ opinion section that April. In June, Vance got another op-ed published in the leading national paper of record. And after Vance’s memoir was finally published, David Brooks — another conservative mainstay of the Times’ opinion page — lavished praise on it. Foster noted the Times then promoted “Hillbilly Elegy” heavily in August, recommending the book to readers on August 2nd, August 5th, and August 10th, before featuring Vance as a guest on its August 19th podcast.
The Times officially made Vance a “contributing opinion writer” in September. By early 2017, after a year of puffery by a liberal university’s law professor and a liberal national newspaper’s puffery, acclaimed liberal Hollywood director Ron Howard announced he would be making “Hillbilly Elegy” into a movie. If Vance does indeed make it to the White House, it will have been with the help of the same elite coastal liberals he’s spent the last few years trashing.
The 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee was vaulted into the Senate not just with his fame as an author and Trump whisperer, but with $15 million from tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Suddenly, Vance no longer felt Trump was “America’s Hitler” and a “cynical asshole like Nixon” who agreed with a sports radio host that called Trump a “total fraud.” Vance’s best friend from college told the Washington Post that Vance suddenly switching from Never Trump to team MAGA wasn’t a grand political awakening, but rather a result of a bruised ego after the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie was universally mocked by critics.
The Ohio senator has since become a darling of not the liberal establishment, but of far-right technocrats. Vance has close ties to the Heritage Foundation, which is the chief organization behind the authoritarian Project 2025 blueprint. As Occupy.com previously reported, that document aims to drastically expand the power of the executive branch and pack the federal government with loyal far-right political apparatchiks in order to allow the next Republican president to rule as an autocrat.
Heritage president Kevin Roberts told reporters that “privately, we were all rooting for” Vance to get picked as Trump’s running mate. While Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 (despite at least 140 of his former staffers and advisors crafting it), Vance said the document had “some good ideas in there.” He even wrote the foreword for Roberts’ forthcoming book, in which he calls for the dismantling of the administrative state, cracking down on the LGBTQ+ population, severely restricting immigration, and making abortion essentially illegal nationwide. If he were president, it’s highly likely Vance would streamline the full implementation of Project 2025, with Heritage guiding him every step of the way.
In the next two weeks, Americans will get to choose between a competent 60 year-old sitting vice president, former U.S. senator, and former attorney general with a wealth of public service experience, and a 78 year-old potentially suffering from dementia, whose former top military official called him “fascist to the core,” whose even more dangerous running mate would pick up right where he left off if he didn’t finish his term. The outcome will likely come down to a few thousand ballots in a small number of battleground states.
Check your registration at vote.gov and make a plan to vote on November 5.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
