"His conduct has surely desensitized Americans to some degree. But..."

 

Donald Trump’s personal behavior is often strange, his conduct over the last 12 days has been pretty remarkable — especially with the midterm election around the corner.

He’s offered voters what even some Republicans say amounts to a bribe. He’s threatened (jokingly?) to withhold disaster aid from a state if it doesn’t elect a GOP senator. Ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he told a dubious story about his proximity to Ground Zero. He’s baselessly suggested Democrats conspired to kill him. He’s threatened to halt all foreign trade. He’s holding the future of the Kennedy Center hostage if judges don’t allow him to put his name on it and says he wants his proposed 250-foot triumphal arch across Arlington National Cemetery to double as a military complex housing drones and snipers. He’s also now denying certain media outlets, including CNN, access to the White House.

One of the most underestimated reasons for the decline in Trump’s political fortunes is Americans’ loss of faith in his leadership capabilities. Polling in recent months has shown: 67% of Americans said he doesn’t carefully consider important decisions. 71% said he’s not “even-tempered.” And more than 7 in 10 adults and registered voters said he doesn’t even have a plan for the Iran war, according to both Fox News and CNN polling. And in the runup to the 2026 midterm elections, he’s doing very little to disabuse people of these notions.

Trump’s offer of $5,000 to every adult US citizen if Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities is certainly a quid pro quo. Registered voters say 66%-18% that it’s “inappropriate.”

His joke-y threat Wednesday to withhold disaster aid from North Carolina if it elects a Democratic senator is also eyebrow-raising. Trump said he was kidding, but his track record makes clear his administration has discriminated against blue states on such things. And it’s a pretty unfunny thing to even joke about.

His tale ahead of the 9/11 anniversary about firefighters carrying him away amid fears of a building collapse was unconfirmed and misleading at best, as CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote. And to the extent the story is embellished, it sounds a lot like the president stealing valor.

Trump also claimed this week that the 2024 assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, was “a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election” — an explosive claim, if there were any truth to it. But there remains no evidence that any Democrats were involved and he didn’t provide any more detail. Indeed, attempted assassin Thomas Crooks was a registered Republican.  And even the same day as Trump’s comments, FBI Director Kash Patel testified that there was “no evidence” that Crooks “was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents.”

Trump repeatedly threatened to halt large portions of US foreign trade — including with all countries with whom the US has a trade deficit — if the Federal Reserve doesn’t lower interest rates. “If we stop trading with every country that we have a deficit with, which is most of them, and which would be very easy to do, we’d make at least $1.5 trillion a year,” Trump claimed Wednesday in North Carolina. That logic makes no sense.

By Friday, Trump suddenly announced he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House “effective immediately,” catching even some of his own staff off guard. A CNN reporter was denied access to White House grounds Saturday morning, and her press pass was seized. A reporter for Politico and a reporter and photographer for MS NOW was also denied access.

Some of the other examples of Trump’s behavior are a little more small-bore, but curious, nonetheless.

Trump on Tuesday suggested the Supreme Court justices he nominated might have misrepresented their intentions, saying that they were “not the people I interviewed” and “are merely a shell of their original selves.” He broke with longstanding US foreign policy protocol by praising the prospect of the reunification of Ireland. He called concerns about AI safety a “hoax” despite large swaths of Americans being quite concerned about that topic.

And finally, Trump has spent much of this week angling for a way to force the courts to let him put his name on the Kennedy Center, despite that being apparently illegal. Trump is now explicitly suggesting he might let the institution wither and die if he doesn’t get what he wants.

It seems like a long time ago, but the talk during Trump’s first term was often about his “temperament” and his tweets. His conduct has surely desensitized Americans to some degree. But these seem like the kinds of behaviors he’d want to rein in ahead of a midterm election where his party’s grip on power is on the line and voters have real doubts about his steadiness as a leader. Trump has gone in the other direction, by upping the antics.

-CNN Politics