Despite the best efforts of the Beltway press to present him as a spry young man next to 81-year-old Joe Biden, it's getting harder by the day to ignore that 77-year-old Donald Trump is decompensating rapidly. He wasn't all that healthy or coherent to begin with but, lately, watching him speak has the feel of getting cornered by the weird creep at the nursing home. Around lunchtime on Monday, all three cable news networks cut to Trump awkwardly accepting the Supreme Court nullifying the 14th Amendment on his behalf. After a few semi-coherent, if gross, remarks about how he was "honored" by the ruling, Trump launched straight into a stream of paranoid jabber more appropriate for someone having a psychiatric episode on a city bus than for a major presidential candidate.

He started rambling about how he wanted "immunity" for all his crimes, claiming that without that, "You really don’t have a president, because nobody that is serving in that office will have the courage to make, in many cases, what would be the right decision — or it could be the wrong decision." By the time he got to defining "migrant crime" as a "new category of crime," both MSNBC and CNN were cutting away. Not because it wasn't newsworthy, but I suspect it was more a reasonable worry that viewers would be driven away. It's much like the way folks avert their eyes when a delusional person on the sidewalk starts screaming at the demons he wishes to fight with "sticks and stones," to quote something Trump said about immigrants.

His appearance got stranger after most networks had muted him. A bit later, he complained that it takes him 10 minutes to wash his hair, which he somehow blamed on Democrats instead of on the full bottle of hairspray he uses on his remaining locks every morning.

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One commonly held theory is that Trump has always been a moron, creating an expectation of cognitive function so low that it's hard to notice he's failing to meet it. But even looking back at his dumbest White House moment — perhaps the suggestion that injecting bleach was a COVID-19 treatment — he didn't sound quite so out of it. His train of thought was idiotic, but it wasn't derailing into "ding boom" or baby talk. Of course he's always been an ignorant loudmouth, but you could largely follow the dumb things he was trying to say. Now he often sounds like a meth-head trying to explain the law of gravity to a dog.

No, it's not just that Trump's own intellectual baseline is so low. It's that Republican voters have lost the ability to notice when someone isn't making sense, because they've fried their minds with right-wing propaganda. At best, these voters ingest a regular diet of Fox News fantasia, where millions of migrants are setting cities on fire in between casting illegal ballots. But the hardcore Trump fans, the ones who follow him around the country and buy merch at his rallies, go much deeper into the black hole. They live in a world where QAnoners announce the return of JFK Jr. as Trump's running mate and Newsmax hosts explain that Taylor Swift was making "Satanic hand gestures" at the Super Bowl...