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   The Unadorned Truth About Donald Trump   
      
   We must treat him like any other candidate for high office who is   
   emotionally and mentally unstable.   
   By Jeffrey Goldberg   
      
   June 27, 2024, 6:17 PM ET   
   This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you   
   through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and   
   recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.   
   Earlier this year, Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins suggested that   
   voters, in the interest of civic hygiene and personal illumination, attend   
   a Trump rally. This would be the way to understand the candidate, his   
   thoughts, and his supporters, Coppins argued. He himself has attended more   
   than 100 such gatherings since 2016, and he noted, correctly, that “nothing   
   quite captures the Trump ethos like his campaign rallies.”   
   I myself have attended only a few of these rallies (though among them was   
   Trump’s January 6, 2020, rally on the Ellipse, which should count double).   
   But what one derives from the experience is, in the words of our colleague   
   Tom Nichols, the visceral sense that Trump is deeply unwell.   
   Attendance at Trump rallies can be metaphysically taxing—and some seem to   
   go longer than a Taylor Swift concert. So watching them from beginning to   
   end online is occasionally a welcome substitute.   
   A couple of weeks ago, on C-SPAN, I watched my first Trump rally in quite   
   some time, a gathering under a heat dome in Las Vegas. I watched not   
   because I expected to learn something new about the candidate, but because   
   I had been alerted by concerned friends and colleagues that Trump had   
   attacked me by name. This hadn’t happened in quite some time, and self-   
   interest dictated watching.   
   Trump is upset with me, and with The Atlantic, for a story I wrote in   
   September of 2020, in which I reported, among other things, that he   
   referred to American soldiers killed in action as “suckers” and “losers.”   
   (For more on the particulars, please read this story by Adrienne LaFrance.)   
   Trump is also upset by a profile I wrote late last year of retired General   
   Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which   
   Milley, a decorated combat veteran, is portrayed as someone who defended   
   the Constitution against Trump’s depredations. In response to this article,   
   Trump suggested that Milley be executed.   
   At his Las Vegas rally, Trump described me as a “horrible, radical-left   
   lunatic named Goldberg” (he hit the word Goldberg with what I perhaps, or   
   perhaps not, overinterpreted as special feeling). He articulated, at great   
   length, why he would never disparage American service members. (Dear   
   reader: He disparages the military constantly.)   
   All of this was to be expected. What I found surprising, as I watched his   
   entire presentation, was the ratio of gibberish to normal sentences. Which   
   is to say, there was even more gibberish than I remembered in the typical   
   Trump speech. The apotheosis of gibberish was his extended soliloquy on   
   sharks and battery-powered boats. No summary could do it justice, so here   
   is an extended cut:   
      
       “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot   
   of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t   
   really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact   
   that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These   
   people are crazy. He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks. They just   
   didn’t really understand a young woman swimming,’ now, who really got   
   decimated and other people too, a lot of shark attacks. So I said, ‘So   
   there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here. Do I get   
   electrocuted if the boat is sinking, and water goes over the battery—the   
   boat is sinking; do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I   
   jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you   
   he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘Nobody’s ever asked me that   
   question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of   
   electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if   
   there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every   
   single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we going to end that. We’re   
   going to end it for boats. We’re going to end it for trucks.”   
      
   Please watch the whole thing, and as you do, imagine Trump’s words coming   
   from the mouth of President Biden, and then imagine the Democratic Party   
   allowing Biden to continue to run for president.   
      
   Trump overwhelms us with nonsense. This is the “banality of crazy,” as the   
   Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas calls it. By “us,” I mean, of course, the   
   voting public, but I especially mean the editors and headline-writers of my   
   industry, who sometimes succumb to one of the most pernicious biases in   
   journalism, the bias toward coherence. We feel, understandably, that it is   
   our job to make things make sense. But what if the actual story is that   
   politics today makes no sense?   
   It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s   
   the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party   
   would nominate someone who is nuts. Therefore, it is our responsibility to   
   sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of   
   his bizarro statements, to rationalize. Which is why, after the electric-   
   shark speech, much of the coverage revolved around the high temperatures in   
   Las Vegas, and other extraneities. The Associated Press headline on a story   
   about the event read this way: “Trump Complains About His Teleprompters at   
   a Scorching Las Vegas Rally.” The New York Times headlined its story thus:   
   “In Las Vegas, Trump Appeals to Local Workers and Avoids Talk of   
   Conviction.” CNN’s headline: “Trump Proposes Eliminating Taxes on Tips at   
   Las Vegas Campaign Rally.”   
   In my house, the headline from the Las Vegas rally was the disconcerting   
   and surprising news that I’m a “radical-left lunatic.” Outside my house,   
   though, the public should have been informed, above everything else, that a   
   former and possibly future president went on a ludicrous, illiterate rant   
   about sharks and batteries, a rant that calls into question not only his   
   fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities.   
   Watching the Las Vegas rally reinforced my view that, at our magazine, we   
   can best serve our readers by highlighting aspects of Trump’s rhetoric and   
   behavior that we would highlight about any other politician, including Joe   
   Biden. I’ve never wanted this magazine to become part of the “resistance.”   
   (You just have to read our coverage of Biden to understand that we are   
   not.) I simply believe that we should tell the unadorned truth about Trump,   
      
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