This op-ed was published by The National on August 14,2024

Former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump‘s mounting panic, at times bordering on hysteria, is hardly surprising. It is not just his sudden and complete reversal of fortunes in the election campaign. Mr. Trump isn’t merely running to get back into the White House. He is running to stay out of prison.

Less than a month ago, he was presiding like a Roman emperor over his coronation at the Republican National Convention, sitting in his sky box receiving lines of ring-kissing high-ranking supplicants. He had just barely survived an assassination attempt and appeared on a glide path to re-election against an evidently declining President Joe Biden.

Suddenly, he is instead facing the dynamic and heretofore underrated Vice President Kamala Harris who in no time has opened a significant lead in national and key swing state polls. More importantly, she has captured the cultural momentum by fostering an optimism and joy unwitnessed in US politics for decades.

Her sudden dominance and Mr. Trump’s inability to regain control over the pop cultural register he is used to effortlessly dominating is clearly profoundly disturbing. He’s facing the terrifying twin specters of losing to a black woman and going to prison.

He faces sentencing over his adult film star hush money convictions, and, if he loses the election, trials over pilfered top-secret government documents and extensive efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In the documents case, in particular, he has virtually no defence and could face a significant prison term.

He has moved quickly to begin establishing a narrative to challenge the validity and legality of a potential defeat. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed, for example, that it was “unconstitutional” and “a coup” – and of course deeply “unfair“ to himself – for Ms. Harris to replace Mr. Biden as the Democrats’ nominee, which is all laughable. But his campaign manager, Chris LaCivita – a notorious practitioner of the political dark arts– ominously insisted that: “It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day”.

Given Mr. Trump’s myriad efforts to overturn the 2020 election, highlighting the interregnum between voting and inauguration is deeply ominous, especially since over 70 election-denying activists now occupy state-level positions of election-related authority.

Mr. Trump may be tempted to go further this time, given the much higher stakes, but his options will probably be limited to sowing chaos and doubt, and ultimately attempting to get either courts or the House of Representatives to supersede the voters.

But most of Mr. Trump’s responses to his unexpected political crisis have been visceral and instinctive. He has been mystifyingly denouncing popular Republican governors, reportedly lashing out at his aides and referring to his opponent in sexist and derogatory terms, and publicly questioning her ethnicity and intelligence. But he still lacks any effective counterattack.

Mr. Trump and Mr. LaCivita are attempting to repurpose successful tactics from earlier contests. By absurdly claiming that Ms. Harris always presented herself as Indian until she suddenly “turned Black”, Mr. Trump is reprising his effective attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” because of her questionable claims of Native American ancestry. “Here’s another phoney”, he’s implying, but with no apparent success.

Worse, his running mate, Senator JD Vance, is leading a despicable effort to replay the mudslinging or “swift boating” attacks – orchestrated by Mr. LaCivita – denouncing Senator John Kerry in his 2004 election loss to then-president George W Bush. That barrage of defamation tarnished Mr. Kerry’s record as a Vietnam war hero through unfounded accusations ranging from cowardice to dishonesty.

This tactic has been revived against Ms. Harris’s running mate, Governor Tim Walz, claiming that he showed cowardice and disloyalty by retiring after 24 years in the military because his former unit was subsequently deployed to Iraq.

The biggest danger of such political ordure is not that it will stick – it almost certainly won’t – but rather that it could make military service a liability for potential candidates. It dishonestly disincentivizes National Service, even after no less than 24 years of honorable soldiering. Mr. Vance himself served only four years, largely writing articles for the military. And Mr. Trump received a highly dubious medical deferment for alleged bone spurs that, if they existed at all, were so insignificant he can’t remember on which foot.

But mostly Mr. Trump has been pining for the good old days of a few weeks ago, and his much-missed former opponent, Mr. Biden. At a recent rally, he attacked Mr. Biden almost as much as Ms. Harris. “Why did I debate him?” he plaintively lamented, though he is now demanding three additional debates with his new opponent (an unmistakable sign of political alarm).

He’s even conjured a bizarre scenario, floated in speeches and social media, in which Mr. Biden bursts into the upcoming Democratic national convention and reclaims the nomination. This very public pipe dream has even some sympathizers wondering if the aging Mr. Trump is beginning to lose touch with reality.

Such concerns were further stoked by his promotion of an incredible conspiracy theory that Ms. Harris is using artificial intelligence to generate fake crowds around the country, based on a supposed reflection in a photograph of her parked aircraft. He has long been obsessed with crowd size, but questioning the reality of her numerous large rallies – a claim even more ridiculous than, for instance, fantasies of the moon landing having been faked – could well be more reflective of emotional deterioration than any form of political calculation.

Mr Biden unquestionably showed serious mental decline, and media scrutiny of that was entirely appropriate. Yet the US press has remained largely silent on Mr Trump‘s own strikingly decreased acuity.

Even an actual “stable genius”, as Mr Trump has famously described himself, at a crossroads between the White House and “the big house” – with only an election determining which it will be and suddenly staring at an unexpected potential defeat and hard time – might be hard-pressed to maintain psychic equilibrium.

It’s high time the country’s media, after an inexcusable eight years of self-imposed silence, finally interrogates Mr Trump’s emotional stability, grasp on reality and mental acuity. Anything less is tantamount to deceiving the public by implying there’s nothing to warrant such concerns even though the evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump may have serious “issues” has become overwhelming.