‘Undisciplined, unhinged and deranged’: will Trump’s strange behavior hurt him at the polls?

A “beautiful” beach body and a “mentally disabled” opponent. “One rough hour” of police retaliation to stop criminals. “A million Rambos” in Afghanistan. Haitian immigrants “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats”. Death by electrocution versus death by shark. Insane asylums and, of course, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”.

These are just a few of the recent remarks made by one of two major candidates for president of the United States. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has spent years saying the unsayable to entertain, goad and grab attention. But his pronouncements over the past few weeks have plumbed new depths of absurdity and incoherence.

Trump, 78, increasingly slurs or stumbles over his words, raising fears over cognitive decline. He is slipping in polls against Kamala Harris and knows that defeat could lead to criminal trials and even prison. After a decade of dominating American politics, critics say, Trump could be in the throes of a final meltdown.

His verbal output now is “absolute batshittery”, according to Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “These are not the musings of a well-adjusted adult. He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.”

Trump was mostly given a pass by the mainstream media, Setmayer added, because of the intense focus on Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity when he was still running. “Now the focus is solely on him because he is the oldest candidate in this race. His kookery is even more highlighted now than before because he is alone on an island with his deterioration.”

Trump has always thrown dead cats on tables, as the metaphor goes, offering his fans the thrill of transgression and watching with glee as liberals howl with outrage. His run for president in 2016 was characterised by racially divisive rhetoric and a constant stream of controversies that dominated news cycles and forced rival Hillary Clinton into reactive mode.

A Guardian analysis of a campaign rally Trump held in Greensboro, North Carolina, in October 2016 found references to “Crooked Hillary” and the assertion: “For what she’s done, they should lock her up.” Even then, Trump was obsessed with crowd sizes, media lies “poisoning” the minds of the electorate and the fantasy that “this whole election is being rigged”.

But the Trump of eight years ago also brought a more disciplined and focused message. He railed against bad trade deals and reeled off a list of policy priorities: the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan, eliminating regulations, defending religious liberty, supporting law enforcement, repealing and replacing Obamacare, saving the second amendment, and appointing “great justices” to the supreme court.

Perhaps most strikingly, Trump asked independents and Democrats to join a fight against the “corrupt establishment” that would give government back to the people. He decried national divisions, promised that “we’re going to be a unified nation, a nation of love” and wrapped up in a relatively tight 40 minutes.

Today Trump’s rallies tend to sprawl for an hour and a half or two hours which, as Harris noted in their debate, means some people leave before the end. He has sought to defend his rhetorical meanderings as “the weave”, claiming the threads all come back together to make sense.

But at a recent stop in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, “Trump shifted from topic to topic so quickly that it was hard to keep track of what he meant at times,” the Associated Press reported. There were digressions about the climate crisis, Harris’s father, how his beach body was better than Biden’s, and a fly that was buzzing near him. “I wonder where the fly came from,” he said. “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here.”

The Trump of 2024 also strikes a darker tone as he struggles to define Harris with a nickname or brand. In Prairie du Chien he tested a new insult: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. Anybody would know this.”

At another rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump painted a lurid picture of crime spiralling out of control, which he said could be ended “immediately” with one “real rough, nasty day”, or “one rough hour”. Some critics compared the idea to the dystopian horror film The Purge.

Donald Trump at a campaign town hall on Friday in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

At a press conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “Trump at times interrupted his own asides with even further asides,” according to the New York Times. He mixed up Iran with North Korea and struggled to pronounce the name of the United Arab Emirates. He spoke glowingly of fighters in Afghanistan: “They could take a knife, they were like Rambos, just like putting a million Rambos – good old Sylvester Stallone was my friend. But it’s like putting a million Rambos.”

The campaign has also been punctuated by bizarre riffs about the 30-year-old fictional character Hannibal Lecter and whether it would be better to be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. Trump used a debate watched by tens of million of people to push the dangerous lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

This week Trump was the subject of a withering takedown on Comedy Central’s satirical news programme The Daily Show. Host Jon Stewart played a clip of an interview asking Trump for the specific mechanics of how prices would come down.

His reply: “First of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions like, give me a specific answer.” Then he rambled off track into how much Russia had taken from presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “With Trump, Russia took nothing,” Trump said.

Stewart had produced a chart to mark his responses on “policy specifics”. He quickly replaced it with a chart that said “Huh?” “I guess I had the wrong chart,” Stewart said.

He then played another clip showing Trump zigzagging all over the place in response to a question about his childcare plan before announcing: “Childcare is childcare.” A third clip showed Trump being asked about claims that he wants to ban IVF. Again his answer swerved wildly before settling on “We have no taxes on a thing called tips”. Stewart reached for a new chart that said: “What the actual f#@k are you talking about?”

Democrats see Trump as a politician in decline. Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “He has definitely lost a step, as they say. He is less coherent than he was certainly four years ago.

“He used to insult people in a way that got to one of their problems, like ‘Little Marco’ [Rubio], but now he’s just throwing random insults. Whatever you say about Kamala Harris, she’s not mentally disabled. That’s crazy. A lot of people have noticed he would occasionally be off the wall but now it seems to be more so.”

Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, recalls that in 2016 Trump could read from a teleprompter like he believed it – but now he sounds like he does not want to be here. “He reminds you of a sixth-grade boy having read something out loud at the front of the class who’s generally pissed off that he’s there and not on the soccer field.”

And yet the former president’s rallies still draw big crowds, with many supporters apparently amused and entertained by Trump’s verbal antics. Kamarck added: “One of my friends who’s a movie critic – not in politics – watches Trump’s rallies and says, look, the guy is literally an entertainer and he says these things to get laughs and applause from the crowd.

“Yet those of us who are in this business take him seriously. Part of it is that his base loves him, loves the entertainment of him. They’re not for Kamala Harris - they don’t think she’s mentally disabled – but they like him ‘calling it out like it is’. They don’t take him quite seriously and they like his plain-spokenness and they see that as a sign of authenticity.”

The knockabout humour comes with a sinister aspect, however. Trump continues to demonise immigrants, pushing falsehoods about them spreading diseases and stealing jobs from US citizens, and trafficks in racist stereotypes. He has spent the best part of a decade tapping into white anxiety and grievance. Now, reminded by a court filing this week of the legal peril he faces if he loses the election, he is preparing to make his last stand.

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “He’s definitely more undisciplined, unhinged and deranged. He’s always had these tendencies but, as he’s gotten older, they’ve become much greater. The Hannibal Lecter stuff or the shark versus electrocution stuff is just insane, just crazy and should be discussed on that basis.

“But it’s a big mistake just to talk about Trump being unhinged or insane. You’ve got to talk about also how dangerous and retrograde what he’s saying is. We also ought to stress the extreme racism and misogyny.”

Lichtman, known for an election predictions model which this year favours Harris, added: “Trump saying that Kamala Harris is mentally impaired, mentally disabled, and had these deficiencies even from birth, reprises one of the worst and oldest stereotypes that has been used to demean and put down Black people throughout American history. And that is that Black people are inherently deficient in their mental capacities and not able to do the same job as white people. I was astonished to see a candidate for president of the United States reprise that horrific old slur and stereotype on Black people.”

As of a week ago, the latest national polling averages showed Harris at 48.2% compared with 44.4% for Trump, giving the Democrat a 3.8-point advantage. But she describes herself as the underdog and the race in swing states remains too close to call. And this week Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, gave a polished debate performance that critics called “sanewashing” – an effort to make Trump seem moderate and palatable, even though the substance was no less abrasive.

Setmayer, the former Republican spokesperson who is now a co-founder of the Seneca Project, a Super Pac aiming to mobilise moderate women on Harris’s behalf, said: “Many of us underestimated how deep the scars of grievance and misogyny and racial animosity are in this country and Donald Trump gives voice, aid and comfort to the lowest common denominator, the worst in us. This is an ugly reality that we are facing in America.

“We’re being tested and our democracy is on the line because what Donald Trump is saying is not just crazy batshittery. It’s dangerous. It’s authoritarian. It’s anti-democratic. It’s the ideology of hostility toward others. In Trump’s mind we’re not all equal and American voters need to make a decision about the type of country they want to live in and what kind of future they want to leave for their children.”