The whole backward-looking Biden frenzy mostly seems like an excuse for the press to look away from the present day. Right now, the most acute problem the United States has with presidential age, capacity, and fitness is not about what people didn’t know or wouldn’t say about the last president. It’s about what they can’t bring themselves to say about the current president.
Shortly after his chit-chat about golf on Wednesday, Donald Trump ordered the lights in the Oval Office dimmed so that he could show the president of South Africa a video about what Trump believes to be the conditions in South Africa. First came a long—bizarrely, obsessively, grindingly long—montage of clips of Black South African politicians at various rallies singing or chanting about killing the Boer. None of the politicians were Cyril Ramaphosa, and the most frequently occurring figure was Julius Malema, who was ejected from Ramaphosa’s African National Congress party in 2012. Then came a likewise oddly extended clip, filmed from above, showing vehicles parked along a roadway that had white crosses running alongside it.
“Now this is very bad. These are the, these are burial sites right here, burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers,” the President of the United States said. He continued:
.. and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross, and there’s approximately a thousand of them, they’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers. And those cars aren’t driving, they’re stopped there to pay respect to their family member who was killed. Uh, and it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it. Both sides of the road, you have crosses. Those people were all killed.
This was categorically not true. The crosses were not a row of thousands of farmer graves but a protest set up in response to the murder of one white farming couple. Soon after, while flipping through a stack of printouts that he said were stories about more murders of white farmers—”Death. Death. Death. Horrible death. Death”—Trump held up a page printed out from a far-right website, saying, “Look, here’s burial sites all over the place, these are all white farmers that are being buried.” The photo was of bodies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where prison escapees had murdered several women.
Fixated as he was on supposed white genocide, Trump was even more obsessed with the fact that an NBC reporter had interrupted his transition between the video and the stack of clippings by asking about the luxury jumbo jet the administration had just accepted as a gift from Qatar to be used as a new Air Force One. Here was his response when Ramaphosa tried to tell him that Black people are being killed in South Africa:
The farmers are not Black. I don’t say that’s good or bad, but the farmers are not Black, and the people that are being killed in—in large numbers—and you saw all those gravesites, and those are people that—loved ones, going, I guess, on a Sunday morning, they told me, to pay respect to their loved ones that were killed. Their heads chopped off. Uh, their—they died, died violently. And you know, we’re here to talk about it, and I didn’t know we’d get involved here, but I will say this, that if the news wasn’t fake like NBC, which is fake news, totally, one of the worst, ABC, NBC, CBS. Horrible. But if they weren’t fake news like this jerk, uh, that we have here, if we had real reporters, they’d be covering it. But the fake news in this country doesn’t talk about that. They don’t want to talk about it. But now they have to talk about it, but they won’t. They, this won’t even be a subject. They’ll have him talking about, Why did a country give a free—think, think of this—why did a country give an airplane to the United States Air Force? OK. The United States Air— Not to me. To the United States Air Force so they could help us out because we need an Air Force One until our—[points toward model plane] see that’s Air Force One, it’s being built, two of ’em being built. But Boeing’s a little bit late, unfortunately. So why did they give us a plane, to the United States Air Force. That is what that idiot talks about after viewing a thing where thousands of people are dead.
This is how the president talks every day: in rambling, broken thoughts veering from petty yet grandiose grievances to paranoid conspiracies and fantasies dredged up from the gutters of the racist internet. Last month, before the nonexistent graves, it was a photo of the tattoos on the hand of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—or rather a caption of the characters “MS 13” that had been added to the photo and which Trump insisted were part of the tattoos themselves, to the point of losing his temper at ABC’s Terry Moran for trying to dispute the claim.
Who believes that Donald Trump—fixated on imaginary graves and Photoshopped tattoos—is going to be able to process new and alarming information in the middle of the night, with the fate of the world at stake? This is a president who reverses his own tariff policy depending on which advisors can catch him alone at any given moment, who decides to declare he’s reopening the derelict Alcatraz prison on a whim, who needs to be mollified with baby talk to keep him focused on his own budget bill.
None of this is any sort of secret. Trump clearly isn’t capable of carrying out the duties of a president in any consistent, meaningful way. Until his defenders and enablers are afraid of the consequences of that, it doesn’t matter.
