Trump’s leadership style has only gotten uglier since Harris entered race

The traits and characteristics that voters value in a presidential candidate are as wide ranging as the population and diversity of the American people. However, there are some things that most of us can agree upon.

In a recent YouGov poll, more than 80% of Americans agreed that honesty, integrity, respect for the rule of law, sound mental health and the ability to stay calm under pressure are among the most important traits that a president can possess.

These results beg the questions of how so many Americans can continue to support Donald Trump today, even as his mental health declines and his cruelty and crudity become even more visible.

After all, no one can credibly claim that Trump is particularly honest. At his hour-long press conference two weeks ago, the Republican nominee for president engaged in 162 misstatements, exaggerations or outright lies in just 64 minutes. In June, Trump’s own former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Trump lied “every 100 seconds” during his debate with Joe Biden.

Nor can they claim that Trump is a man of integrity. Even before his efforts to overthrow the results of 2020 presidential election and lead a murderous insurrection at the United States Capitol, Trump was dining with white supremacists, discriminating against non-white tenants, cheating his employees and contractors, and sexually assaulting women, grabbing women by the you-know-what, cheating on his wives and cheating small contractors and family business that made the mistake of trusting him.

Trump’s lack of respect for the rule of law is similarly well documented. From his criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to his utter disrespect for federal law and military protocol in his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week, Trump has shown time and time again that rules, regulations and laws are simply inconveniences to be ignored.

Which brings us to Trump’s mental health and his ability to remain calm under pressure.

Trump’s mental health has been in question for years as high-ranking officials in his own administration — including at least four members of his Cabinet — discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to attempt to remove Trump from office on at least two separate occasions during his presidency.

Trump has shown consistent signs of further cognitive decline since leaving the Oval Office, including a decline in the vocabulary and complexity of his sentences, an increase in Trump’s digressions during speeches, the growing inability to remain focused on a single topic and the slurring of words.

In recent weeks, facing the pressure of declining poll numbers and an intelligent, exciting and inspiring opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump has declined even further, losing both his composure and competence.

In the past week alone, he promoted Qanon conspiracy theories, accused Harris of secretly plotting to assist the gunman in the assassination attempt of Trump and called for military tribunals and prison sentences (and even implied executions) for everyone from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci.

When he wasn’t spreading deranged conspiracies, he was busy posting campaign infomercials that did everything from disrespecting fallen American war heroes by using a national military graveyard as the backdrop for a campaign ad to attempting to raise money by selling digital trading cards and pieces of the suit he wore in June’s debate. He even publicly made a crude and vulgar joke about Harris, Hillary Clinton and oral sex.

Is this the kind of person we want as president? Is this the kind of person anyone, much less the nation’s children, should respect and emulate?

By Thursday, he seemed to have lost his mind completely. Speaking at a campaign rally in Potterville, Mich., Trump rambled nonsensically, at one point losing track of his thoughts midway through an attack on Harris:

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s, and I own a big building there, it’s no, I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing.I should say it’s the finest city in the world, sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know. I lost billions of billions of dollars you know? Somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said probably two, three billion, it’s OK I don’t care. They said, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ and that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say that I don’t know if you know, Lincoln was horribly treated, uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly, Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. And I say, ‘Do that study again because I think there’s nobody close (long pause) to Trump, I even got shot, and who the hell knows where that came from right?’ ”

Later in the day, Trump told a crowd of supporters in La Crosse, Wis., that, “Some people don’t eat bacon anymore and we are going to get the energy prices down, when we get energy down.” That was a single sentence. A single thought in Trump’s failing mind.

The list of moments like these could go on for pages, but it’s sufficient to say that ever since Harris joined the race, almost everything Trump has said has either been overtly racist, sexist, demeaning, intentionally cruel or simply nonsense. Don’t forget, it was only one month ago that Trump first uttered the word “Kamabla” and said the vice president “happened to turn Black.”

In short, Trump has none of the attributes that most Americans say they are looking for in a president. Instead, he models the worst of us: dishonesty, cruelty, a disregard for the law and an inability to exercise basic self-control or even maintain a coherent thought.

To be clear, this is not an issue of partisan politics, it’s an issue of character, decency and mental fitness. The idea that any American would look at the words and actions of Donald Trump and support his bid to be president is simply mind-boggling.