Trump’s Bobbing and Dancing Disaster
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Chris Lehmann on the elites’ denial of the presidential candidate’s mental decline.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by Chris Lehmann to discuss the elite denial of presidential candidate’s mental decline.
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U.S. Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump dances during a campaign rally.
(Rebecca Noble / Getty Images)As the presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s hard to ignore the evidence of Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior: his slurring of words, his freezing up during questions, his repeated cancellations of interviews, and the bizarre incident at a town hall in Pennsylvania, where Trump unexpectedly spent more than half an hour bobbing and tottering on stage to a selection of his favorite tunes. My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann wrote about this event. He joins me to talk about Trump’s cognitive slide and also the failure of elite institutions that are still enabling Trump, including the mainstream media and the Republican Party. We also take up the state of the race in general.

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
The Trump administration has released a new National Security Strategy that is a marked shift
not only from earlier administrations but also Trump’s first term in office. While the new policy
statement eschews the goal of global hegemony, it promotes culture war in Europe by
promising support of anti-immigration political parties, economic rivalry in Asia with China, and
a renewal of US military hegemony in the Western hemisphere. To survey this document and
Trump’s often contradictory foreign policy, I spoke to frequent guest of the show Stephen
Wertheim who is American Statecraft senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
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