End Game: The Carnival Barker Loses His Marbles

Donald Trump's surrogates faced something of a challenge in the aftermath of last week's presidential debate, obliged to insist that things had gone well for him, all evidence to the contrary. And there was plenty of contrary evidence provided by the former president's responses to questions posed by the moderators, as Kamala Harris displayed debating skills that left him looking rattled. If the non compos mentis in battleground states constituted an actual voting bloc, the case that Trump fared well might be plausible, but otherwise he looked like Benito Mussolini on amphetamines.

Harris mixed broad themes with zingers aimed at making Trump go postal. The military regards Trump as "a disgrace," he was a convicted felon who was facing a sentencing hearing that would be "a big day" for him, he was "weak" and Putin et al. would "eat him for lunch." It's been a long time since Trump seemed mentally suited to be president, but last week over 60 million Americans saw someone who needed to be guided off the stage, if not out of the building.

There were the customary insults, which made him sound like a Not Ready For Prime Time Player. "She's a Marxist," Trump ranted. "Everybody knows she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist professor in economics. He taught her well." Then "People don't go to her rallies," the product of wishful thinking, delusion or both. "And the people that do go, she's bussing them in and paying them to be there."

Stung by Harris' jab about the empty seats at his rallies and the video of people leaving them, Trump sounded somewhere between infantile and untethered. "People don't leave my rallies," he insisted angrily. "We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics."

Pressed about his boasts that he had overturned Roe v. Wade, Trump resorted to simple fiction. Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, Trump contended, "says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it's execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is OK." The nullification of Roe was opposed by the overwhelming majority of Americans, but not on Donald Trump's planet. "Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states," he claimed.

On the issue of Afghanistan, Trump got some basic facts wrong, in the light most favorable to him, telling a story that sounded, well, made-up. The leader of the Taliban since 2016 has been Hibatullah Akhundzada. Not according to Trump. "Abdul is the head of the Taliban," Trump declared. "He's still the head of the Taliban. And I told Abdul don't do it anymore, you do it again you're going to have problems. And he said why do you send me a photo of my house. I said you're going to have to figure it out." Why Trump's sending Abdul a picture of his house is something all of us are going to have to figure out, and not just Abdul.

If the idea was to use the debate to demonstrate to the still unconvinced that he was off his rocker, Trump was just warming up, bouncing from warnings about World War III ("just to go into another subject") to what, supposedly, is "what's happening in the towns all over the United States," which "a lot of towns don't want to talk about because they're so embarrassed about it."

What is it that's happening all over America? Immigrants are "eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country."

Informed that this story is unfounded, Trump remained adamant. "The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food," he insisted.

There was a feeling post-debate that Americans have had enough. Narcissists or charlatans, even demagogues, are one thing. But seeming like a psycho is something else. That's the challenge they have at Mar-a-Lago.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.