What's wrong with Donald Trump? (New York Times, Ezra Klein Show transcript)

Just heard this remarkable October 22, 2024 podcast on NPR, WJCT in Jacksonville.  What do y'all reckon?

OPINION

THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW

What’s Wrong With Donald Trump?

Oct. 22, 2024

• 2100

By Ezra Klein

What’s Wrong With Donald Trump?

I think there’s an answer. But it’s not age — or, at least, it’s not just age.

This is a transcript of an audio essay, and we recommend listening to it in its original form so you can hear the clips. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

You’ve probably seen the clip by now. Donald Trump is holding a town hall. It’s Monday, Oct. 14, in Pennsylvania. He was being asked softball questions by Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, and there is a medical emergency in the crowd. The rally stops for a while. They play “Ave Maria” while the medics respond. Then Trump and Noem begin again. Then someone else in the crowd needs medical help. The rally stops again, begins again. Noem is settling back in when Trump announces he’s had enough.

Donald Trump: Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. [Cheers.] Who the hell wants to hear questions, right? [Laughter.]

What comes next is something I’ve never seen before. Trump, swaying dreamily to his playlist, in front of a rally full of people, for nearly 40 minutes. It was like he was D.J.’ing his own bar mitzvah. You can look, in these clips, at the faces of the people around him, like Noem. They really have no idea what to do. They are suddenly backup dancers in a concert that shouldn’t exist.

Part of me finds Donald Trump’s behavior here unusually relatable. You think I want to sit up here talking about politics and war day after day? You don’t know the temptation to, just once, just for one week, turn this podcast into a drum and bass set or play you my favorite Kiasmos songs. But I don’t. Of course I don’t. It’s not what we’re doing here. And if I were a presidential candidate in the final weeks of a campaign, I wouldn’t do what Trump did, because the fallout would be predictable: an avalanche of media coverage asking, “What the hell was that?”

I wouldn’t do it because of the inevitable attacks from my opponents about the strange behavior I’d just exhibited onstage.

Tim Walz: I would not usually encourage you, but we’re doing it now. Go watch this guy right now. And go watch these rallies or this town hall. He stopped taking questions and stood frozen onstage for 30 minutes while they played his Spotify list for people. [Laughter.] It was strange. But if this was your grandfather, you would take the keys away. You would take the keys away.

I don’t think Walz has this right. Trump did not freeze up on that stage; I’m not going to accept that. He did not lose where he was in the moment. If anything, he was all too present. But Walz is saying something Democrats really want to hear right now.

There are so many Democrats — I think you can imagine I hear from them all the time — who are furious still about the difference between the way the media treated Joe Biden’s age and the way it has treated Donald Trump’s age. The diminishment of Biden’s capacities led to unrelenting coverage and concern from the media and from Biden’s own party that ultimately drove him from the race. Every time Biden flubbed a name or a place, every time his voice was quiet or thick and clotted, every time a sentence derailed before it reached its intended station, a frenzy over Joe Biden’s fitness would rise.

But Donald Trump, at 78, is nearly as old as Joe Biden. He exhibits his own cognitive irregularities. He rambles, and he lies and makes things up and seems to get strangely lost in these digressions. His speech is associative and circular. It can read like gibberish on the page. And he goes on bizarre riffs, like this one, which is somehow about the dangers of electric boats:

Trump: I say, “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?”

By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark — I watched some guys justifying it today. “Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.” These people are crazy —

He said: “There’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now who really got decimated and other people, too.” A lot of shark attacks.

So I said: “So there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards. Or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking and water goes over the battery? The boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, “You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.”

There is this fury among many Democrats about the pass they feel Trump has been given. And I’ve struggled with this myself. It’s not that Trump’s age is unknown or that in the media it is uncovered. But even when we do write about it, I can tell you, it doesn’t connect in the same way. The media doesn’t actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend that it does. The audience knows what it believes. If you are describing something they don’t really feel is true, they read it, and they move on. Or they don’t read it at all. And I don’t think people believe — to be honest, I don’t believe — that the core problem with Trump is his age.

Over four years, we really did watch age change Joe Biden. It made him different than he’d been before. But is that what has happened to Donald Trump? Is he different than he was before?

Because I would say Donald Trump in 2024 is like Donald Trump in 2020 and like Donald Trump in 2016. I don’t think he has so much changed as he is distilled. But this is where the critics are right: We had the language to talk about what was happening to Joe Biden. Age is a delicate topic, but it’s one we know. And so we did talk about it. We spoke about it relentlessly.

We’ve never had good language for talking about Donald Trump. We’ve never had good language for talking about the way he thinks and the way in which it is different from how other people think and talk and act. And so we circle it. We imply it. I don’t think this is bias so much as it’s confusion. In order to talk about something, you need the words for it. But for me, something clicked watching him up there, swaying to that music.

You may have heard of the big five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum of each of them. I’ve taken these tests, and I score close to as high as you can on conscientiousness and agreeableness, and if we’re really being honest here, I’m above average on neuroticism, too. I was talking to a research psychologist about this, and when I told him that, he told me, “That’s a good combination for being very productive and very anxious.”

Yeah. It sure is.

I mentioned, though, that these traits are spectrums. Some of the newer personality frameworks name the other side of the spectrum, too. So to be low on neuroticism is to be high in emotional stability. To be low on extroversion is to be introverted. And to be low on conscientiousness is to be disinhibited. To be very low on conscientiousness is to be very high on disinhibition. And that is Donald Trump.

I want to tread carefully here. For years now, there has been a cottage industry of books diagnosing Trump with this or that psychological malady. And the view that Trump’s psychology borders or tips into the pathological is not limited to his critics. John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, is known to have bought the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” seeking insight on the man he served. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s third chief of staff, recommended aides read “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.” He thought it would help them understand the way Trump’s strange psychology, maybe even his mental illness, helped make him a powerful and unique leader.

But there are strong reasons we in the media and psychiatrists in general are careful with this kind of language. There’s a rule in psychiatry that you don’t diagnose patients you haven’t directly examined. That rule comes from politics. It is called the Goldwater Rule, because they did that to Barry Goldwater and got sued and lost.

The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. So I am not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something simpler and, I think, more neutral here: Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.

And when I say that, I am describing both what is wrong with Donald Trump and what is right with him.

Something I have learned as I’ve gotten older is that every person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. Disinhibition is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.

It’s easy to forget that in 2016, Jeb Bush seemed likely to win the Republican nomination and perhaps the White House. Much of the top talent in the Republican Party had worked for a Bush in some form or another. And yes, plenty of Republicans thought, often privately, that George W. Bush’s presidency had been a failure. They thought the Iraq war had been a mistake. But you could not succeed as a Republican unless you tread carefully around that. Or so went the thinking of almost everyone back then. And then someone proved it completely wrong.

Trump: George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. [Applause.]

John Dickerson: So you still think he should have been impeached?

Jeb Bush: I think it’s my turn, isn’t it?

Trump: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction. [Boos.]

Let me state what everybody knows: There are many things politicians believe that they do not say. The norms of politics — the norms of simple politeness — suppress much that people feel. There are vast swaths of political opinion you’re not really supposed to talk about. A lot of people believe that immigrants are bad and dangerous and that we shouldn’t have so many of them in this country. That free trade is ripping this country off and it’s the fault of these corrupt idiots in Washington lining their own pockets. That China isn’t our ally or our partner — it’s our enemy. And that the great threat to America comes from within, that other Americans are disloyal, that they are the enemy and the power of the state should be turned against them.

It’s not that no one else in politics held these views before Donald Trump. But for the most part, it’s not how they spoke about them. That was the failure in the system that Trump exploited: the lie that just because politicians didn’t talk this way, voters didn’t feel this way. One of Trump’s verbal tics is to say, “Many people are saying.” But it’s the opposite. He’s saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He’s saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public.

One argument Trump’s supporters make is: You don’t get Trump’s honesty without his outrageousness. You don’t get a leader who can break the mold by supporting a person who conforms to the mold. Here’s Kellyanne Conway at the 2024 Republican National Convention:

Kellyanne Conway: How often do we hear, “I want Trump’s policies without Trump’s personality”? Well, good luck with that. We don’t get those policies without that personality.

She’s right. You certainly don’t get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, “I’d be a good president. I’m smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there”?

How many times have you felt insulted or wronged by someone and wanted to just unload on them in public? To go all out in annihilating your tormentor in every way you could? How many times in your work or your life have you believed something other people didn’t believe, something they thought was wrong or impolite or outdated or ridiculous, and you bit your tongue. You didn’t want to say it and be laughed at, mocked, dismissed, punished. But we hold ourselves back. Most of us do.

And so when I say this, I mean it: What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party and capture that political party totally. Break its fundamental consensus. Slander its previous standard-bearers. To then become president, having never held elective office or served in the military, while saying things and doing things that, until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique.

Over the years, I have interviewed I don’t know how many politicians. Talking to them is different from talking to anyone else. It’s why I don’t just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.

The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.

But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?

It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.

It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.

Sometimes Trump’s disinhibition gets you a willingness to call a failed presidency a failed presidency. To call a lie that took us to war a lie. But sometimes it gets you this:

Trump: Somebody should run against John McCain, who has been, you know, in my opinion not so hot. And I supported him. I supported him for president, I raised a million dollars for him. It’s a lot of money. I supported him. He lost. He let us down. But you know, he lost. [Light laughter.] So I never liked him as much after that, because I don’t like losers. [Louder laughter.] But Frank, Frank let me get to it. He hit me —

Frank Luntz: He’s a war hero.

Trump: He’s not a war hero.

Luntz: He’s a war hero.

Trump: He’s a war hero. He’s a war hero ’cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? [Laughter.] I hate to tell you.

Luntz: Do you agree with that?

Trump: He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK? And I believe — perhaps he’s a war hero. But right now he said some very bad things about a lot of people.

Trump’s disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he’s a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he will praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he will mock John McCain. Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling. He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn. He once told a biographer: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”

I believe him totally when he says that. In 2018 he told The Washington Post, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” Imagine going through life truly believing that, truly acting like that. And then imagine that in so many ways, it has worked for you: It has made you rich and famous and powerful beyond your wildest dreams. What would that do to you? What does that do to a person with a mind like Donald Trump’s?

Here is the question Democrats have floundered in answering this year: If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? There is this gap between the unfit, unsound, unworthy man Democrats describe and the memories that most Americans have of his presidency, at least before the pandemic. If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?

There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child.

These quotes about Trump abound, given on the record or on background, to various biographers and reporters. Some of them are later disputed, as the staffer realized the consequences of what they said. But there are reams and reams of them. For every one I offer here, I could give you a dozen more.

In 2017 his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same time, lest Trump do something truly deranged.

Here’s the title of a 2017 article in Politico: “White House aides lean on delays and distraction to manage Trump.” The first paragraph reads, “As White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus mused to associates that telling President Donald Trump no was usually not an effective strategy. Telling him ‘next week’ was often the better idea.”

In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell Op-Ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of the internal resistance to Donald Trump, in which — quote — “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” That author later revealed himself to be Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, he described the lengths he and others took to shield America — to shield their own staff — from the commander in chief’s whims and rages:

Miles Taylor: The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary, myself, about Jerry Brown, and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom, because they didn’t support him. And he didn’t have a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, “I don’t care. These people haven’t done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money.”

In fact, that phone call that I referenced with FEMA officials, the secretary and I were so concerned because we didn’t want our senior leadership to be exposed to how undisciplined and tumultuous the White House was, because it made it harder for them to do their jobs. So after that call, FEMA officials said: “What do we do? The president has just told us to cut off money to people whose homes are burning down.”

Our answer was: We’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to the president. But then, George, months after, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it. And again, I think subsequently, he tweeted about doing it. Fortunately, it never happened. FEMA didn’t follow through on it because I think because they determined from their lawyers that a tweet wasn’t an official order.

The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”

During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane. He has talked often and insistently on his desire to turn the machinery of the government against his domestic political enemies. He talked often about pulling out of NATO. He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid. In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters. Here’s Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, on “60 Minutes”:

Mark Esper: I thought that we’re at a different spot now, where he’s going to finally give a direct order to deploy paratroopers into the streets of Washington, D.C., and I’m thinking with weapons and bayonets. And this would be horrible.

Norah O’Donnell: What specifically was he suggesting that the U.S. military should do to these protesters?

Esper: He says: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.

After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he refused to admit that loss, perhaps refused to even believe that loss. I’m personally persuaded by the reporting that he’d come to believe very weird theories both of fraud and that he could be reinstated as president. And yes, there is a part of all of us that resists believing our own defeat. How many politicians who’ve been voted out of office would have preferred to ignore those results, to claim fraud and cling to power? Not all of them, certainly. Most of the people who serve in politics are patriots. They understand that the peaceful transition of power is sacred and that their ambition is profane. But even the politicians who are not patriots recognize the likely outcome of fighting the results of a fair election: dishonor, defeat and possible prosecution.

Trump did not care. He was unrestrained by those inhibitions. He tried, in every possible way he could, to overturn the election. He called state election officials and demanded they find votes for him that did not exist. Here’s Trump threatening Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in a phone call that later leaked:

Trump: The ballots are corrupt, and you’re going to find that they are, which is totally illegal. It’s, it is, it’s more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a, you know, that’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And, and you know, you can’t let that happen.

That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can. Both of which are criminal fines. And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen.

You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So, look, all I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.

It didn’t end there. With state after state refusing to bend its results to Trump’s whims, he demanded his vice president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify the election. Pence certified it anyway. When a mob stormed the Capitol, chanting, in part, “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump did nothing. He watched it on television.

Even now, knowing everything we know about that day — the people who died, the people who were injured, how close we might have come to a massacre in the halls of Congress — here is how Trump describes it:

Trump: The vice president, I disagree with him on what he did. I totally disagreed with him on what he did. Very importantly, you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me. They came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came.

Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said, peacefully and patriotically. Nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken. Strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.

What is remarkable to me about that answer — which, to be sure, Trump gave just last week at a Univision town hall — is that it doesn’t serve Trump’s own interests. He needs to reassure people about this. That’s the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us have. That restraint helps us act strategically, carefully. When I described the way politicians calculate their answers earlier, I wasn’t insulting them. There is a reason they do that. When JD Vance showed up at the vice-presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason. He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That is why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively. When he is pressured, when he is emotional, he cannot stop himself. He can’t inhibit himself. Here he is on “Fox and Friends,” being lobbed an easy question, a softball, about making nice with Nikki Haley, whose help he could really use right now, whose help has been offered to him:

Trump: Nikki Haley and I fought, and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points. I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody’s ever been beaten by. I beat Nikki badly. I beat everyone else too badly.

If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself. He is missing the part of his mind that tells him what not to say, what not to do. He may be cunning and intuitive. He may know how to work a room and command a crowd. He may know how to spy the weakness in another person and dominate them. But he cannot control himself.

The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him. Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.

And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.

But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doing. Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal, “We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” He went on to say, “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”

I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answer. Don Jr. was one of the people who reportedly persuaded Trump to pick Vance. Back in May, before Vance was chosen but when he was known to be under consideration, when he was clearly running for the job, he sat down with my colleague Ross Douthat, who asked him an interesting question. When, Ross asked, did Vance decide he actually liked Donald Trump?

Vance said it was when he first met Trump, in 2021, and Trump told him a story about being deceived by his generals about the troop levels in the Middle East. Vance said the conversation made him realize Trump was deeper than he’d been given credit for, and Vance realized, “I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy — the generals not listening to the president of the United States about matters like troop deployment.”

Vance is one of many now who’ve made it their mission to see that Trump’s future orders are carried out, no matter their content. If Trump was constrained by others in his first term, Vance wants to make sure the same does not happen in a second term. And Vance has been arguing this for some time. Here he is in 2021, again arguing that the true threat to democracy isn’t Trump trying to overturn elections or Trump doing dangerous things in office but Trump’s will being frustrated by the bureaucracy around him:

JD Vance: The administrative state controls everything, right? So to the point that when Donald Trump wins, he can’t even sometimes get his people in core positions of authority in the administrative state. It’s like, well, do we have a constitutional republic? The founding fathers actually created a very powerful chief executive, a very powerful president. But if he can’t even fire the people in his own administration, is this really a successful republic?

The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises. Here, for instance, is Vance at the vice-presidential debate:

Vance: Remember, he said that on Jan. 6, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on Jan. 20, what happened? Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House. And now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration.

But here, at the All In conference, is Vance describing what would’ve been different if he’d been the vice president on Jan. 6:

Vance: Do I think that Mike Pence could have played a better role? Yes. But again, the two premises that I take issue is, one, Pence was not asked to overturn the election. He couldn’t have, but two, the reason —

Jason Calacanis: He was asked to not certify it.

Vance: Sure.

Jason Calacanis: So would you have certified —

Vance: Again, I would’ve asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had in these important states.

Calacanis: So you wouldn’t have certified. To be clear.

Vance: I would’ve asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors.

Calacanis: I think that’s what you’re saying.

Vance: That’s what I would’ve done.

I am not here to tell you that Donald Trump’s age is not a problem. He would be, upon his inauguration, the oldest president ever to assume the office. Recently he has begun canceling scheduled interviews, his staff apparently citing exhaustion.

And we know that aging can make disinhibition worse. The August 2020 edition of the journal Psychology and Aging was entirely devoted to research on how the ability to control our behavior appears, in many studies, to decline as we get older. It is hard not to think of that research when I read that Trump’s rallies have stretched to an average of 82 minutes, up from about 45 minutes in 2016. Trump’s ability to ramble on a stage is often used as evidence of his continued vigor. I think it’s the opposite. I think his inability to stop rambling on a stage is evidence that what little capacity he once had to control himself is weakening. And what else are we to make of riffs like this one in the final weeks of a campaign?

Trump: But Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women. [Applause.] But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there — they said: “Oh, my God. That’s unbelievable.” [Laughter.]

But Trump’s age is not what worries me most. This was not a man possessed of personal restraint in 2016 or 2020, either.

What has changed even more than Trump are the people and institutions around him. The leader of the House Republicans is Mike Johnson, not Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership. And while I do not consider McConnell a profile in courage, his successor will be more in need of Trump’s patronage. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for all their flaws, are out, while Don Jr. and Lara Trump are in. JD Vance wormed his way onto the ticket by promising to do what Mike Pence would not. Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to buy influence, centrality even, in another Trump administration. The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity from prosecution for official presidential actions. Republicans have spent four years plotting to take control of the administrative state — to stock it with loyalists who would never, ever do anything to impede Trump — and turn the entire machinery of the government to Trump’s whims.

Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully. That Trump is not such a person is obvious if you watch the man. And so, for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.

Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively. Fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not.

But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated, to go from one of Trump’s amazing hires — he only brings on the best people — to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers.

What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.

You can listen to the audio essay by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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A correction was made on 

Oct. 22, 2024

: 

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a woman killed at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She was Ashli Babbitt, not Ashley.

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When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.  

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Wrong With Trump?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe