measles, DISINFORMATION, a “strong blow” of misogyny – whether women like it or not – a violent fantasy with nine weapons for political enemies, rudeness, petty insults and followers.

Choose your perversion, America. His last hours of campaign show Donald Trump is betting that enough of us want it.

Friday night Trump feigned having sex with a microphone after suggesting that he “screw the people behind the scenes” whom he blamed for that microphone not working to his liking. Throughout the day, the media has been obsessed with Trump suggestion that former Rep. Liz Cheney, who is campaigning against him and supports Vice President Kamala Harris, should be shot.

The spectacle and back-and-forth about whether he was depicting a firing squad or, as his surrogates claim, merely sending her to fight in the wars he supported, may seem like a damaging distraction to a campaign that is nearing its end. But they are actually Trump’s goal.

Say something mean. He thrills his fans with viscerally violent images. And then watch as privately shocked Republicans run to the cameras to explain that this was, in fact, perfectly normal. He wants to be the center of attention. He wants to shock. He believes this will endear him to voters who can’t stand the status quo.

All last week, Trump continued to disparage Kamala Harris by calling her “low IQ” and “dumb as a rock.” It’s a quintessential Trump response to a huge gender gap: insult Harris while telling women that he, having been convicted of sexual assault, will protect women “whether they like it or not.” Trump on Saturday continued to talk about women as objects in need of his protection: alone at home, vulnerable to migrants coming to kill them in their kitchens. “Women must be protected when they are at home in the suburbs,” he declared. At another rally on Friday, he reveled in their supposed gratitude for him: “Suburban housewives love me.”

Of course, condescending men and insulting women were just background noise at last week’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. The main show was a comedian’s disparaging of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of trash.” That one didn’t seem to go down well with Trump after it exploded on a political issue for him.

But after a week of refusing to apologize to the Puerto Rican community, Trump just did dismissed it. On Saturday, he referred to the episode as “a comedian” who “told a little joke.”

“He mentioned Puerto Rico and they made it like a big deal,” Trump said in a phone interview with Fox News.

While there is much debate about whether Trump is experiencing cognitive decline and has become disinhibited, we should be clear about what is happening at the end of the campaign: These are the choices Trump is making. He knows how to behave well enough when he wants to and chose not to. He acts this way because he feels he can, because he thinks it works, because that has worked.

TRUMP IS MORE POPULAR FOR TRYING TO STEAL AN ELECTION AND CAUSED AN INSURRECTION. With two impeachments, thirty-four felony convictions, and four criminal charges, Trump’s approval rating has soared and has new converts among the young and non-white, union members, and American Jews.

He is well positioned to win. And he trusts that the voters will it, and all his resentment and revenge and corruption and lies—that they don’t demand a competent government that can respond to crises or solve problems.

Trump didn’t even try to pretend he cared. He doesn’t seem interested in what Elon Musk will do as efficiency secretary or what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to do to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump needs Elon’s money for his campaign and he needed Kennedy’s endorsement to attract some democrat and freak votes. Musk spreads electoral lies on X and will be invited into the Trump administration—even though it is one of the government’s largest contractors— to do what he wants and promote his own interests. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who rejects vaccines, but he was invited to manage health policy in government agencies. Trump said RFK could get “wild” and pledged to let him handle “women’s health.” Voters know Trump doesn’t care about health care or spending cuts.

According to the new Report by Tim Alberta in Atlanticcampaign staff managed to convince Trump not to use a new nickname for President Joe Biden that Trump wanted to launch after the disastrous June 27 debate: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

However, it soured this summer when people complimented his campaign on his discipline, saying at a private fundraiser: “What does discipline have to do with winning?”

Trumpologists have spent nine years analyzing and debating various theories of Trump’s superpowers — the reptilian brain, the ability to lie so openly as his supporters delight in being implicated, how the Big Lie convinced millions of Americans that coordinated nefarious forces control only one election (and only at the top of the ticket) instead of what they had always seen, their neighbors operating thousands of county-by-county decentralized elections.

Republican strategist Alex Castellanos he wrote in 2018:

Trump is a predator. When something enters his world, it either eats him, kills him, or mates with him. That’s all his predatory instincts can do. The president’s primitive nature is the root of his narcissism. Trump’s immediate and voracious appetites allow for no concern for others or understanding of tomorrow. He reacts instinctively, not emotionally, morally or intellectually. He is insensitive to truth and incapable of discipline or strategy.

The difference between 2018 and 2024 is that those people with long resumes and Ivy League pedigrees who disciplined Trump in his first term are gone and kicked out. This third presidential campaign proved that Trump could no longer be contained.

Alberta concluded in its reporting: “At the heart of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed he is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has grown — and it serves as a reminder of what awaits him if he wins on Nov. 5.” .

Trump’s power comes from us. Little by little, Americans absorbed Trump’s onslaught and adapted, as people do. And nine years after taking our political system hostage, Trump now has the belief that, for many of us, his id is our id; that we can tolerate the show and maybe even like it.

Enough of us need to show him, and his party, wrong.

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