Trump is getting worse. Will the media notice?

Donald Trump’s campaign is in a fierce tailspin as his failed attacks on Kamala Harris haven’t been able to slow down her growing popularity.

“It’s very clear the former president is unraveling. He’s having a complete meltdown,” Ashley Etienne, a former Joe Biden staffer and political advisor, said during a recent segment on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show. “Kamala Harris has got him a chokehold that is really driving him to the point of insanity, and really driving his campaign to the point of paralysis.”

Harris is officially the Democratic presidential nominee. Nonetheless, Trump has continued to describe the vice president’s elevation to the top of her party’s ticket as “unconstitutional” and accused her of taking part in a “coup.” Recently, Trump told a group of reporters that he was “very angry “at Harris and ranted, “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks.”

“I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president,” Trump added.

During a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump went off script and declared himself more attractive than Harris.

“I say that I am much better looking. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” Trump declared to a crowd of his supporters. For a man to compare his attractiveness to a woman’s is odd and arguably creepy. And if Trump genuinely believes he supersedes Harris in the looks department, he needs to take a good look in a mirror.

He also bizarrely claimed Harris is not Black and only started “pretending” to be Black when she decided to run for political office. And he continues his perverse obsession with crowd size, falsely bragging he had a bigger crowd at the Ellipse in Washington D.C. during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enjoyed at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963, which drew an estimated 250,000 people.

Trump also falsely claimed that a crowd that showed up to greet Harris at the Detroit airport simply didn’t exist. “There was nobody on the plane, and her campaign used ‘A.I.’ instead,” Trump declared. This would probably come as a major surprise to the 15,000 fans in attendance, captured on video camera by multiple news outlets.

There are a number of reasons the right-wing obsession and fascination with Harris is so rampant. Apart from her being the Democratic’s presidential candidate, she is a biracial woman of color and one of a very small number of women of color in Congress. She is intelligent, attractive, and unapologetically direct in a professional sense.

Harris exudes an unabashed, refreshing level of confidence. She is the embodiment of the living nightmare for many right wingers. Black, biracial, confident, candid and competent. She epitomizes pretty much everything many of them dislike. For a first-term congressperson to have struck such fear into a sizable sector of a political movement is really interesting.

Trump has claimed President Biden deployed the FBI to Mar-a-Lago with the intent to assassinate him. He accused Biden of “faking” having the Covid virus. He falsely claims Democrats want to murder babies after birth, and that Venezuela is releasing its convicts from prison and sending them to the United States with the current administration’s blessing. And, of course, he is still touting the same lie that he, not Joe Biden, was the winner of the 2020 election.

The truth is Trump is not funny. There is nothing amusing about his rhetoric. He’s not confused. He is a mentally unhinged person.

The media should be discussing this alarming reality every day. Rather than treating Trump as if he is a run of the mill candidate when he clearly is not, and begin reporting him for what he is — an older man who has already reached the stage of mental illness and is rapidly becoming worse as time progresses.

One can only wonder how many Republicans — and segments of the media — would have demanded invoking the 25th Amendment had Joe Biden stated such a litany of falsehoods. I think we know the answer.

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.