After the Trump-Biden debate, some asshole with a blog noted:

What is bizarre in all of this discussion is that Trump was unable to communicate basic concepts–he couldn’t form complete sentences or express himself clearly. Yet, based on the pundit reaction, it’s as if Trump wasn’t even there. To rephrase this, both Biden and Trump failed their mental acuity checks….

I know I’m going to get people saying, “DIDN’T YOU SEE THE DEBATE?!?”, but it seems weird to call it a debate loss for Biden when he narrowed the gap afterwards. Maybe people watched the actively dementing Trump too? (I found the Bloomberg link on Bluesky and the Bloomberg staffer who posted it used the phrase “widely panned performance”–which is a huge fucking tell).

With Biden gone, Trump’s deficiencies, which have only become worse, are glaringly apparent (even if most of the political press corps was so focused on Biden, they ignored Trump; boldface mine):

That’s it right there. Every time I read about the June 27 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the assumption is it was a disaster for Biden. But Trump was a mess. As I said in Wednesday’s edition, “his bowls of word salad and his firehose of lies constituted a vocabulary that [was] as alien to most Americans as Esperanto.” Now that Biden is out of the running and the possibility of a second Trump term is clearer in voters’ minds (and Kamala Harris is an appealing alternative), there appears to be room to rethink what happened. Even some Republicans seem ready to admit Trump was a disaster.

Every public event since June 27 has demonstrated the same point – that Trump’s habitual incoherence is getting worse, and the worse it gets, the more he alienates voters he must have to break through the ceiling of 43.5 percent of the electorate. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, his interview at the meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, his press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago, his “economy speech” last night in North Carolina, and today’s presser at his New Jersey club – all of them featured gibberish so acute that he may as well have been speaking a foreign language.

We do see the occasional (sort of) breaking through of this in political coverage: AP published a story about Trump’s Bedminster press conference titled “Trump blends falsehoods and exaggerations at rambling NJ press conference.” But it ignores the fundamental issue that Trump is mentally incompetent to the point where he can’t even do his racisms–and he likes doing racisms!

The basic mental incompetency of the Republican candidate, despite what those who cover him incorrectly believe, isn’t as widely known as they might think. It’s a story.