As next week's first presidential debate fast approaches, it's occurring to Trump campaign officials that playing up their candidate's mental superiority might have been a mistake. Was it last week's disastrous town hall that burst Team Trump's reality bubble? Is it the fact that Donald Trump can barely string an intelligible sentence together? Or maybe it's the way he now clutches the sides of a podium to steady himself. Who knows?
But here's just one recent example from the campaign trail of why mocking Joe Biden's mental capacity just may have been a serious miscalculation.
Huh—pretty sharp, that. It's exactly why Trump aides have made a frenzied bid of late to portray Biden as a veteran debater of "47 years" after months of trying to sell voters on his frailness. Naturally, Trump hasn't gotten the memo.
At a Pittsburgh rally Tuesday night, Trump revisited his cockamamie conspiracy theory that Biden had taken some sort of performance-enhancing drug before Democratic primary debates.
"This guy doesn't have a clue. He doesn't know where the hell he is and they'll give him a shot of something. I don't know. He's going to get something," Trump said, renewing his call for a drug test. "We want a drug test. We'll both take it."
Meanwhile, Trump advisers are fretting that their candidate is about to walk headlong into the trap the delusional Trump thought he was setting for Biden.
“This idea of Biden not knowing how to debate is ridiculous. The more that expectations are lowered for him the worse,” said former White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
You hate to see it, but Spicey has a point.
“Biden has clearly shown he can function, the bar is low and the expectations are so low, all he has to do is exceed those expectations,” said GOP strategist Ed Rollins, who runs a pro-Trump super PAC.
Not only has Biden weathered a dozen or so debates during the Democratic primary, he actually lives in the real world, where real people have real problems, and roughly two-thirds of them don't think Trump is the automatic solution.
Trump, on the other hand, has two major problems. First, he lives in such a state of unreality that he doesn't know what he doesn't know because no one will tell him. Last week's town hall proved that putting Trump in front of anyone who isn't a true believer can easily unravel him in real time.
Second, Trump simply isn't that mentally sharp himself. He'll be lucky to escape next Tuesday without a major gaffe, some slurred words, and reality check that undoes him as a giant national audience looks on.
Maybe he should take an injection or two?