As I’m sure you’ve heard, there’s an important debate coming up Tuesday night. After hinting that he might not attend since the initial agreement was to debate Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris, and then claiming that the ABC moderators would be biased against him, Donald Trump agreed to appear.

It was interesting to hear that the Harris campaign wanted to revise the rule that calls for the microphone of the candidate to be muted when it is not their turn to answer. Biden’s team negotiated that term because of Trump’s demonstrated proclivity to interrupt and talk over his opposing candidate.

Apparently, Harris’s team felt that “allowing Trump to be Trump” would benefit her candidacy, as his impertinent lunacy would be on display for viewers who might not be aware of his detachment from reality, lies, and bad behavior. In an ironic twist, Trump’s team did not want to change the rules…for the same reason Harris wanted them changed.

If you have seen any recent clips of Trump’s rallies or interviews, you are likely alarmed that someone so deranged is in what is currently a coin-flip election.

An appearance at the Economic Club of New York this past provides an example. Trump was asked what, if anything, he would do about the cost of child care, an issue that polls show high on many voters’ minds. Here’s what he said, word for word:

Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that because the child care is, child care is you couldn’t, you know there’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with child care, I want to stay with child care but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth. But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’re going to be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first, it’s about ‘Make America Great Again,’ we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it.

Got that?

No? Well, let me help…I’m neither a Trump insider nor a linguist, but I’ll try to translate for you. I think he meant: “We’ll make so much on these (economy-destroying) tariffs that we’ll have plenty of money to offer free childcare.”

Because of episodes like this (or the one about a month ago at the National Association of Black Journalists national convention) many in the media are now making is the importance of putting Trump’s own words out there for all to see, instead of summarizing or interpreting them for the reader (as I just did immediately above). That maybe the best way to prevent that coin-flip to result in a Trump win is for the media to show him in all of his demented vainglory and confusion.

This article in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Trump’s incomprehensible child care comments appear to have broken a dam, makes that point.

As does historian Heather Cox Richardson whose blog post Saturday featured Trump’s behavior at a rally in Wisconsin. She writes:

A number of us who have been watching him closely have been saying for a while that when voters actually saw him in this campaign, they would be shocked at how he has deteriorated, and that seems to be true: his meandering and self-indulgent speeches have had attendees leaving early, some of them bewildered. In today’s speech, Trump slurred a number of words, referring to Elon Musk as “Leon,” for example, and forgetting the name of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who was on his short list for a vice presidential pick. But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

Read her description of his “speech” here.

Is this man one to entrust with our freedom and prosperity?