GET THE WEDNESDAY COUNTDOWN PODCAST BECAUSE TRUMP'S FUGUE STATE CRISIS IS NOW IN ITS THIRD DAY: From Monday night at Oaks, Pennsylvania when Trump abruptly STOPPED the town hall inexplicably and began to slur and behave bizarrely, through his announcement that Kamala Harris is physically disqualified from being president because she has hay fever through his cancelling of a softball interview on CNBC the same day she was to be interviewed on Fox, to the question from the Economic Club of Chicago about whether or not google should be broken up which he answered by talking about voting in Georgia.

A survivor of - and expert on - cults, Matthew Remski, has a different idea. What happened in Pennsylvania "echoes MANY instances of cultic leaders who, exhausted, ill, and at the end of their cognitive rope, outsource their emotional dominance subroutines to canned music... The leader of the group I was in for 3 years maintained a Trump-campaign-like schedule of daily 2-hour sermons. Over the years he increasingly relied on his DJ to fill the room with emotional overwhelm whenever he gapped out. He was 78 too. He air-conducted the tunes. He had a shrinking repertoire of melted talking points... He just turned to the music."

AND THE SANE-WASHING IS WORSE THAN WE KNEW:
Joseph Kahn, executive editor of the New York Times, has been interviewed at length by Steve Inskeep of NPR. The result is almost as disturbing as Trump playing the hits from that radio station that broadcasts only in his own mind. I’m going to read a lot of it, verbatim, because Kahn is almost as detached from reality as Trump.

AND JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT  it was quieting down, the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/Robert F. Kennedy Jr scandal roars back to life as Lizza answers my ex's lawsuit against him by claiming she told him RFK wanted to "possess and impregnate her." Via FaceTime? That'd be some accomplishment! The latest details if I can stop laughing long enough.

GET THE WEDNESDAY COUNTDOWN PODCAST: tinyurl.com/55dt699f