Opinion | Donald Trump Is Bored

Have you heard that Donald Trump is unraveling? His use of profanity has become increasingly casual, in rallies that stretch almost twice as long as they did in the past. His references to Vice President Kamala Harris have gone from dismissive to vicious. He has left us with more information about the golfer Arnold Palmer than most of us really needed. And then there is the uptick in his tic of designating everything as superlatively unprecedented. “Groceries, food, has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” and “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had never done anything like it,” etc.

In this, many see mental decline. I see it differently. Trump is just bored.

The evidence lies in what linguists have termed extravagance. As Martin Haspelmath has explained it, extravagance is the linguistic effort not simply to be understood but to be noticed. Haspelmath says this effort drives much of human communication and the way language changes over time. He notes that “speakers not only want to be clear or ‘expressive,’ sometimes they also want their utterance to be imaginative and vivid — they want to be little ‘extravagant poets’ in order to be noticed, at least occasionally.”

One tool of extravagance is humor, which, with its exaggeration and irony, adds a jolt. In the 1980s when it was new, the expression “from hell” — I am agnostic as to whether it was popularized by the comedian Richard Lewis — was a genuine belly buster. I remember being in a play in which a fellow cast member described some singer as “the bass from hell” and it was one of the hottest backstage jokes of the production.

Extravagance can also involve putting a label on things that used to be left to context — like the expression “I just can’t even” for a very particular kind of weariness and frustration. Or the relay procession, underway since Early Middle English, of words meaning “very,” with each new one starting as a more attention-grabbing version of what preceded. First was “truly,” followed by “very” itself, then “really” and “actually.” More slangy entrants like “hella,” “mad” and “straight up” have continued the relay below the Standard English radar. All that is extravagance, too.

Everything we’re seeing more of in Trump — the cussing, the going on too long almost as if seeking a better high, the exaggerating, the recreational name-calling, the references to genitals — makes sense as someone turning up the volume to keep himself entertained. His audiences have remained loyal, so it’s not them he’s worried about; this is about what’s in his own head.

I’ve even noticed a similar escalation in the way I sometimes communicate. I have often told a story about being 5 years old and hearing a friend speak Hebrew with her parents — the first time I had encountered a language I couldn’t understand — and about how I found the experience so frustrating that I cried. My telling of the tale has, shall we say, grown over the decades, honed by audience response and my own quest for novelty. My latest version has me frantically asking my mother why we didn’t speak Hebrew, and her responding with tart affection “Because we aren’t Jewish! Get in the car, Jughead!”

Recently I decided to get to the palimpsest. My mother was indeed in the habit of calling me Jughead, after the Archie comics character who ate a lot, as I did (plus I had kind of a big head). However, if I squint and think about it, what really happened is that my mother waited until we were in the car, then soberly explained that Hebrew was a language Jewish people spoke. And I did not cry — I just felt left out, angry and confused. The version I have come to tell is just a better story, because I’ve seasoned it with extravagance.

There’s been a lot of talk about whether Trump’s disinhibition, which my colleague Ezra Klein so aptly analyzed, is proof that Trump is losing it. I think he’s just making the most of the duckling-imprinted fidelity of his MAGA base, turning up the heat — thumbing his nose at conventional standards of deportment — because conventions are boring.

I’m not even sure that turning a rally over to 40 minutes of swaying to music is a sign of disinhibition in the first place. It’s not some primal human urge that the rules of polite society are barely able to constrain. It’s just less boring than taking questions. This is extravagance — pushing the envelope, doing the unexpected. This is breaking the rules not because you’re too fogged up to understand them but because your past transgressions, however much they appalled the keepers of order, no longer give you the cheap thrills they used to.

Trump seeks the presidency not to serve the people, a job he clearly finds onerous and unengaging, but to serve, in various ways, himself. Extravagance is exactly what we would expect in the language and actions of such a person, especially with the passage of time.

People close to 80 are never who they were at 45, but the difference between Trump then and Trump now strikes me as pretty ordinary. Some of my friends have convinced themselves that Trump is so obviously diminished that if he is elected, before very long the 25th Amendment would have to be invoked, and the country would be left in the hands of JD Vance, someone who is at least a self-disciplined adult with a modicum of civic spirit.

I’m not seeing it. My fear is that Trump in office would be perfectly and horrifically sane and more or less stay that way for his whole term. What many see of late as crazy is just him champing at the bit to get into office so that he can use it for his mentally maleficent ends.