Bulletin: Something Has Happened at the New York Times

Did you know Donald Trump is OLD? (gift link)

And that he says bad things about women? (gift link)

Peter Baker, of all people, wrote the first article, Jess Bidgood the second.

With President Biden no longer in the race, former President Donald J. Trump would be the oldest person ever to serve in the Oval Office. But his rambling, sometimes incoherent public statements have stirred concern among voters.

Mr. Trump has long engaged in discursive, roundabout, off-script speaking that would not pass muster with an English teacher. Diagraming his sentences with a noun, verb and object can be daunting. He floats from one subject to another seemingly at random, often baffling listeners looking for a main point, a pattern that experts call tangentiality that increases with age. And he throws out wild assertions with no basis in fact.

He has mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, declared more than once that he beat Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton and while arguing that he is mentally fit gave the wrong name for his former doctor. During a June rally in Nevada, he wandered into a bizarre rhetorical cul-de-sac speculating about being on a sinking boat and whether it would be better to be electrocuted in the water or attacked by a shark. “I’ll take electrocution every single time,” he volunteered. “I’m not getting near the shark. So we could end that. We’re going to end that for boats.”

The second article is a compendium of public statements from Trump’s misogyny archives.

His history of being physically and rhetorically hostile to women in these public moments exposes him to political risk and heightens the stakes of the debate at a time when his support among female voters in national polls is weak.

Mr. Trump has struggled to defend himself at debates against accusations of sexual harassment or sexism, denying and then deflecting questions about his treatment of women.

At times, he has seemed to lose his cool with women in these settings. When, during their third debate in 2016, Mrs. Clinton accused him of being a puppet of Vladimir Putin, he practically barked that he was rubber and she was glue. “You’re the puppet, you’re the puppet,” Mr. Trump said. A little later, he gave her supporters an unofficial campaign slogan when he called her a “nasty woman” in a dispute over Social Security.

But he is still reaching for caustic and belittling attacks when it comes to Ms. Harris.

“I think I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he said of Ms. Harris last month. “I don’t have a lot of respect for her.”

I worry that the gendered attacks hit a deeply buried sexism in the public. I’ll have more to say about that.