Former President Donald Trump’s attacks against Vice-President Kamala Harris continue unabated and, if anything, have increased in virulence and desperation. As her prestige increases, his goes down. He has become a joke for many late-night comedians, but this hasn’t stopped Trump from becoming even more disrespectful to his opponent, to the point of distorting and cheapening the political atmosphere in the country.

In 1973, a few months before he died, probably assassinated by General Augusto Pinochet, Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, wrote a small book titled, “Book of Questions”. In it, Neruda, who Gabriel García Márquez called “the greatest poet of the 20th century—in any language—" posed a series of questions that revealed his amazing imagination and versatility. They also make the reader consider things from a different perspective. Using the same approach, I dare to ask a series of questions that intend to throw light on one of the most disturbing political phenomena of recent times.

Why is Donald Trump allowed to continue his disrespectful attacks against the only other presidential candidate without serious and unrelenting questioning? Do people ever compare the stellar background of Kamala Harris, a law-abiding citizen and law enforcer, to that of Donald Trump, who is anything but? How can a woman, any woman, millions of women, tens of millions of women still support a candidate who has debased, abused, and cheated on them? How can those same women choose a President who is a convicted rapist, with one of the largest fines for rape in the world history of jurisprudence? Do they realize the abnormality of Donald Trump’s joint appearance with his daughter Ivanka on the TV program The View when he said, “If she were not my daughter, I would be dating her”? Doesn’t this qualify as a “weird” comment, unbecoming to any normal father?

How can any rational person support somebody who has made lying a way of life? According to historian Douglas Brinkley, U.S. presidents have occasionally “lied or misled the country” but none was a “serial liar” like Donald Trump. Alair Townsend a former deputy mayor of New York in the 1980s and former publisher of Crain’s New York Business said, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” In 2004, journalist Susany Mulcahy told Vanity Fair, “I wrote about him a certain amount, but I would actually sit back and be amazed at how often people would write about him in a completely gullible way. He was a great character, but he was full of crap 90 percent of the time.” When asked by that magazine to comment on Mulcahy’s opinion, Trump said, “I agree with her 100 percent.”

How can people accept that the future of the country, and indeed the whole world, is in the hands of a consummate con artist who, according to The Washington Post has made more than 30,000 “false or misleading” claims during his presidency, averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day?

In 1891, psychiatrist Anton Delbrück labeled people who told many outrageous lies as having “pseudologia phantastica,” a behavior that was considered pathological. Many consider it as part of a spectrum of personality disorders that include antisocial, narcissistic and histrionic behavior. Pathological lying may respond to a desire to have others view them positively so as to make them look better than what they actually are. Would that be the case with our former President?

Or is it perhaps a case of Aphasia floriloquens, a pseudo-disease described by the Indian-American author Vikram Paralkar, in his brilliant book The Afflictions? Paralkar says that that pseudo-disease “is difficult to place among the ninety-two categories of linguistic derangement known to man, for it is the only aphasia marked by an extraordinary excess of speech, rather than a lack of it.” An issue to ponder…

Donald Trump seems to have a problem with the size of the crowds at his events, and is always trying to increase the number of his followers to almost ridiculous amounts which may be a sign of his own insecurity. In August 2024 at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida Trump said in August of 2024, “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, [he was referring to “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021] same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. And I’m okay with it because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King.”

When asked by Newsweek to comment on Trump’s remarks, Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) replied, “It is clear Donald Trump is taking advantage of the marijuana laws of Florida because that brother must be high as hell thinking that, comparing himself to Martin Luther King. You know what, Donald? The only difference between the real state in 1963, and the real state in 2017 is Martin Luther King. That is the biggest difference –you ain’t him.”

And, as for Trump’s disparaging comments on women, he repeats like a mantra, “Nobody respects women more than me.” Donald Trump has chosen two formidable enemies: women and the truth. Only one of them can forever seal his fate.