Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) on Sunday urged for appropriate coverage of what he called Donald Trump’s “thermonuclear meltdown” in the final leg of the 2024 race.

“I sure hope no one on social media or in the traditional media sugarcoats the thermonuclear meltdown Trump is having,” Schatz posted on X, formerly Twitter. “He’s indulging in a fair amount of violent talk, paranoid fantasies, and promises of retribution. Please no ‘candidates trade barbs in final hours.’”

In the last stretch of the campaign, the Republican nominee has continued to derail off message, after increasingly erratic rhetoric and behavior in recent weeks led hundreds of health care professionals to warn the 78-year-old is “concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office.”

The former president has imagined former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) being gunned down, warned that the start of a second Trump administration may be “nasty,” and signaled he will put an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist in charge of government health agencies.

On Sunday, he said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2021 after he lost the election. A day earlier, he suggested he’d like to “knock the hell out of people backstage” when his microphone stopped working at a rally, before performing a bobbing gesture on the mic stand that many viewed as an imitation of oral sex.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has had a more typical finale to the race, pitching an optimistic closing message to voters in Michigan over the weekend.

Legacy media organizations such as the New York Times have been criticized for “sane-washing” Trump’s messaging throughout the campaign by offering charitable interpretations of what has often been incoherent rambling.

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