The Madness of King Donald

The president is once again off the rails, but when, truly, is that not the case? After an uneasy interval of relative quiet (in which he not-so-quietly dismantled additional agencies of the government, especially those connected to election security), he publicly projected still more of his madness. Last night was a set piece of paranoid imagining in which he claimed obsessively that he wuz robbed. Wary of antagonizing his chief handler, V. Putin, he pinned the blame on Chinese actors, along with nefarious, manipulative Democratic activists who somehow conspired to defeat him in 2020.

You could argue that this was another feint, a calculated distraction from multiple crises. Just as Iran was supposed to move us off center on Epstein, the election screed was supposed to distract us from Iran. Things don’t really get better for Donald Trump. They simply get worse in different ways.

But he has made a career of successive provocations, figuring that we will forget, refocus, and then forget again. Whatever the manifold failures of Bill Clinton, he tried to focus on the economy, stupid, figuring that that’s the thing Americans cared about. Americans still care about the economy, as Drumpf’s cringing “advisors” apparently tried to remind him. But Donald Trump is out of ideas.

Yet that would suggest that he had ideas in the first place. For this president, it’s a matter of intermittent obsessions. When one of them carries us to the border of ruin, he drops us down into yet another. He may be a brute, but it’s worked so far. He wields primary election contests like a Star Wars light saber. You may have noticed that he is still in office, with a Congress that remains his castrated poodle.

To its credit, the press tried to mute him this week. I checked the electronic version of the New York Times, and Trump’s speech last night is not the first item on the list. No screaming headlines, no special ruckus, just a thoughtful, comprehensive round-up by Peter Baker. With the exception of Fox, no one gave him the typical courtesies. Broadcasters broke away with commentary and fact checking and two networks decided against live coverage. That may not be everything, but it is certainly something.

But we should not imagine that the speech was nothing. This was not the rant of damaged psyche, replaying a battle which he lost decisively. It was that, of course, but not exclusively so. We must remind ourselves again and again that Trump is convinced that he will lose the midterms and, with them, his hammerlock on decisive power. Once there is a Democratic Congress, there will be a new sheriff, a new judge, and a new banker in town. Trump’s game is to cast crippling doubt on the midterms and shred the results in any way possible. Our greatest struggle still lies ahead.

—

I keep forgetting to say that this article, like all the others on this platform, was written without the use of artificial intelligence. It’s the actual product of a struggling mind and reflects a basic comfort with human imperfection.