Is Trump losing his touch or his mind? It’s getting harder and harder to tell. The past few weeks have seen Trump commit one uncharacteristic blunder and stumble after another, increasingly on issues that irritate his once unirritable base.
Perhaps Trump’s ego is now so overinflated that he feels like he can turn on the people who put him here. He never really liked them anyway. When did he ever worry about the price of gas? It’s been decades since he even pumped his own.
His personal late-night handmaiden, Natalie Harp, keeps most of the bad political news, especially from his erstwhile allies, from Trump’s eyes and instead keeps his ravenous ego pumped full with adulatory memes and hagiographic fanfictions that depict him as the savior of white America and protestant Christianity.
But the memes showing Trump as a superhero don’t do him any favors. They mainly serve to accentuate how frail he’s become in person. He slouches in his chair. He walks awkwardly on swollen ankles and feet. He nods off, yawns and fidgets on camera. He is peevish and snaps at the least provocation, especially when he is provoked by a woman he suspects knows more about him than he knows about himself. His speech is halting and disjointed. His voice is raw; the words come out cracked. The sentences, when there are sentences, often trail off into prolonged, often agonizing, pauses, before restarting in a different gear and direction.
More and more, he gets lost in his own self-infatuated fantasies, as he did before a group of NYC police and firefighters during the 9/11 commemorations last week, when he told them:
I want to just thank my people. I took a lot —I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was, it was raw.
Nobody had seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.
And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, “Got to get out of here!” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.
None of this is true. It’s a case of stolen valor by the man who bragged that once the towers fell down, his building would be the tallest in New York City. Even this was a lie. Trump World Tower, which opened in 2001, is 861 feet tall. The Citicorp Tower, 40 Wall Street (which Trump once owned), 70 Pine Street (Cities Service Building), the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were all taller.
Lower Manhattan was closed to all but rescue workers for weeks and Richard Alles, a New York Fire Department battalion chief on September 11, who was in charge of letting crews into the blast zone, said Trump was never there.
Let’s recall that Trump also claimed he watched Muslims cheering the collapse of the towers in New Jersey. It didn’t happen. As sports journalist Rick Reilly noted: “I know this is BS because I was with him in his Trump Tower apartment once. I was looking through his telescope. He said, ‘I watched the twin towers fall through that … It’s solid gold.'”
That sounds more like our guy.
Trump no longer projects power. Only the gilded trappings are left. But the low-rent Versailles decor he has cocooned himself inside only makes him look like an aging potentate well past his prime. He has surrounded himself with sycophants, none of whom have the political skills to save him from the perilous pit he has dug for himself and the country at large.
Trump’s instinctive response to any gaffe or screw-up on his part has been to double down, to magnify the falsehood, to repeat and repeat it so many times until the howler becomes an article of faith among his congregation.
But this cynical maneuver only works when the missteps don’t hit the base at home. He can lie all he wants about topics like Obama’s birth certificate, the stolen 2020 elections or the anarchist assault on the Reflecting Pool. But he can’t get away with fibbing about the price of gas, the cost of a dozen eggs or rising electric bills. People bring home the receipts that prove he’s lying.
It’s odd to see Trump flail on populist issues he once would have owned, like data centers, whose opponents Trump denounced with HRC-like condescension as dumb and poor. Didn’t Natalie show him the polling that showed more than 70% of the American public, across party lines, loathe these monstrous facilities?
Dismissing concerns that data centers will drain local water supplies and drive up electric bills, Trump said: “I would want as many data centers as I can, because they throw off tremendous amounts of money. They don’t take any energy, because, you know, the new ones that I approve, they all create their own energy.” Trump would have been fired from his own TV show for trotting out this feeble sales pitch.
Same thing with AI. Suddenly, the man who claims he’s never used a computer is giving a full-frontal embrace to Big Tech’s most menacing creation. Trump has gone so far as to discount the warnings issued by AI’s own Dr. Frankensteins about the very distinct possibility that their digital creatures may slip out of their programmers’ control by first eliminating human jobs and then eliminating humans altogether.
When asked whether there are any guardrails to prevent AI programs from turning on humanity, Trump said there was nothing to worry about as long as there is a strongman like him running the US, “It’s going to be fine. We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom! ‘I really don’t like that robot.’”
Mostly, though, Trump seems bored, out of it half the time, barely engaged the rest. The old fire has burned down to a few smoldering embers. He’s distracted by shiny things. His Oval Office bric-a-brac. His ballroom. His arch. His name on the Kennedy Center. Natalie, oh, Natalie.
He’s caught in a war that he can’t win and can’t bring himself to get out of. It’s the mentality of someone he never went to war but has played the role of a bully his entire life. Nothing infuriates Trump more than being called a loser. But he is one.
He used to shove allied leaders out of his way at NATO and G7 meetings. Now the Prime Minister of Canada, a country that Trump vowed to make the 51st State, stares him down in a senseless trade war that Trump started for no rational reason. Now Canada, once the US’s leading trade partner, is looking to join the EU and most of the rest of the world is looking to China as a stable and reliable economic partner.
The losses are coming on every front. Trump was betrayed by his own Supreme Court, his own Congress (on both crypto and war powers) and his own Federal Reserve, all in the span of a week. Anyone keeping an eye on where Melania’s been spending her time? He can’t even count on Rasmussen to rig a poll that shows him with higher approval ratings than his old rival HRC or those communist upstarts from his old town, Mamdani and AOC. And he may not have hit bottom.
Trump’s house of mirrors began to crack when he decided to go to war against Iran with Israel. This was probably the dumbest decision he made since he staked the fortune his father gave him (or at least his credit) on building opulent casinos in Atlantic City and lost big time. Netanyahu stiffed Trump and left him with a bill where the charges (legal, human and financial) mount by the hour. Trump’s getting pummelled by Iran, which counters his triumphal claims of victory with ship-sinking mines, drone strikes and missile attacks on oil tankers, refineries and US forces and bases. Only the most hypnotized talking blondes (male and female) on Fox News believe him anymore.
Meanwhile, as it all falls apart around him, Rubio has gone silent. Kash Patel is an embarrassment, providing unwanted comic relief with every public appearance. His jet-set envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are cutting their own deals. And JD Vance is playing Kamala Harris to his dementia-stricken Biden, unable to assert himself, even when opportunities present themselves. Perhaps that’s because, like Harris, Vance doesn’t have a “true self” to assert. Vance seems like a bearded cypher, capable of regurgitating a few pat platitudes about the superiority of white Christian culture, but in a manner so strident and arrogant that he alienates the people he’s meant to convert.
At this point in his disintegrating administration, there must be all kinds of sinister machinations taking place behind the scenes, as the contenders for Trump’s faltering throne maneuver for the levers of power. But there’s no one left who can command Trump’s fanatical base. The contenders lack his garish charisma. Trump has seen to that. Like some Romanov monarch, he has shed the palace of any potential rivals. Even his own children–Ivana, excepted–he seems to view with disdain and suspicion. There’s a reason he skipped Don Jr.’s latest nuptials, despite the fireworks display and all-night party financed by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev.
Trump is Trump, even in his diminished capacity. There will be no successor. In a sense, there will be nothing to succeed to. The Trump political empire, like his economic empire, is a mirage. There’s nothing inside it, but inventories of MAGA caps and now worthless Trumpcoins. You can’t take the tariffs with you.
After more than a decade of grievance politics, Trump got a lot wealthier than he has ever been. The presidency was by far his most successful business venture. Perhaps his only successful enterprise. But the grievances of his base remain unaddressed, their lingering economic gripes compounded by the policies he put in place. At some point, the sense of betrayal is going to set in and the blowback will be fierce. Perhaps not against Trump himself, but almost certainly against anyone who tries to claim his MAGA mantle.
There was always only the brand and the brand without the man is empty, a void filled only with debts that will never be paid.
COUNTERPUNCH
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