I don’t know how many of you follow Donald Trump on twitter, but it’s getting really weird. I know that’s entirely predictable. When hasn’t it been weird, right? But there’s something really manic and bizarre about it right now that makes me wonder if he really isn’t starting to melt down psychologically.
I know there’s a financial incentive in all this. I doubt he realized that he could make so much money from that stop-the-steal grift until they realized they could convert 75% of it to his own use. It’s worth hundreds of millions now and I’d guess he’s milking it, which isn’t irrational it’s just crooked as hell. As usual.
But still, his ranting on twitter isn’t the only thing he’s doing. That report yesterday about meeting with Giuliani, Flynn and Sidney Powell about seizing election machines and declaring martial law seems extreme even for that grift. I mean, they’re talking about staging a real military coup.
It sure looks like he’s cracking up. He’s spent his whole life avoiding being seen as a “loser” even as he squandered his father’s fortune and failed at business time after time. And he succeeded through relentless self-promotion and lies, eventually ascending to the highest-profile, most powerful job on earth, even managing to dupe tens of millions of Americans into believing he is the greatest leader the world has ever known. (He did this with a lot of help from the amoral Republican establishment and the right wing propaganda mills, but still, it’s quite an achievement.)
But now he is facing a major defeat, one which many others have faced for a variety of reasons. Think of Lyndon Johnson winning a real landslide in 1964 and then having to bow out in 1968. Or Richard Nixon resigning and flying off into permanent ignominy. Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., Al Gore! That’s just in the last half century. Presidential campaigns always have a winner and I’m sure it hurts to lose. Think of poor Hillary Clinton. And yet Trump is the only losing candidate in history to act like a spoiled three year old and stage an extended temper tantrum that is getting worse by the day. He’s not crying himself out. He’s working himself up.
Politico’s Michael Kruse looked into this:
Over the course of a lifetime of professional and personal transgressions and failures, channeling lasting, curdled lessons of Norman Vincent Peale and Roy Cohn, Trump has assembled a record of rather remarkable resilience. His typical level of activity and almost animal energy has at times lent him an air of insusceptibility, every one of his brushes with financial or reputational ruin ending with Trump emerging all but untouched. His current crisis, though, his eviction from the White House now just a month out, is something altogether different and new.
“He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,” Mary Trump, his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and bestselling book about him and their family, told me. “We continue to wait for him to accept reality, for him to concede, and that is something he is not capable of doing,” added Bandy Lee, the forensic psychiatrist from Yale who’s spent the last four years trying to warn the world about Trump and the ways in which he’s disordered and dangerous. “Being a loser,” she said, for Trump is tantamount to “psychic death.”
The combination of an unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has some people wondering if there is a chance that Trump’s unusual actions suggest something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown?
A few people said no. But some seem to think it’s inevitable:
Louise Sunshine, for instance, has known Trump longer than just about anybody. She started working with him in the early 1970s—so I sent her a text asking her the question. “Maybe,” she responded.
Everybody, after all, has a breaking point. “And he’s not indestructible,” said Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive vice president who was the construction manager for Trump Tower and just wrote a book called Tower of Lies. “I do think Trump is struggling,” Tony Schwartz, the actual author of The Art of the Deal, told me, “and that this is far and away the toughest time he’s ever had.”
“His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,” Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney and enforcer before he turned on him, told me. “While he’s creating a false pretense of strength and fortitude, internally he is angry, depressed and manic. As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.”
“Psychological disorders are like anything else,” said Mary Trump, who’s also a psychologist. “If they’re unacknowledged and untreated over time, they get worse.”
In Lee’s estimation, it’s not something that could happen. It’s something that is happening, that’s been happening for the past four years—and will keep happening.
“His pathology has continued to grow, continued to cause him to decompensate, and so we’re at a stage now where his detachment from reality is pretty much complete and his symptoms are as severe as can be.” She likened Trump to “a car without functioning brakes.” Such a car, she explained, can look for a long time like it’s fine, and keep going, faster and faster, even outracing other cars. “But at the bottom of the hill,” Lee said, “it always crashes.”
It certainly seems that he’s even more unhinged than usual but I don’t know how much of that is just a frantic attempt to keep hiscult on board or if he’s actually losing it. But he’s clearly not even pretending to function in the job he’s still charged with. He just doesn’t give a damn about anything other than pretending he isn’t the big loser he actually is. Whether he does anything drastic about it remains to be seen but by anyone’s standard this has to be acknowledged as a dangerous moment. The man who is in charge of the worlds biggest nuclear arsenal is unable to process his loss and is diving headlong into a vengeance soaked, fantasy world. Yikes.
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cheers,
digby