Dispatch from the campaign trail

Trump is hard at work trying to woo voters

Trump backed out of the recent campaign event in Iowa and it doesn’t appear that he is planning to leave his beach club any time soon (unless it’s to decamp to his Bedminster club for the summer.) But that doesn’t mean he isn’t campaigning. Here’s what it looks like:

Some interesting commentary on all this:

(2/2) You see it in Trump's continued attacks against E Jean Carroll, despite having lost, adding damages, and his counsel no doubt imploring him to stop. He is at the stage where forcing his reality is everything now. Narcissistic collapse isn't here yet, but it's approaching.

— The Shallow State (@OurShallowState) May 23, 2023

“Forcing reality” is a great term. All that bullshit about great polling is nonsense. He posts polls from fly-by-night partisan pollsters and some with no attribution at all that show him winning. The thing is that it works. If he pushes it hard enough and with the back-up of sycophants and partisan opportunists, millions of people will believe him. He has good reason to believe that he can “force reality” on a whole lot of Americans. He’s made tens of millions of them believe that the election was stolen and he is the rightful president. He had help, of course, from the right wing media but really it was almost all him. He “forced reality.” Can he do it again?