Donald Trump is rapidly losing what little was left of his mind
All along, the numbers have made clear that roughly half of 2024 Republican primary voters want someone other than Donald Trump to be their party’s 2024 nominee. The other half of the Republican primary voting base is a mixture of Trump die hards who want to stick with him no matter what, and more tepid Trump supporters who are only currently supporting him because they think he can win.
Trump’s indictment and arrest might make him more popular with the die hards within his base, but they’re already in his corner anyway, and they don’t suddenly get to vote twice. And Trump will likely lose support among his more tepid non-base supporters who are going to conclude that supporting a guy who might not even be available isn’t the best way to try to win the 2024 election.
Yet in spite of all the ways in which Donald Trump’s indictment will harm his 2024 prospects – not to mention the part where he’ll go on trial and be sent to prison if convicted – the entire media is only willing to frame this in terms of how much Trump’s indictment will supposedly help Trump’s prospects. After all, overhyping Trump’s continued political viability is good for ratings no matter which side of the fence any given media outlet is on.
The thing is, while the media doesn’t really mean it when it pretends that Trump’s prospects will somehow benefit from his criminal indictment, Trump himself appears to be very much trying to convince himself that being indicted really will somehow magically help his prospects. In fact Trump is now taking this delusional notion to rather cartoonish lengths.
Trump is privately so obsessed with talking about how his indictment is going to help his 2024 prospects, some of his advisers are now telling the New York Times that they’re concerned he’s fully removed from reality and resorting to “magical thinking” instead of trying to come up with a trial defense. Some of Trump’s other advisers are telling The Guardian that they can’t figure out whether Trump is serious when he keeps privately musing about how much he’s looking forward to being perp walked. Trump is even privately talking about how he looks forward to becoming a “martyr” and he’s even hoping to be violently assaulted so it’ll boost his poll numbers. No really, he reportedly said this.
These are not the words and mindset of a mentally stable person. No one who’s clear headed enough to understand what it means to be criminally indicted and arrested looks forward to being criminally indicted and arrested. He just knows he can’t stop it, and he’s afraid of how much of a mess it’ll make his life, so he’s trying to convince himself that this bad thing is somehow a good thing. And he clearly doesn’t have any real world basis for believing he’s going to be viable in 2024, if he’s relying on the bizarre fantasy of getting assaulted to help put him over the top.
There has always been something very wrong with Donald Trump. He’s a narcissist, a sociopath, an emotional black hole, you name it. But there’s a lot more going on now. He’s a career criminal whose goal has always been to avoid getting indicted. He was recently the world’s most powerful man. Now he’s cornered and powerless and facing criminal indictment in multiple jurisdictions.
It’s not just that Trump has no prospect of being a political figure by 2024. He has very little prospect of being a free man by 2024. In spite of the hype he’s been hearing on TV, he has to know that these things are true. It’s why he’s now trying to convince himself that his indictment and arrest are somehow a good thing for him, instead of trying to figure out how to beat the charges. It’s why Trump is reduced to floating increasingly ludicrous fantasies about how he’s going to magically come out on top. This eternally disturbed man is now losing what little was left of his mind.
