It finally happened

For awhile I’ve been writing that if an increasingly senile Donald Trump’s babysitters didn’t get him off the campaign trail soon, he was going to end up fully imploding on stage. This is, after all, a guy who incoherently suggested he might take his pants off during a rally speech last week. How much longer before something like that actually happened?

Sure enough, Trump finally managed to have a full scale public event implosion on Saturday at the Libertarian Convention. It was the first time he’d addressed an audience that didn’t consist of his own supportive base. Trump got booed. Loudly. Repeatedly. The majority of the audience didn’t seem to want him there. It was a disastrous choice of venue by his babysitters.

In years past Trump would have reacted to such a situation by aggressively sparring with the audience and trying to own the moment. We saw this when he got booed at multiple Republican primary debates in 2016. He responded by out-bullying the audience, and he got away with it.

But here in 2024, Trump is a small fraction of himself. He seemed fully confused about why he was being booed, and what he was supposed to do in response. He tried insulting libertarians for never being competitive in elections, but then that was it. Fully unsure of himself, he meekly wrapped up his teleprompter speech and left the stage as the boos crescendoed.

Donald Trump, simply put, imploded. It’s not just the audience hated him. It’s that he was fully witless when it came to trying to deal with a hostile crowd. It shows what’ll happen if Trump lasts long enough that he ends up having to do something like a town hall or a debate. The moderator (or President Biden) will spar with Trump, and Trump will come off as completely senile.

Now that Trump’s criminal trial is ending, we’ll see what his babysitters decide to do with him. There will be a pause between this trial and whichever trial comes next. Even if he is sentenced to prison in this trial, there will be a gap between conviction and sentencing. Trump will, no doubt, want to hit the campaign trail more than ever. But he just showed his handlers that he can’t do it without destroying what’s left of his political viability. And his handlers, by picking such a stupid place for him to speak, just showed that they’re not any better at this than he is.