The real reason Donald Trump is going completely off the deep end

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Even if Donald Trump’s week-long racist tirade started off as a calculated distraction from his existing scandals, he’s handled the fallout in such erratic fashion, it’s become a scandal of its own. Things are now so out of control that Trump sent his top remaining surrogates on TV this weekend to try to clean it up, and they failed miserably. So what’s really sent Trump into such a downward spiral?

It’s clearly the kind of thing that has Donald Trump panicked to the point that whatever method there might usually be to his madness, it’s all but disappeared. We expected white supremacist dog turd Stephen Miller to fail in his attempt at convincing people that Trump isn’t a racist, and he did. But Mike Pence only had to go on television and confidently (or at least coherently) state that Trump wasn’t a racist, and Pence was so bumbling, he blew it spectacularly. Trump’s surrogates are nervous to the point of being off their game, and not just because Trump can’t stop saying racist things.

Consider what’s happened in the past two weeks. Donald Trump’s old friend Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors. Old stories were dredged up about Trump and Epstein having thrown wild parties together. Trump’s Secretary of Labor had to resign because he was the one who initially let Epstein off the hook, before conveniently receiving a cabinet position from Trump. George Nader, a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russia, was hit with the kind of charges that could cause him to cut a plea deal against Trump. And now Robert Mueller is forty-eight hours away from finally testifying in front of the television cameras about his investigation into Trump’s crimes.

So which one of these things has sent Donald Trump completely off the deep end? It’s pretty clearly all of them. Trump has long feared that his theft of the presidency would expose his old crimes, or that his crimes since stealing the presidency would be exposed, and now we’re on the verge of seeing both those things happen at once. Keep in mind that once Trump is no longer president, he goes to prison – and his grip on the presidency is suddenly the most tentative it’s ever been.

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