Donald Trump is in total freefall

Donald Trump started the week with a racist tirade about Elijah Cummings and Baltimore, in a calculated effort at distracting everyone from his existing scandals. Trump ended the week facing blame for a mass shooting by a white supremacist whose rhetoric bore a striking resemblance to Trump’s own racist rhetoric.

Now Donald Trump seems to have nothing to say for himself. He’s taking heat for being at one of his golf properties today instead of addressing the crisis, but really, did anyone want to hear from him anyway? Trump tweeted nothing of substance today, and when reporters finally caught up with him, all he could do was tepidly babble about how the shooter was mentally ill, and how he’s going to fix it all.

Trump has always calculated that he could wield his racist rhetoric like a sword, motivating racists to continue to support him no matter how badly he botched the presidency, while distracting everyone else from his various criminal scandals and his inevitable impeachment. But Trump’s worst case scenario was that his racist antics might end up causing the kind of racist violence that most of the nation would blame him for – and that scenario just arrived.

Donald Trump’s day of reckoning has finally arrived, and the loudmouth has nothing to say for himself. His surrogates are out there blaming the white supremacist mass shooting on everything from video games to name-calling, but Trump knows this is a no-win situation for him. Trump’s racism has finally backed him into a corner, and now he can’t use racism to distract his way out of it. Trump is in freefall. And because he doesn’t have an ounce of leadership in him, he has no idea how to stop it.