Donald Trump is about to try one last desperation heave tonight

| 8:13 pm EDT October 21, 2019
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Last night it leaked out to the media that Donald Trump had become profoundly unhappy with the job that his underlings and surrogates were doing when it came to getting his message out there about impeachment. This raised two questions. First, who was getting scapegoated? Second, who would carry Trump’s water next? Now it looks like we’re getting the answer to at least one of those questions.

Palmer Report asked this question last night: “Will a frantic and exasperated Trump decide that he simply needs to go find new bottom-feeding surrogates, or will he decide that he needs to start hitting the TV talk show circuit himself?” Just now, Trump tweeted this: “Will be interviewed by Sean Hannity tonight at 9:00 P.M. on Fox News. Enjoy!”

In other words, Trump really has decided to go on cable news himself and try to make his anti-impeachment case directly to the public. Naturally, he’s chosen Hannity, the biggest Trump apologist on the airwaves, in the hope of pulling off the softest of softball interviews. But it’s notable that Trump is doing this at all. With a few notable and calamitous exceptions over the past two and a half years, Trump has generally had his underlings do nearly all of the TV talk show dirty work for him.

We can expect Donald Trump’s performance tonight to be a disaster for the ages. We already saw during today’s cabinet meeting that he’s nowhere near being psychologically competent enough to speak on his own behalf. Now he’s chosen the worst possible setting, because Hannity is only going to encourage him to go as far off the conspiratorial deep end as possible. As usual, Trump is making the mistake of playing to his deranged lunatic base, when the rest of us figured out a long time ago that his base alone isn’t nearly large enough to save him.