Donald Trump is bleeding

| 4:30 pm EDT September 5, 2019
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

It’s difficult to tell what might be going on in Donald Trump’s deranged mind, if indeed anything coherent is going on in there these days at all. But back in the real world, there’s only one way to characterize what’s happening to Trump right now: he’s bleeding.

No, not literally. But we can’t think of a better metaphor to describe what’s happening to Donald Trump, the position he’s in, what he’s doing, and what’s happening to him. It’s not just that Donald Trump is doubling down on increasingly embarrassing nonsense in increasingly humiliating fashion, such as getting caught altering a hurricane map with a Sharpie yesterday to try to cover for the fact that he initially said by mistake that the hurricane would hit Alabama. It’s far more fundamental than that.

Yesterday’s latest poll numbers line up with the existing averages and help confirm what we already knew: as of right now, Donald Trump doesn’t have a path to victory in 2020. He can’t win without states like Wisconsin, where he’s currently losing to Joe Biden by about ten points. The other Democratic candidates aren’t doing as well in the state, but if any of them become popular enough to overtake Biden as the nominee, in the process they’ll become popular enough to mount Biden-like numbers in Wisconsin.

It’s not just Wisconsin, either. Donald Trump’s numbers are bad and worsening across the nation. He’s behind a large enough gap that no margin of error could allow for the possibility that he might actually be winning, and no incremental cheating could close the gap. That doesn’t mean Trump has lost. There’s still a very long time between now and election day. But right now he’s bleeding. The path he’s on is one that’ll only leave him in a bigger hole as time goes on. Trump isn’t just bleeding, he’s now hemorrhaging.