Donald Trump just doesn’t get it

| 7:00 pm EDT October 2, 2019
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Just two days after endorsing the idea of a “Civil War” if he’s impeached and removed, Donald Trump is now accusing the House of carrying out a “coup” against him. That’s right, he’s now trying to carry out a coup while falsely accusing his adversaries of carrying out a coup. There’s a method to his madness, but it’s the wrong method – and it reveals why he’s now in so far over his head.

With all this histrionic, threatening, violence-themed nonsense, Donald Trump is obviously trying to appeal to his deranged base. Maybe it’s even working. But as rapidly shifting poll numbers are revealing, Trump’s base alone isn’t large enough to sustain him.

Donald Trump’s forty-ish percent approval ratings have always consisted of a large heaping of moderate conservatives, traditional Republicans, and confused nonpolitical types who have been tepidly supporting him because they weren’t sure whether to give up on him. These are the people Trump needs to be appealing to right now. He needs to convince them that he should remain in office, as opposed to being ousted.

Donald Trump is either too politically naive to understand that he needs people outside his base, or he’s too far gone to understand that the conspiracy theories he’s spewing aren’t real. Either way, Trump’s increasingly deranged words – calling for civil war, calling for members of Congress to be arrested, calling for immigrants to be shot – are having the precise opposite effect of what he needs right now.