Donald Trump just set himself on fire

| 4:47 pm EDT August 8, 2024
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A week ago I wrote that Donald Trump was entering the “setting himself on fire for attention” stage of his downfall. He couldn’t handle watching Kamala Harris pulling even with him in the polls and taking the momentum away from him, so he held a rally and questioned whether she was really Black. Trump’s handlers pulled him off the campaign trail after that, in an effort to protect him from himself. But it clearly didn’t last.

Today Trump held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home. The last minute nature of the announcement suggested that Trump engineered this himself and was trying to work around his handlers. By the time he took the stage and started rambling, it was clear that this was definitely not something that his babysitters wanted him to be doing.

If Trump was starting to set himself on fire last week because Kamala had pulled even with him, he’s outright torching himself now that she’s pulled ahead of him. Trump, who managed to come off as very angry and very low energy at the same time, announced that he was agreeing to debate Harris after all. No surprise. This was inevitable given how he’s falling behind. But that wasn’t enough for Trump. Not by a long shot.

Trump went on for about an hour. He whined about how President Biden is no longer in the race. He claimed that he’s way ahead in the polls in every swing state (false). He claimed that his rallies are twenty times larger than Kamala’s rallies (false). He claimed that his base now consists of 75% of the country (a true moment of delusional desperation). Then, in a reminder of what this is all really about, he insisted that he shouldn’t go to prison because he didn’t try to put Hillary Clinton in prison.

Donald Trump is in the historically unique position of running for President to try to keep himself out of prison. If he loses he’ll be locked up for the rest of his life, but not because he lost. It’ll be because he’s a career criminal and judges and juries are convicting him and sentencing him. Trump knows that if he loses, his life as he knows it is over. What we saw from him today is an acknowledgment that he knows he’s now losing – and he’s at the point of making the kinds of desperation moves that’ll only make it worse for him.