Donald Trump is going to take the entire Republican field down with him

| 7:00 pm EDT August 21, 2023
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When you’re dealing with a mind like the one belonging to Donald Trump, narcissistically sociopathic to begin with, and now suffering both the psychological pressure of his downfall and the cognitive malfunction of his senility, it can be tricky to figure out what he actually believes, or what he’s even trying to do. But what Trump is trying to do may not matter at this point.

Take, for instance, Trump’s refusal to participate in the first Republican 2024 primary debate. What’s he trying to do? Who knows? If anything, his handlers are trying to keep him from appearing on stage with adversaries for fear his worsening dementia will make him too fragile, and he’s just going along with whatever nonsense rationales they’re feeding him about why he shouldn’t do the debate. But the bottom line is that, for whatever reason he isn’t doing it, he isn’t doing it.

This serves to hurt Trump’s political prospects, in the sense that nothing says “I’m not really running and my ‘campaign’ is just about funding my legal fees” like Trump not even bothering to participate in the debate. A lot of people have already figured out that his “campaign” isn’t real, and this will help to underscore that. But it’s also helping to delegitimize the entire Republican primary process. If your party’s “frontrunner” is seen as a joke then your party’s entire field is a joke.

That’s to say nothing of what’ll happen once Trump’s criminal justice system troubles get uglier, and Republican primary voters begin asking if they really want to nominate a guy who’s going to prison, and one or more Republican candidates gain at least temporary momentum as the vacuum fills itself. At that point what will Trump, desperate and unhinged and with nothing left to lose, be willing to do to whichever Republican candidates have the bad luck to gain momentum before Trump is fully out of his misery? We’ve already seen Trump help destroy DeSantis out of pure spite. Who’s next?

Malignant narcissists like Trump always need it to be someone else’s fault when their downfall comes. At first they blame their enemies. But as the downfall gets more severe and the end is in sight, the narcissist tends to turn inward and blame those around him for it all. Trump is already at a point where he’s publicly attacking Republicans across the board for not saving him from prison. What happens when Trump gets that much closer to prison? Trump is liable to take the entire Republican field down with him – not out of any particular sense of strategy, but simply because that’s what people like Trump do.