Donald Trump just gave away how much of a goner he truly is
John Durham’s investigation into the people who led the Trump-Russia investigation ended up going nowhere. After it ended with a whimper last month and made the Republicans look like idiots, Jim Jordan nonetheless announced that he was going to hold a hearing with Durham later that week. That hearing never happened, which wasn’t surprising. We figured that once Jordan slept on it, he’d realize that the sooner Durham disappeared, the better for his side.
But on Wednesday the House ended up holding a public hearing with John Durham after all. Suffice it to say that it was a complete disaster. House Republicans couldn’t manage to get a single soundbite out of it, because they had nothing to work with. In contrast, House Democrats were able to use the hearing to repeatedly spell out just how many of Trump’s top campaign people were convicted in the original Trump-Russia probe.
It got me wondering why House Republicans even went through with this Durham hearing. There was no possible way they could have expected the hearing to go well for them. It wasn’t going to win them a single additional vote, and it was just going to be depressing and demotivating for their existing base.
But then I looked at Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts for the day, and I remembered that these days, House Republicans are largely only performing for an audience of one. Trump spent the Durham hearing posting about how great the Durham hearing was going, and how it vindicated him. In other words, House Republicans held this ill-fated Durham hearing simply because Trump wanted to see a Durham hearing.
It’s important to understand that Trump is not some puppet master pulling the strings of House Republicans in order to get them to help carry out his evil genius plan. More accurately he’s a washed up has-been who’s clearly in some stage of dementia, and wants to be repeatedly reassured that his biggest loss in life wasn’t really a loss. House Republicans keep periodically giving him what he wants because he knows their dirty secrets, and they’re afraid that he’ll start spilling those secrets out of spite or confusion on his way down. They’re simply pacifying a fading old man who’s reverting into a baby.
If anything this disastrous Durham hearing, and Trump’s excited response to it, are the most clear eyed evidence yet that Trump really is fading in the cognitive department. He actually thought this Durham hearing went well for him. That’s because he’s fully disconnected from reality, and is merely grasping for any “confirmation” of the self serving conspiracy theories that keep him going.
It’s similar to Trump’s Fox News interview this week, which was such a disaster for him that even his remaining supporters had to be cringing. Yet Trump spent a day bragging on social media about how well it went for him, and even encouraged people to tune in for the second part of it the next day.
This is a guy who’s too far gone to understand reality, lives in a conveniently limited fantasy world of his own making, and is reduced to latching onto anything that helps him keep that fantasy alive. But in reality he’s the kind of broken has-been who got caught with a bathroom stuffed full of stolen classified documents because he didn’t even know what to do with them. The guy’s a goner, in every sense of the word.
