Donald Trump has no idea what he’s doing in this primary race

| 3:00 pm EST January 21, 2024
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I knew three years ago that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley would each fall flat on their face once they were forced to try to stand on their own in the 2024 Republican primary race. It’s obvious, given that neither has any political savvy or any personality. Sure enough, DeSantis has completely imploded, and Haley is struggling almost as badly. Here’s the thing. If this was so obvious that I knew it was coming all along, how come Donald Trump still doesn’t get it?

Here’s what I mean by that. Haley and (especially) DeSantis were always going to self destruct of their own accord. All Trump had to do was sit back and let it happen, while remaining at least mildly cordial toward them both, and he’d have inherited their bases once they fell off the cliff. Instead Trump has made a point of kicking them toward the edge of the cliff the entire time, thus alienating their core supporters.

DeSantis and Haley may eventually fall in line behind Trump if he wins the nomination, but that doesn’t mean their supporters will. For instance, now that an increasingly dementia riddled Trump had made the humiliating gaffe of confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, supporters of Haley and DeSantis are eating Trump alive for it this weekend on Trump’s own social network.

This isn’t surprising. Trump has been openly vicious toward DeSantis and Haley as they’ve struggled, so why wouldn’t their supporters be just as vicious to Trump now that he’s struggling? More to the point, how did Trump not see this coming? Sure, the entire media (on both sides) has spent years insisting that DeSantis and Haley were super savvy, inevitable, the next big thing. But actual politicians are supposed to be savvier than to believe the ratings-driven nonsense dished out by the political media.

But I think something else may be at play. Donald Trump’s life is a disaster. He’s miserable. His life is being ripped apart by his trials. His cognitive abilities are failing him. He knows it’s all going terribly, terribly wrong and he probably doesn’t understand why. And because he’s a malignant narcissist, he has to take out his unhappiness on someone. He sees his former sidekicks DeSantis and Haley daring to run against him, and he decides they’re responsible for his downfall, so he’s been taking out his frustrations on them. And there’s no one around Trump who’s been willing or able to get Trump to understand or care how stupid of an idea it is.

The core supporters of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley have been lying in wait, hoping for an opportunity to get revenge on Donald Trump, and now they’re getting it. They’re helping to spread the messaging about Trump being senile. They’ll still be looking for revenge when a senile Trump limps into the Republican National Convention with a prison sentence hanging around his neck. And if Trump does get the nomination, they’ll be far less likely to bother voting for him in the general election.

It’s becoming more and more clear that Donald Trump doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing in this Republican primary. He seems to think this is still the 2016 Republican primary race, where the circumstances were very different. But then that’s par for the course for Trump these days. Unable to understand his current situation, Trump is treating the present as if it were the past. That’s not surprising, from a guy whose senility has him so thoroughly stuck in the past that he thinks Barack Obama is still the current President.