Donald Trump’s people scramble to cover for the increasing perception that he’s toast

| 9:09 am EDT April 25, 2024
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Donald Trump has had just about as brutal of a week as you can have, and it’s still only Thursday morning. He’s on criminal trial. His own former friend has confessed that he and Trump conspired to rig the 2016 primary and general elections. Everyone can see he’s likely to be convicted. And he’s so far gone cognitively, he keeps dozing off during his own trial.

In other words, the general public is rapidly figuring out that Trump is completely politically nonviable. He’s senile, he’s going to prison, and it turns out he didn’t even really win in 2016 to begin with. Nothing that we’re supposed to believe about this man’s abilities, past or present, is true. He’s just a blob sitting there waiting to be finished off, and everyone increasingly knows it.

So now Trump’s people are doing what right wing figures always do when they’re afraid of looking weak: they’re trying to change the subject by making the conversation all about how strong Trump is instead. So they’re leaking stories about how Trump’s sons will run the transition and strategically install loyalists, even though these two idiots don’t know how to tie their shoelaces. And Trump’s daughter in law is out there claiming that the RNC is going to personally handle general election ballots, even though that’s not a real thing that would or could ever happen.

But Trump has to look strong right now, or it’s immediately over for him. And since everyone can increasingly see that Donald Trump is a broken blob, now his people are trying to make the story be that other people named “Trump” will be doing the strongman work.

As always, it doesn’t matter that Trump and his campaign are being criticized and condemned for the strongman moves that they’re vowing to make. That kind of condemnation never hurts a right wing political figure. If we’re “sounding the alarm” about all the strongman things that Trump is supposedly going to get away with, all we’re really doing is helping paint him as being strong. And that’s literally all that matters, because right wing figures’ ability to get ahead is entirely dependent on their ability to look strong.

Look what happened to DeSantis. The minute Republican voters figured out he was a weakling, they abandoned him. That’s how the right wing strongman routine works. If you show weakness, you’re finished. And yet Trump is sitting there sleeping through his own criminal trial, which makes him look so weak that even his own base is too embarrassed to show up and protest in support of him.

So even as Trump’s people try to distract from Trump’s increasingly glaring weakness by leaking one thing after another about how much of a strongman routine his people are still supposedly going to be able to pull off for him, let’s make a point of not taking the bait.

The story here, the story that matters, the story that’s going to finish Trump off, is that he’s weak. He was too weak to fend off his criminal trial. He’s too weak to keep his own former pals from testifying against him. And he’s too weak to even remember where he’s at long enough to stay awake during his trial. Trump’s pathetic weakness is the story. Don’t let Trump’s people bait you into letting his supposed strength be the story instead.