I don’t think Trump’s gonna make it
Donald Trump lumbered onto the stage this evening, seemed short of breath from the start, got lost in a number of incoherent stories, yelled “fake news” at multiple reporters in the room, and then abruptly decided to lumber off the stage, telling Mike Pence to take over the rest of the press conference.
This came after Trump spent the day posting increasingly belligerent, bizarre, and braindead tweets attacking just about everyone he could think of. Trump’s day wasn’t productive. It wasn’t coherent. It wasn’t anything, beyond deeply concerning. It’s not just that Trump didn’t sound like his presidency is going to make it. It’s that he didn’t sound like a guy who’s going to make it, period.
Even when you set aside conversations about how much worse Donald Trump will screw this up before November, there’s the question of whether this is even sustainable for him. The stress of finally having to do a little bit of work in his otherwise lazy life, at a time when he’s clearly in poor health to begin with, just makes you wonder.
We’re already at the point where a struggling Donald Trump is walking out on his own press conferences. How many more days in a row can his own people put him out there without killing him? Then again, they can’t really hide him at a time like this either. At some point Trump’s worsening physical, psychological, and cognitive health are going to come to a head – and it’s starting to feel like that could happen a lot sooner than November.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report