“I think we broke his brain”
There’s a scene in The Office where the likable characters keep needling their toxic new coworker until he snaps and punches a hole in the wall. At that point one character says to the other, “I think we broke his brain.” That line keeps coming to mind when I try to parse what’s happened to Donald Trump over the past week. What stands out as remarkable is what broke his brain.
On some level Trump probably understands that he’s falling behind in the polls and on track to lose. But as evidenced by how readily he’s citing right wing nonsense polls, he’s at least partially deluded himself into believing that he really is winning. And while Trump is obviously hearing how often he’s getting called “weird” these days, recent behind the scenes reporting suggests that he’s managed to convince himself that the “weird” remarks are aimed solely at his running mate JD Vance.
Trump has always had a surreal ability to rationalize any news he hears, any evidence he sees, no matter how bad for him, into a comforting delusion about how it’s actually good for him. The older he’s gotten and the more often he’s lost (2020 election, one trial after another), Trump has seemed to become more steadfast in his comforting delusions than ever.
But there’s one thing that Trump can’t seem to explain away – and that’s rally crowd size. No matter how bad things have gotten for Trump over the past four years, he’s always been able to hold a rally and see a crowd of people cheering for him, and tell himself that he can’t possibly be anything other than supremely popular.
Then Trump made the mistake of holding a rally in the exact same swing state venue that Kamala Harris had just packed to the rafters days before. Trump looked around and saw large swaths of empty seats and realized he couldn’t draw the same size crowd as his opponent under the same circumstances, and that’s when it sank in for him he’s not as popular as she is. He’s not the cool kid. And he’s certainly not winning. That’s what broke his brain.
Rally crowd size has never been a leading indicator of voter turnout. If it were, Eugene Debs and Wendell Willkie would have been Presidents of the United States. But in Donald Trump’s warped narcissistic mind, the supporters he can see in front of him are more real (and thus less subject to rationalization) than any vote total. Whether Trump has been ahead or behind in any election at any given point, he could always look at his superior crowd sizes and tell himself that he must be ahead by a mile. But now even that’s been taken from him.
We saw what happened once it hit Trump that Kamala Harris had outdrawn him. He spent the rest of his rally bashing the venue where he was speaking, trying to scapegoat it for the empty seats. But even Trump wasn’t able to buy that particular rationalization. He disappeared from the campaign trail for a week after that. When he finally reemerged, it was for a rally in the red state of Montana, a state where he and his babysitters knew he could outdraw any rally that Harris might hold.
When Donald Trump realized that he’s no longer even the leader in rally crowd sizes, it broke him. Now, with just ninety days to go in the election, Trump isn’t even bothering to hold rallies in swing states anymore, for fear he’ll get outdrawn and it’ll further crush his collapsing ego. The guy is literally going to prison if he loses, and yet he’s not even trying to compete anymore, because he can’t handle the idea that his crowds might be smaller than those of his opponent. That’s psychotic. And if he wants to help finish himself off in that manner, that’s great.
