Donald Trump reaches a whole new level of desperation

| 11:10 pm EDT June 13, 2019
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“We are winning in every single state that we’ve polled.” Generally speaking, when people speak between the lines, they do it on purpose. Someone should explain this to Donald Trump. It seems like whatever it is that he says, he means the opposite or something much worse. In this case, that’s good news for the world. The New York Times published an article detailing that Trump’s own internal polling placed him in a bigly unfavorable position. The seventeen-state poll had Trump behind in many of the key states he needs to secure a second term. Here’s what that means we might expect.

We’ve seen Trump descend into a Sisyphean hell of trying to clear himself of legal troubles by committing more crimes. Being desperate and stupid is a terminal illness, at least politically speaking. With the revelation that his base, who are the only people left in this country who will reliably vote for Trump, is insufficient as a voting body to secure him a second term, Trump will, deliberately or otherwise, become more desperate yet. Expect more tweet diatribes, incoherent media appearances and rallies, and melodramatic political moves. Expect him to assert more executive privilege, wheel out Sarah Sanders (or whoever replaces her), Kellyanne Conway, and his posse of gargling imbecile children.

Worse yet for Trump, he can expect more congressional defectors the further down the rabbit hole he goes. Justin Amash won’t be alone for long. Mitt Romney recently stated he isn’t sure he’ll support Trump in 2020, which, even considering Romney has a history of impotent criticism against Trump, is a bit startling. The specter of future Senate defectors is very real in the wake of the Senate Republicans’ threats to oppose Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexican goods before the administration came to an agreement of sorts with Mexico. The longer the Republicans wait to remove the Trump tumor, the worse off the Republican corpus will be, and cutting their losses will be an obvious choice if it becomes clear that Trump can’t win in 2020.

For the near-term, it’ll be interesting to see if the next round of approval ratings reflect the misgivings Senate Republicans seem to be developing. Trump’s mediocre-but-prima-facie acceptable economy delivered a poor May jobs report and market volatility is wearing on investors – both substantial black marks for Trump. For the long-term, expect this hot mess to come to a boil.