So this is the end, right?

| 9:09 am EST December 16, 2022
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So this is just about the end of Donald Trump, right? No one who’s actually gearing up to run for President in the next election teases a “major announcement” and then rolls out digital trading cards, right? Everyone can see that he’s not really running, right? We can all just admit as much?

At this point Trump isn’t even trying to keep up the illusion that his “2024 campaign” is anything more than a short term cash grab ahead of his indictment and arrest. What kind of 2024 presidential candidate does something like this? Certainly not one who’s planning to still be in the race by 2024, that’s for sure.

But there’s something even bigger here. It’s one thing for Trump to make a short term cash grab by pretending he’s going to run in 2024. It’s another thing to do it this stupidly. If you’re trying to sell the notion that you’re actually running, so campaign donations will keep rolling it, you’d do things like announce a running mate, or launch a campaign tour, or things that make it look like you’re actually running.

When you’re a (supposed) presidential candidate and you tease a “major announcement” and then it turns out to be trading cards, you’re just making it that much harder to keep up the illusion that you’re a serious candidate. Even if the media wants to help prop up your fake campaign because it’s good for ratings, the media looks at a stunt like this and reluctantly concludes that it has to start distancing itself from this punchline of a “campaign.” After all, if Trump can’t bother to be seen taking his fake campaign seriously, the media can’t be seen taking it seriously either.

It really makes you wonder just how little of Trump’s cognitive abilities are still intact, and who’s really running the show these days. Either Trump signed off on this idiotic idea because he thought it was a good idea, or one of his remaining advisers pulled this stunt in his name without his knowledge or involvement. I’m not sure which of those two scenarios is uglier for Trump, but they’re both rather jarringly bad, to put it mildly.

By now it’s clear that Donald Trump is just a sitting duck, either too far gone cognitively to know what he’s doing or too far gone psychologically to care, waiting to be finished off by the Department of Justice or whoever indicts him first. There is no Trump 2024 campaign. There is no master plan. There is no strategy. There is no comeback. There is no surviving this. There’s just Trump playing cards being hawked by a guy who’s about to be indicted. This guy is one fry short of a Happy Meal, and now he’s hawking Happy Meal prizes.