Donald Trump’s behavior grows even stranger as he circles the drain
Donald Trump has turned out to be such a cartoonishly hyperbolic villain, and his scandals are playing out so much like something out of an unrealistic crime thriller, little surprises us at this point. Yesterday we had the kind of shocking courtroom moment that only ever happens in the movies, where Trump’s attorney’s other secret client turned out to be Sean Hannity. Nothing should surprise us. And yet as he circles the drain, Trump’s behavior has surprisingly found a way to get even stranger.
We all keep half jokingly talking about how Trump is going to eventually just tweet a confession. Yet today Trump tried to defend a guy on trial in Turkey by declaring that “I am more a Spy than he is.” Come on, no one is that stupid, right? Yet Trump really did just write about the hypothetical scenario of him being a spy, even as it becomes more clear that he is in fact a Russian government operative. Former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away today, and so we were all expecting Trump to find a way to botch that. Sure enough, Trump posted a statement about Mrs. Bush with the wrong year on it.
Trump is now bragging about his approval rating in the (notoriously illegitimate) Rasmussen poll on a daily basis. He’s always been insecure about his historic level of unpopularity, but now he pushes back against it on a daily basis. Moreover, each time he brags that he’s climbed past the 50% mark in the Rasmussen poll, seemingly not remembering that he had just finished bragging a day earlier about having climbed past the 50% mark. How many times can you go past the same number? In the mean time, the real polls have Trump’s approval rating closer to the thirties.
Donald Trump is also now so cartoonishly obsessed with attacking Amazon and the Washington Post, both owned by Jeff Bezos, that he launched into two separate rants about it on the same afternoon. This guy is acting more like an impossibly on-the-nose cliche by the day. As things get even worse for him in the coming days and weeks, his behavior will grow even stranger as he circles the drain.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report