This is just getting weird

| 9:09 am EST December 17, 2022
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On Monday the January 6th Committee will hold a public hearing to formalize making a criminal referral against Donald Trump to the Department of Justice. As soon as Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee could make part or all of Trump’s tax returns public. And oh by the way, Special Counsel Jack Smith just more or less confirmed that Trump will be indicted, by empaneling a new grand jury against him.

Meanwhile Trump is out there fighting back against all of this by… selling imaginary trading cards of himself depicted as a superhero? Selling JPG images of himself? Is there a way to even describe this? There’s real NFT, and then there’s whatever this is. If you tried to come up with the most embarrassing thing Trump could do, that would harm what little is left of his political viability the most, that’s what this Trump trading card thing is. Trump wasn’t selling anyone on his “2024 campaign” stunt to begin with, and now he does this to himself?

We’re all in favor of Donald Trump helping to take himself down – but this is just getting weird. When is the last time this guy even appeared in public? He gave a half hearted “2024 campaign kickoff speech” last month and then mostly vanished. You almost wonder if, when the Feds come to arrest him, they might find him sitting there drawing on the floor with crayons, incoherently muttering nonsense, and making superhero noises with his mouth.

There are some observers who suspect Trump has been behaving this incompetently and incoherently because he’s hoping to use mental incompetence as a trial defense. The law doesn’t actually work that way, but up to now it’s been at least theoretically possible that Trump was putting on a show because he had a mistaken understanding of how the law works. At this point, however, we have to accept that he really is this far gone, right? He’s selling imaginary superhero trading cards of himself. That’s not something you do unless you really are that far gone.