This is the part where Donald Trump completely falls to pieces

| 9:09 am EDT October 23, 2023
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After Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro cut plea deals against Donald Trump this week, Trump spent Sunday insisting that Powell had never been his attorney to begin with. Trump’s attempt at distancing himself from Powell merely helped ensure that Trump’s lawyers won’t be able to use attorney-client privilege as a way of trying to limit the scope of Powell’s testimony against Trump.

It’s not just that Trump is living in a fantasy land where he thinks his legal troubles can be swatted away with the kind of faux-clever rhetoric that might play well on cable news. It’s that in his hallucinatory quest to magic wand his way out of this, he’s destroying what little chance at a successful defense he might have been able to grasp at.

We keep hearing these increasingly implausible theories about how Trump’s stupid and incoherent moves are actually part of some secret evil genius plan to save himself. We even have to listen to pundits who now insist that Trump’s senile behavior is his defense strategy, that he’s just faking it, and that it’ll keep him out of prison. The law doesn’t even work that way with regard to cognitively incompetent defendants, but that’s beyond the point. The cold hard reality is that Trump is simply falling to pieces, in real time, and in devastating fashion.

Trump’s attack against Sidney Powell on Sunday might have been the right move if this were a purely political scandal, if he were still in office, and this were strictly a matter of public perception. But this is so thoroughly the opposite of that. This is the criminal justice system. Trump has ninety-one felony counts pending against him and he’s out on bail while awaiting trial. Mean tweets don’t get you anywhere. They just make your life even harder.

Not only is Trump’s “strategy” here completely the wrong one, it’s also a broken record at this point. Trump is really falling back on the claim that he barely knew Sidney Powell? We all saw her carry out his insane (and by the way, insanely incompetent) plot to overthrow the 2020 election. For Trump to try to deny it at this point is… well, it’s just lazy. It’s what you’d expect from a guy whose brain is now too far gone to try to come up with any new material.

It’s also very narrowly focused. It all suggests that Trump may be so cut off from the outside world, he’s not even privy to much of what’s happening to him. Trump spent Sunday ranting about Powell, but it’s still not clear if Trump knows that Chesebro also flipped on him. Given just how deeply and broadly Chesebro was involved in the plot, he may be a more devastating witness than Powell. Not that Trump seems to have any idea what any of this is even about. The guy is simply toast.