This isn’t working for him anymore

| 4:35 pm EDT April 27, 2020
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Now that Donald Trump has changed his mind and decided to hold a press briefing today, after having announced over the weekend that he no longer saw any point to them, pundits near and far will try to decipher what Trump’s strategy is. I’ll make it easy for you: he doesn’t have one.

Trump has always been a malignant narcissist who’s been clinically addicted to attention, in the same way that someone else might be addicted to a drug. In years past he’s been savvy enough about it to make sure he got attention in ways that benefited him. In his youth he managed to goad the media into writing about how wealthy he supposedly was, which helped him perpetuate the illusion that he was a billionaire. In recent years he’s managed to goad the media into covering whatever controversy he manufactured that day, instead of covering his actual scandals that day.

The problem for Trump is that, in addition to being as much of a malignant narcissist as ever, he’s now slipped pretty deep into senility. He still has a clinical need for attention. But he’s no longer capable of figuring out how to get attention in a way that helps him. He’s been trying to do that with his press briefings, but instead they’ve merely exposed how badly he’s fading.

Yet even after seeing the damage that he did to himself with his “disinfectant” debacle, Donald Trump is about to head out there yet again today. It’s not that he doesn’t care about the negative impact these briefings are having on his reelection prospects. It’s that he cares more about his addiction to attention. Now that he’s senile enough that it’s an either-or proposition for him, he’s clearly choosing poorly – as addicts tend to do. Trump’s life-long con game now working against him.