Donald Trump’s meltdowns reach their breaking point
Palmer Report has been characterizing Donald Trump’s most unhinged moments as “meltdowns” for so long that we’ve become a bit self conscious about using the term. How many times can the guy melt down before it becomes cliche? Even as we’ve grappled with whether to retire the word from our coverage, it turns out “meltdown” has finally gone viral and reached critical mass in response to Trump’s, well, meltdowns.
Late on Wednesday night, the word “Meltdown” appeared in the top ten United States trending topics on Twitter for what we believe is the first time. This may have been partly because Meltdown Comics is going out of business. But it was also a result of so many people on Twitter individually characterizing Trump’s Twitter behavior on Wednesday as a “meltdown.” Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted “Now we know why Donald Trump has been having a meltdown.” Congressman Hakeem Jeffries also referred to Trump’s tweets as a “meltdown.” New York Magazine referred to Trump’s “unhinged Twitter meltdown.” The list goes on.
We’ve now reached a point where the person occupying the office of President of the United States has so clearly and repeatedly demonstrated himself as mentally and psychologically unstable, everyone from the mainstream media to Congress now feels comfortable referring to him as having one “meltdown” after another. To give you an idea of how objectively fair that word is when referring to Trump’s behavior, at one point on Wednesday he misspelled “Special Counsel” three times, deleted it, then misspelled it three more times. It’s one thing to make a spelling error. It’s another to keep frantically posting the same error after deleting it, which is less about spelling than it is about simply being out of control.
As it becomes more clear to the public by the day that he’s only there because he and his campaign cheated, the man in the Oval Office is sending increasingly clear signals that he’d be too unstable to remain in that office even if he weren’t there illegitimately. Mainstream America has come to agree that Donald Trump is in perpetual meltdown. It’s only getting worse as he comes to realize he’s not going to get to keep that office much longer.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report