Earlier this week, before the SOTU, I heard someone comment that Trump is not reading the room. After last night I’d say he’s dealing with two different rooms. The die hard MAGA devotees are certain he was brilliant last night. One even declared that last night the Democrats lost the midterms. According to the editorial board of the New York Post, Trump’s home-run State of the Union 2026 showed exactly how crazy the Democrats are. But most of the commentary, and the post-SOTU polls, say Trump’s act didn’t go over all that well.  The bottom line is that it probably didn’t change anyone’s opinion. And it’s looking like Trump’s die-hard fans are less than a third of the electorate. For some time polls have been saying the percentage of people who “strongly approve” of him has been stuck at closer to a fourth of the electorate, in fact.

I didn’t watch, but I’ve seen some outtakes. The bit of shtick where he makes fun of the word “affordability” seems to be a permanent part of his act now.  Trump doesn’t really give speeches as much as put on a variety show, as Tom Nichols wrote at The Atlantic. But whether at a rally or on national television, I can’t see how making fun of the word “affordability” endears him to anybody.

See also Who Said It Better? How Trump’s Economic Pitch Echoes Biden’s. This expresses something I’d already been thinking. I’ve read that a lot of voters turned against Joe Biden in 2024 because he kept saying “Bidenomics” was working,. and the economy was getting better, but people weren’t feeling it in their lives yet. But now Trump is doing the same thing.

Telling voters that the economy is better than they believe is a risky strategy, as Mr. Biden found out in his own truncated re-election campaign. He had spent months with an on-again, off-again branding exercise to sell “Bidenomics” as an economic miracle that never quite stuck. It did not matter that he was armed with a blizzard of macroeconomic data. Voters felt squeezed.

Now, with polls showing that a majority of Americans think that Mr. Trump’s policies have made life less affordable, he was the one trying to sell the idea that America has entered a “golden age.”

“The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” the president said, bragging about what he characterized as the stock market’s rise, the drop in gas prices and lower mortgage rates.

So I’m not too worried that Trump’s act last night cost Democrats the midterms. See also Paul Krugman’s analysis of the “speech.”

Yesterday there was reporting that the DoJ appears to have withheld key Epstein documents from public view, Further, there is reason to believe the withheld files contain allegations that Trump abused a minor. Greg Sargent has details.

Greg Sargent also writes that Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All. In brief, he writes that the Trump Administration has created a new “terror bureaucracy” that has pumped huge amounts of money into ICE and Border Patrol, creating an unprecedented military force that will likely be with us for many years.

As I wrote yesterday, I do not plan to watch the SOTU tonight. The NY Times usually has a live running commentary on major speeches from several political reporters, and I’d rather just keep an eye on that to see how it’s going. I’m sure the juicy bits will be all over social media soon enough. If anything significant happens I might comment here, though.

The first thing I read this morning is by Paul Waldman at Public Notice, Trump is about to start a war he hasn’t bothered to explain. Trump is still moving military assets toward Iran and talking about maybe attacking or maybe bombing; he hasn’t made up his mind. He seems very unclear what he wants to do or what he wants to accomplish by it. I see there are plans for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to brief House and Senate leadership, along with intelligence committee leaders, at the White House today. Whether that has happened yet I do not know. Trump certainly hasn’t asked Congress for any authorization to attack anybody, however. Yes, I know, that whole Constitution thing is just too confusing.

At the same time, as Waldman points out, there is no particularly compelling reason to attack Iran right this minute. IMO this whole thing has the hallmarks of something Trump just got in his head. Maybe it’s a distraction; maybe he thinks being a war president will boost his polling numbers. Maybe he thinks if he can get a good war going he can cancel the midterms. Who knows?

The real military — the top brass minus Pistol Pete Hegseth — does not want to attack Iran as long as not attacking Iran is a viable option, as it is. After reports of the chair of the Joint Chiefs warned administration officials that taking on Iran would be very risky and costly, Trump had a massive tantrum. .

Eric Schmitt reports for the New York Times:

President Trump said on Monday that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that any eventual military action ordered against Iran would be “something easily won.”

But that is not what General Caine has told Mr. Trump and other senior advisers in recent high-level White House meetings on Iran, people briefed on internal administration deliberations said.

Instead, General Caine has said that the United States has amassed forces in the Middle East to carry out a small or medium strike, but that there would be a potentially high risk of American casualties and that such an operation would have a negative effect on U.S. weapon stockpiles. General Caine has also underscored that the operations under consideration in Iran would be much more difficult than the successful capture last month of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

I sincerely think the best thing that could happen for the U.S. is if Trump had a complete meltdown giving the State of the Union, a meltdown so obvious that even his base could see he’s not mentally capable of making serious decisions about anything. If he were removed from office we’d end up with J.D. Vance, but I think Vance might be somewhat less dangerous. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, but perhaps his instincts for self-preservation would moderate him some. And nobody likes Vance, which means he won’t have the political capital to step too far out of line.

Lots of good stuff to read elsewhere. I especially recommend How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach. It beautifully lays out the case for why the Democrats needs to get over their fetish for centrism. And there’s another good piece by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted.

Update: Another suggested link: The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

The Wall Street Journal is running editorials opposing Trump’s tariffs, and they aren’t behind paywalls. A couple of days ago I linked to The Embarrassing Truth About Tariffs. This one focuses on who is really paying the tariffs (U.S. consumers) and that “manufacturing boom Mr. Trump promised hasn’t appeared, as manufacturing jobs are down over the last year.”

The most recent one is headlined Why Tariffs Aren’t Shrinking the U.S. Trade Deficit. Overall, U,S, trade deficits remain about where they were when Trump took office in 2025. .Trump’s obsession with trade deficits was always a tad pathological. Trump is obsessed with the idea that if a nation sells more stuff to us than it buys from us, we are being “ripped off.” You might remember that when he announced his “liberation day” tariffs he made a point of making them “reciprocal,” meaning (to Trump) that the tariff rate was based on the deficit between the U.S. and other countries, including islands inhabited entirely by penguins. Freeloaders, those penguins.

But my larger point here is that this is the bleeping Wall Street Journal. Which makes me think that there are a lot of business leaders and Very Monied People who are getting over Trump, and the WSJ editorial board is reflecting that.  Yeah, he cut their taxes, but it’s turning out that in other ways he’s more trouble than he’s worth.

Oh, and the Dow dropped 800 points today.

The State of the Union is tomorrow night. I don’t intend to watch. It’s less painful to follow along reading the written updates in the New York Times and other news sources. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump goes off the rails, big time. It could be epic.

This is right up there with the time Trump had billions of gallons of water released from California reservoirs in the mistaken belief the water would magically flow hundreds of miles south and put out the fires in Los Angeles. Which it didn’t.

This is a real Truth Social post, graphic and all.

The Fox News story on this embarrassment:

“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” Trump wrote Saturday night on Truth Social. “It’s on the way!!!”

Gov. Landry was designated the special envoy to Greenland in December and held formal discussions of the road map of Trump’s designs to solidify Arctic security from threats from Russia or China.

Let us reflect on the fact that Greenland is on Denmark’s socialized health care system, which is a lot better than ours. In comparisons of health care systems among countries around the world, Denmark consistently ranks much higher than the U.S. And Louisiana is close to last among the states in providing health care to its citizens. The worst of the worst. In recent years about 10 percent of adults in Louisiana have had no health insurance — that’s probably higher now — whereas all citizens of Greenland get free health care.

The news comes as Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command evacuated a crew member who required urgent medical treatment from a U.S. submarine in Greenlandic waters, seven nautical miles outside of Greenland’s capital of Nuuk.

The crew member has been transferred to the Greenlandic health authorities via a Danish Defense Seahawk helicopter to a hospital in Nuuk, according to the Joint Arctic Command.

Some news stories are trying to spin Trump’s announcement by saying he had to send the hospital “boat” to take care of the sailor, but the sailor already is getting good care from a hospital in Greenland. Does Trump know there are hospitals in Greenland? Or does he imagine Greenland as some third world country with people living in igloos?

And how much does it cost to send a military hospital ship from Louisiana to Greenland, anyway?

The prime ministers of Greenland and Denmark have informed Trump that Greenland does not need his “boat.”  And of course this is being reported internationally, giving the world another example of what a clueless imbecile Trump is.

But I do hope he brags about sending the hospital “boat” to Greenland in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Maybe the low-info Trump supporters will ask why he’s willing to provide health care to Greenlanders but not to Americans.

Update: It’s being reported that both U.S. Navy hospital ships – the U.S.S. Mercy and the U.S.S. Comfort — are currently docked at a maintenance facility, the Alabama Shipyard in Mobile. Both ships are currently receiving lots of maintenance. Neither is ready to go anywhere on short notice.

In other news — some guy tried to enter the “secure perimeter” at Mar-a-Lago with “what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can,” the Secret Service announced. The man was shot and killed by Secret Service and a local sheriff’s deputy, it says. Trump was elsewhere at the time.

See also DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court at The Guardian.

Here’s a gift link to the live update commentary at the New York Times. It was a six-three decision; the dissenters were Thomas, Alito. and Kavanaugh. Roberts wrote the majority opinion.

As I understand it, Roberts wrote that a president cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s tariff powers in the Constitution. This leaves open the possibility that Trump will use some other contorted legal mechanism to set tariffs, but we don’t yet know what that is or why the SCOTUS wouldn’t strike that down also. The Constitution is crystal clear that the authority to set tariffs belongs only to Congress. And, of course, Trump could just ask Congress to rubber stamp his tariff policies. No guarantees that would work, of course.

Update: This was written and published before the decision. The Wall Street Journal will let you read it if you open a “free” account, so it’s not behind a paywall. In brief, Trump has been throwing a fit over a Federal Reserve report that says 90 percent of the income from the tariffs is being paid by U.S. consumers.

The Fed analysis aligns with other research into the distribution of tariff costs from Harvard economists and Germany’s Kiel Institute—and with common sense. There isn’t widespread evidence that foreign producers are cutting their prices to offset the tariffs, the main mechanism by which foreigners would “pay” for the border taxes.

Nor is the dollar strengthening, which is the other possible mechanism for making foreigners pay (we’ll spare you the equations). Instead the tariffs are causing an increase in post-tariff prices of those goods that are still imported, alongside a modest decrease in the volume of imports. Americans pay higher prices, or “pay” in the form of less choice. …

… So far the manufacturing boom Mr. Trump promised hasn’t appeared, as manufacturing jobs are down over the last year. The New York Fed and other research on cost distribution shows one reason why: To the extent American companies eat some of the costs of tariffs, that’s less cash available for investment and hiring.

If we’re assuming the Wall Street Journal editorial board speaks for the monied class, I’d say that the monied class decided to pull the plug on the tariffs before things got any worse.

See also Layla Jones at TPM.

Update: Trump is currently throwing a temper tantrum on national television. He isn’t making sense, as usual.

From the New York Times:

As Trump says he will impose tariffs under Section 122, the question is how long they will last. The law allows the president to impose those tariffs for 150 days, after which they would need Congressional approval. That will be an uphill battle with midterm elections approaching and more concerns among voters about tariffs adding to the costs of goods.

If he can’t get Congressional approval, the president could turn to other authorities after 150 days. But that would mean yet more uncertainty and unpredictability for businesses that have been whipsawed by this tariff policy.

Update: Paul Krugman on today’s ruling.

Josh Marshall, Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

Rogé Karma, Get Ready for Zombie Tariffs at The Atlantic

Update: Kate Santaliz reports for Axios that some House members are pushing for a reconciliation bill that codifies the tariffs that were struck down today. However, it doesn’t sound as if there are enough votes to pass it. A handful of Republicans welcomed the Court’s decision.

This morning I saw that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested “on suspicion of misconduct in public office,” with the consent of his brother, King Charles. And a former prime minister and acting president of South Korea was sentenced to 23 years in prison for attempting an insurrection. If other countries can do that, why can’t we? Our bad boys with money and connections get one pass after another.

I’m also reading that considerable U.S. military assets have been assembled in the Middle East and are poised to attack Iran. This attack could happen as soon as Saturday, but Trump hasn’t yet made his final decision about it. No, Congress has not been briefed, never mind consulted. I suspect most Americans haven’t noticed the news stories about it. Trump may very well decide to not go through with it. But if he thinks being a War President will pull up his sagging poll numbers, IMO he’s in for a disappointment.

Trump’s stupid Board of Peace is holding its first meeting today, or perhaps it’s done meeting already. I’m not sure. As of the most recent report I could find the countries that have expressed interest in joining are Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.  Whether any of them have coughed up the $1 billion to be permanent members has not been revealed. I understand a number of other countries sent representatives as “observers,” not as members. So Trump probably did have a big group to meet with.

Anyway, among other things Trump announced the U.S. might attack Iran in the next ten days or so if it won’t make a deal to get rid of its nuclear weapons program. And he announced the U.S. has pledged $10 billion to the Board of Peace for reconstructing Gaza. Where this money is coming from is, um, not clear. Among Trump’s plans for Gaza is a 5,000-person military base, The Guardian reports. Other nations also pledged money for Gaza, but who is collecting this money and what precisely it will be used for is not clear. If Trump follows his usual pattern a lot of it will find its way into Trump family pockets.

And my larger point is that this is all so outside the norm that one would think news media would be expressing some alarm about it. But no.

Elsewhere — I’ve never been a big follower of Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, but he has an excellent column out now headlined Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools — Again. In brief, he’s admitting that Netanyahu’s policies are destroying Israel, not saving it, and that knee-jerk support for Israel does the U.S. no good, either. And what he writes has been blazingly obvious for a long time. But I haven’t seen it expressed any more clearly.

The Trump regime is taking steps to label all demonstrations against its policies as terrorism. And there’s currently a test case in Texas. The DoJ is putting an alleged “Antifa” cell — I’m serious — on trial on charges of terrorism. The plan appears to be to claim that everyone protesting Trump’s policies are “members” of Antifa, which the DoJ has identified as an actual terrorist organization.

The incident for which protesters are being tried happened on July 4 in Prairieland, Texas. Some young people were protesting an ICE  facility. They shot off fireworks and graffitied cars. At some point a police officer allegedly was shot in the neck. He survived. The police arrested everyone they could catch, and those people are now the “cell” on trial. Read background at TPM.

Brandy Zadrozny writes at MS NOW:

Prosecutors characterize the events that night as an “antifa attack” on the federal government. The defense calls it a protest gone wrong. But the implications of this trial extend beyond the fate of one group of activists: For the first time, federal prosecutors are seeking to convict protesters — most of them American citizens — on charges related to domestic terrorism. The outcome will test whether President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign to brand leftist activists as terrorists can succeed in the courts.

“This is the first indictment in the country against a group of violent Antifa cell members,” acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson said in a November press release.

Since charges were filed, senior members of the Trump administration have held up the Prairieland case as a proof point in their wider campaign against anti-government organizing, arguing that local activism and demonstrations are coordinated attacks by domestic terrorists. Trump’s Department of Justice portrays antifa — a contraction of “anti-facist” long understood as a loose left-wing ideology, not an organization — as a structured “militant enterprise” comparable to foreign terrorist organizations, one that calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and poses a national security threat.

Some of the protesters did engage in property damage, and one of them, identified as Ben Song, is accused of shooting the police officer. But this case appears to be a first step in criminalizing all anti-Trump activism. If the DoJ can pretend Antifa is a real terrorist organization, and that everyone who demonstrates in opposition to Trump belongs to it, they will give themselves permission to arrest peaceful protesters.

The next No Kings day will be March 28, btw. If you possibly can, show up.

Some of the defendants in Texas have pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists, which I wonder was part of a plea deal or even coerced.

Elsewhere — Today Paul Waldman’s new Cross Section column is headlined MAGA White Supremacists Are a Bunch of Pathetic Losers. Well, yeah, So much of MAGA bubbled up from the depths of racism and misogyny.  And I want to add a bit to what Waldman wrote.

The little town I grew up in in the 1950s and 1960s was a “sundown town,”  There was a big notice at the bus depot declaring that any Black person caught within town limits after sundown was subject to arrest (worded somewhat differently). So, yeah, it was all White stretching everywhere. I doubt there were any nonwhite people residing in the county. During the 1960s I heard the grownups worry that some day Martin Luther King was going to show up with a bunch of Those People, and they were terrified. But of course that didn’t happen because why would it? It was a little mining town in the Ozarks with not much going for it. Hardly anyone ever moved there. You had to be from there to belong.

Paul Waldman writes that White supremacists are “whiny and stupid and weak, their ideas whither under even a moment’s scrutiny or questioning, and their fantasies of oppression are pathetic.” Well, yeah. It’s a really good column and worth reading. I just want to throw in a couple of my own observations.

Something I realized while I was still a Young Person: The hard-core White supremacists, the one who are really into it, are the most ordinary people you can imagine. As a rule they are not notably successful, intelligent, or accomplished at anything. There’s nothing about them to make them special, except that they are White. And they cling to that with all they’ve got. It’s the core of their identifies, the one thing they can point to to claim validation for their existence. They’re White, by gawd, so they are owed respect and status. And if they don’t get that, it’s oppression.  This is not to say that people with education and accomplishment can’t believe in White superiority, too, but as a rule it’s not as important to them.

The other observation, which I picked up from social psychology journals, is that White bigots sincerely believe all White people feel as they do about race. White people who say otherwise and who denounce racism are phonies, or “just being PC.” If the bigots ever got it in their heads that a lot of us Other White People think White supremacists are contemptible, stupid goobers, their heads would probably explode.

Also — Noting the passing of Jesse Jackson and Robert Duvall. RIP.

A lot has happened over the past couple of days, and I’m feeling overwhelmed again. But I do want to say something about Pam Bondi’s, um, performance yesterday in front of the House Judiciary Committee. I’ve never before in my life wanted to see someone tarred and feathered as much as I did yesterday.

I understand Trump expressed approval of the debacle, but I’m not sure she did him any favors. Even some voices on the Right were disturbed at what went on yesterday. You may remember Erick Erickson from his RedState days. I take it he’s moved on to cushier venues, but he’s still solidly Right.

When the Attorney General of the United States is asked why she has prosecuted no one related to Jeffrey Epstein and this is her answer, she should be fired or resign. But neither will happen, which is another reason the Democrats are going to have a good election year. pic.twitter.com/IahqskOAHW

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 11, 2026

And Erickson is not alone.

I’ve been idly wondering what sort of career Bondi will have when her current gig ends. They may hire her on Fox News, but I can’t imagine a real law firm or law school hiring her to do anything other than sort mail or make coffee. She is older than I thought she was, though — she was born in 1965 — so maybe she’ll just retire.

But the Department of Justice has effectively been gutted. I understand Bondi has fired more than 230 career attorneys and other employees. At least 6000 more have resigned. And of course these were the best, most experienced people. At the same time, lawyers are not exactly lining up to apply for jobs. The DOJ is getting desperate to hire people. See also Once-Elite DOJ Is Now Desperate For Lawyers, Resorts To ‘Forward This To A Friend’ Recruiting at Above the Law.

And then this happened.

Federal judges selected Donald Kinsella, a veteran litigator, as the top federal prosecutor in Upstate New York to replace a Trump appointee who was disqualified from the role. 

But just hours later, after judges swore Kinsella in during a private ceremony, a White House official fired him.

“Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, [the president of the United States] does,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a social media post. “See Article II of our Constitution,” 

“You are fired, Donald Kinsella,” Blanche added.

Trump keeps trying to appoint unqualified but loyal attorneys to federal prosecutor jobs — think Lindsey Halligan and  Alina Habba. So along with being unqualified they were not properly appointed and confirmed to their jobs, and their prosecutions were being challenged for that reason, along with the many other reasons.

Trump keeps preferring these incompetent wonders over actual lawyers. He wants U.S. attorneys who will do what he wants and bring bogus criminal charges against people he doesn’t like. This is not going well. Yesterday a Grand Jury failed to indict the six senators who made the “don’t obey illegal orders” video. That failure goes to Jeanine Pirro, who is turning into the “failure to indict” queen. I bet she’s sorry she left Fox News. But Trump can’t see that loyalty is not competence, and all of this legal thrashing around makes him look weak.

Further, the firing of Donald Kinsella may not hold up.

The law governing U.S. attorney vacancies at times allows district judges to appoint an official to serve until a vacancy is filled through the normal Senate confirmation process. But it remains an open question whether the president can dismiss those appointed by the federal judiciary.

Peter Shane, a leading constitutional and administrative law scholar at the New York University School of Law, said in a social media post Wednesday evening that he believed Trump’s dismissal of Kinsella was likely unlawful.

So we’ll see what happens. But this brings us to the larger issue of how Trump is his own worst enemy. His second administration is a massive failure already, and most of the nation knows it even if he doesn’t. See also The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore at Strength in Numbers.

In other law-related news, a judge has temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s action against Mark Kelly over the illegal orders video.

In TACO news, ICE Goon Czar Tom Homan has announced the “conclusion” of the immigration operation in Minnesota. He says there will be a “significant drawdown” of federal agents. I’ll be impressed when they’re gone entirely.

Senate Democrats have blocked a DHS funding bill, meaning DHS is likely to run out of funding this weekend.

Trump is losing it. What “It”? The plot, the narrative, the culture war, a big chunk of his base, his political capital, you name it.

See Greg Sargent, Trump Rages at Bad Bunny—and Accidentally Exposes a Big MAGA Weakness. Greg Sargent argues that Trump is losing ground even in places he thought he owned, like the world of pro football. “The president has long regarded pro and college football—the players and fans, at least—as ‘his’ part of the culture,” Sargent writes. But he’s staying away from the Super Bowl. Because of Bad Bunny? or because he was advised he’d be booed?   Greg Sargent continues,

But something deeper is going on here than Trump’s usual lashing out at a critic. This clash hints at a genuine fear on Trump’s part that he’s on the defensive big time in the war over ICE—not just in the political war, not just in the war that’s shedding American blood in the streets, but also in the culture war. Because the battle over ICE has become a culture war all unto itself. And Trump is losing it.

Last October The Gnome declared that ICE would be “all over” the Super Bowl, and only “law-abiding Americans who love this country” would be welcome. Also, too,

When asked if she had “any message to the NFL” regarding the organization naming Bad Bunny as its Super Bowl halftime performer, Noem said, “Well, they suck and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”

Jeebus, she was threatening the NFL? Anyway, the NFL has said there would be no ICE at the Super Bowl, and I’m not sure what happened to get The Gnome to back down. I turned on the pregame show and I’m seeing people finding their seats in the stadium, and I take it nothing alarming has happened yet. And I haven’t seen a big uprising among football fans about Bad Bunny. There’s been a backlash from MAGA, of course, but probably not the uprising against Bad Bunny that Trump expected.

Sargent goes on to cite recent polls that show approval of ICE is losing ground among voting blocks that Trump thought he owned — rural voters, non-college-educated voters, men aged 18 to 29. They don’t like ICE; they don’t like how the deportations are being handled. See also Trump Is Losing Normies on Immigration.

Now see Josh Marshall, Trump’s Big Loser Energy, and Other Tales From the Annals of Political Messaging. This is about Trump’s threat to nationalize the midterm elections, which he won’t be able to do.

Trump doesn’t want to “nationalize” elections. Before the semi-walkback by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the closest he and his toadies came to explaining what he meant is that he wants Republicans to take over running elections in some 15 places where he constantly loses and where he is upset about losing. This is really the biggest loser energy imaginable. He lost and he’s so stung by it that next time he wants to brings his own refs. Again, that’s just the biggest loser energy imaginable. And what’s motivating all of this is that he’s getting less popular every damn day and it’s straight up killing him. He’s homing in on a massive ego injury in November and he’s lashing out right and left. …And it’s driving Donald Trump completely up the wall.

Great! Let him suffer. Glory in it. And most of all lean into it.

Trump’s supporters are abandoning him. He’s getting less popular. He’s losing. So he wants his Republican friends to start counting the votes. So he can win and feel less sad.

Big loser energy! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Trump is accustomed to being as outrageous as he wants to be and then basking in the approval of his culties and the Republican Party in general, while the libs howl in outrage. But he got spanked by Republicans over the recent Obamas-as-apes video. For them truem believers MAGA has been about cultural warfare more than anything else, but a lot of independents and low-info voters got caught up in it because, you know, illegal alien criminals should be deported and Joe Biden (they think) caused inflation. They weren’t expecting the excesses of ICE and a president utterly out of touch with their concerns while he focuses on building a giant ballroom and getting things named after himself.

The Republican Party expects to lose a lot of seats in Congress in the midterms and don’t see Trump doing anything to turn that around. At some point before November a lot of them are going to have to create some space between themselves and Trump if they expect to have any chance at all of keeping their seats. Meanwhile the Epstein files have got to be eating Trump alive. What will Trump do next? I expect him to get more extreme, more outrageous, because that’s his pattern. I expect him to try to crank up hysteria about some enemy who is causing all our (his) problems.

Meanwhile it seems to me most folks just want a nice normal Super Bowl game to watch with beer and lots of cholesterol-stuffed food and a catchy halftime show and no politics. Which seems to be what’s going on.

Let’s look at some news about Trump reported over the past few hours. The first example is courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson’s February 5 post:

This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

“I needed it for my own ego” is honest, at least, but who actually says that?  Then yesterday CNN reported:

President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.

But there was a condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

Again, not exactly normal. I haven’t heard if Chuck responded. Chuck doesn’t have the authority to rename either Penn Station in NYC or Dulles Airport — which is in bleeping Virginia — anyway.

Then Trump shared an appalling video that depicted the Obamas as monkeys. It was eventually deleted after some Republicans complained about it. Update: The White House is now blaming a staffer for the video. Sure.

Trump continues to make ridiculous claims about how he’s brought down prescription drug prices by more than 100 percent.

Trump is having, or at least allowing, a 22-foot-tall gold statue of himself to be erected in Miami on the site where the US will host a G20 summit later this year. The statue is being paid for by a bunch of crypto bros. However, the sculptor is not letting the statue out of his studio until the bros cough up the balance of what they owe him. And since crypto recently took a dive, that may be a problem. So we may be spared the embarrassment of having world leaders being greeted by “Don Colossus.”

Again, these are stories published over just the past few hours. And I say we’re looking at an increasingly deteriorated mental state. Trump is not what we might call well socialized, but there was a time in his life when he could probably fake being psychologically and socially normal. But that time is over. And I know there have been news stories about his declining mental state going back at least a couple of years, if not longer, but I say he’s getting worse. He has absolutely no filters now.

I got this from TPM:

The Trump administration is retaliating against recently freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family for becoming a poster boy for the brutality of Operation Metro Surge by seeking to end their asylum claims and expedite the deportation proceedings against them, MPR reports.

In short, somebody doesn’t have enough sense to leave well enough alone. Although this might be Miller as much as Trump.

Getting back to the New York tunnel story, the project is expected to have a major effect on rail service, and not just in New York:

The project, known as Gateway, sits at the heart of the Northeast Corridor rail route that runs from Boston to Washington and is the most-used passenger line in the United States. It includes the construction of a new two-track tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey, which are linked by 116-year-old tunnels in such poor condition that trains are often delayed, creating a bottleneck.

Supporters of the project say the new tunnel would be crucial to avoiding a disruption in rail service around New York City that they believe would have drastic effects on the national economy.

So this project isn’t just about doing a favor to New Jersey-New York commuters.  Funding originally was held up because the Administration wanted to be sure there was no DEI hanky-panky going on. But holding up this project so Trump can get Penn Station re-named after him is just nuts.

Meanwhile Trump is still planning to put up some oversized European-style triumphal arch in DC and is looking to gut the Kennedy Center in ways that could ruin it as a performance venue. So what’s keeping him from ordering a nuke dropped on the next foreign leader — or U.S. governor — who pisses him off?

As I understand it, when older people have lost all filters this usually indicates a shrinking prefrontal cortex This is not something you want to see in a POTUS.

Having Trump as president really is like being tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded gun (excuse me if I’ve said that before). And in spite of his crashing poll numbers a whole lot of people are still propping him up and protecting him. In the current Congress he’s not about to be impeached and removed from office for cause. At least there could be a huge grassroots scream for removing him under the 25th Amendment.