Trump Is Losing It

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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.

21 thoughts on “Trump Is Losing It”

  1. 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.

    But Trump is doing something! He's holding talks, where people hold up signs, saying "lower prices" and "bigger paychecks," and that means he's properly celebrating his accomplishments, and…

    … no, I'm not kidding, that was his strategy, to "draw attention to his economic accomplishments."

  2. Although the word conservative applied to politics is quite volatile in so many ways, it does remain stable in one way. When it makes poor choices, it forgets rule number one.  

    When riding a horse and the horse dies.  Rule #1 is to DISMOUNT.  Conservatives tend to keep whipping the dead horse.  Not good horse sense.                                    

     

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  4. Quote of the day:

    Information continuing to emerge from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) claims that the M23 armed group has detained Erik Prince, the American national known as the founder and former head of the private military company Blackwater.

    "Getting kidnapped by an armed group is the best advertising for your private military company"

    https://bsky.app/profile/sanho.bsky.social/post/3megjyxcloc23

  5. Today (Mon), certain member of congress were able to view the "unredacted" versions of the first ~3 million documents from the "Epstein Files".

    I've been thinking back to those weeks in 2025 when the DOJ was "explaining" that the files were not yet released even though their release was promised during the 2024 presidential campaign. They claimed that they had massive numbers of agents working long days to go through the contents to determine what could legally be released.

    I'm here to say that I doubt they were selling redactions in exchange for a few million dollars in donations to a worthy non-profit. Highly unlikely they were doing that.

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  6. Maxwell took the 5th today. No news there but her attorney said Maxwell can clear Trump of involvement in the Epstein affair in exchange for clemency.  This is Jack the Ripper here, promising she can "prove" Trump isn't a pedophile, for the low, low, price of a presidential pardon.

  7. I'm reading this morning that Trump will block the opening of a bridge between Michigan and Canada, paid for by Canada. He wants the US to be "fully compensated," but the lack of specifics suggests that Carney's brilliant and articulate rejection of Trump's international tantrums is at the heart of the threat. 

    Politically, this is just stupid. Trump flipped Michigan in 2024 by a narrow margin. I don't think the people of MI intended for the fight with Canada to create a hard trade and tourism chasm. The US half of the bridge belongs to the state of MI. The threat, whether Trump does it or not, will cost Trump seats in the House.

    What I'm reading from the ground in Minneapolis is that nothing has changed. There are 2000 Nazis grabbing people off the streets, still targeting schools. But the media seems to be moving on. The city shows no signs of weakening to Trump, becoming nationalized as far as law enforcement goes. So that is failing. If the Rust Belt is critical in 2028, Trump is pissing it away in grand style.

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  9. I remember when China was thought to have the Obama syndrome.  The Obama syndrome was an imaginary disease that a lot of locals thought he had which caused him to do nothing right, even by accident.  China had it too.  The same group saw the same problem with China, just one mistake after another.  They could wax for hours on how it just won't work for them.  They had it all figured out, as they did with Benghazi.  We referred to them as Benghazi brains when they were out of earshot.  

    The delusion let them waste away, content that they knew the future of the United States was safe with future world dominance assured.  

    Meanwhile, the world changed and they missed it.  

    Steven Rattner was paying attention and still is it seems.  In a NYT article today, he lays out quite different future for the United States.  

    The need to do so is only growing, because the commotion of Mr. Trump’s first year back in office has set America back. In addition to manufacturing, China is threatening America’s pre-eminence in a range of fast-growing sectors, including artificial intelligence and pharmaceutical drug development. While he has tried to cut our spending on important government functions like basic research, China has made them national priorities.

    China’s progress in A.I. has been stunning. While it still lags the United States in terms of cutting-edge semiconductor chips, China has an abundance of another key ingredient of A.I. success: power. It has more than twice as much generating capacity as we do, and some of its data centers pay half as much as ours for power.

    This gives a bit of a vision of our delusion free future, but the big picture needs a complete read.

    Opinion | I Just Returned From China. We Are Not Winning. – The New York Times

    Delusional and Destructive Donnie has not a clue and is losing more rapidly.  As we sink, he collects anchors on the main deck. Only the best and moat fabulous anchors for sure. 

    • Totally prescient. I was trying to think of how to parse Maha's headline today and thought to myself "the orange man is already far gone, an insane evil supervillain, it is US (you and me) that are losing it". The collapse event has already happened and we are dealing with the crisis of the "post whatever" reality. The economic collapse and the consumer collapse will probably follow, but the collapse of the American System has already happened when you have concentration camps run by an anti-democratic, corrupt, fascisistic governmental uniparty that can not comprehend to use against competitors the main strength and crown jewels of the US of A's system: an open and free society that values the individual and their access to a governmental system in a uniform fashion. The collapse is that the US Government thinks that it can compete with garbage can, repressive governments on a basis of being more repressive and race to the sewer. The arms race is over, the "global fascism race" is here, where the law is used as a weapon against the individual and not as an empowering asset for them. 

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    • As an example of collapse, please pray for Nancy Guthrie. As a likeness, back in the day, we had some close friends in old Mexico who were agricultural landowners and had their 79 year-old grandma (and eventually other family members) kidnapped and killed by the cartels. At the time, we smugly said that we were glad that we lived in the good ol' US of A where we had law n' order and trustworthy, earnest law enforcement. Now we live in a corrupt has-been collapsing empire where the criminals are happy to punish our grandmothers. 

      Nancy's daughter asked "You're not like someone's crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever."

  10. Remember, EVERYTHNG Trump touches, dies.  Everything.  Anything he does that even has a chance for success, for good or bad, Trump finds a way to fuck it up.

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  12. As long as I'm annoying with repeat comments: this from Huffpost –

    ———————————————-

    Annual Governors' Gathering With White House Unraveling After Trump Excludes Democrats

    An annual meeting of the nation’s governors that has long served as a rare bipartisan gathering is unraveling after President Donald Trump excluded Democratic governors from White House events.

    The National Governors Association said it will no longer hold a formal meeting with Trump when governors are scheduled to convene in Washington later this month, after the White House planned to invite only Republican governors. On Tuesday, 18 Democratic governors also announced they would boycott a traditional dinner at the White House.

    ———————————————

    This may mean that Republican governors are skipping. Or perhaps the official Governors Association won't put their stamp on a GOP-only event. Maybe some or even most GOP governors will attend. We shall see. But the association of governors isn't interested in being federalized along party lines. The states are sovergn and even GOP governors may get that being absorbed by a fascist regime is a one-way trip. Let's see how many of them show up at the WH to kiss the ring.

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  13. quote of the day:

    “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent…their minds poisoned by importance. The world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any.” -Thomas Paine, Common Sense

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  14. After prepping us for a crappy jobs report, based on a lousy economy and the announcements of major layoffs, we come up with 120K jobs added. I am calling BS. There's the smell of Sharpie in the air, as with the weather map modified to demonstrate the new range of a hurricane to validate a ridiculous claim by Dear Leader, I believe that the WH got the real numbers, proceeded with damage control until Trump told his minions to announce a totally bogus number.

    I do not KNOW this to be true, but how about a FOI request for the basis of the 120K  claim?

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