He's losing

Where I sit tonight -- probably the same place as a lot of you right now -- is in the path of the largest winter storm in years. Tracy and I spent the afternoon getting ready. We already went to the supermarket yesterday, so what we were left with was making sure our backup battery power supply is charged and the generator is ready to go. That meant finding the little connection thing to charge the Jackery battery and looking for our collection of extension cords we can run from it, and from the generator outside, to the stuff we’ll want to be able to keep on if the power goes out – the fridge, the wifi router, the TV, and a couple of lamps.

I was toiling away in the room at the back of the house we use for cat boxes and cat feeding and keeping-stuff-we’re-waiting-to-put-away, and I was thinking of what to write at the end of this out of control week, the out of control month that’s about to come to an end, hell, the extraordinarily out of control year we have – so far – survived, when it came to me:

He’s losing.

He’s “losing it,” as the saying goes. He is more and more visibly disconnected from the reality the rest of us, and the rest of the world, live in. They can still shoot him up with something that is not vitamin B and wheel him out in front of the public and the press and turn him loose to babble the lies that make him so happy to repeat over and over – he won the 2020 election that he lost; the prices of things like electricity and food and drugs and health care that everyone else knows are going up, he thinks are going down 400 or a thousand percent or whatever number he’s got stuck in his mind; he’s the greatest president ever, greater even than Washington and Lincoln; and on and on. But it’s not working, and he knows it, and his people know it.

He’s losing his health. A new purple wound bloomed on his hand in Davos that they tried to explain away by saying he hit his hand “on a table.” What? There weren’t enough hands to shake in Davos, so they couldn’t explain it away using that lie, or maybe nobody would shake his hand. Who knows. Something is seriously wrong with him. It’s what his narcolepsy is all about. He couldn’t keep his eyes open if they paraded a bevy of topless teenagers in front of him, he’s on the nod so often and so deeply. The thing about dragging the leg comes and goes, but if I were to guess, I’d say one of the reasons they’re rushing to complete the gold-plated jet from Qatar they say will be ready “by summer” is that they’re installing some sort of elevator he can use to get into the thing.

He’s losing supporters. Three or four polls are out telling the tale of his crash in popularity with the 18 to 30-year-olds. Even those who flipped from Biden to him in 2024, think he stinks, with 65 percent in one poll and 69 percent in others disapproving of the way he’s doing his job. He’s so crazed over his tanking poll numbers that he wants to make it a crime to run polls that say his numbers are falling.

He’s losing Republicans in the House and Senate. How many have said they’re resigning now? I lost count at 40. They’re looking at the losses they’re going to face in the midterms and bailing at record levels.

He’s going to lose the midterms. Everybody knows it. James Carville thinks it’s going to be a blowout. Charlie Cook was just dragged kicking and screaming into admitting control of the Senate is likely to go to the Democrats. The White House announced this week that Trump will be traveling to support Republicans for the midterms once a week between now and next fall. That means rallies. Remember the last one, in the Poconos, when they couldn’t fill a casino convention room and had to wall off a smaller space with big curtains? Just wait: His rally tour is going to turn into the Big Search for the Smallest Event Space So It Will Look the Fullest.

He’s losing it with ICE. The violence and cruelty of his thousands of new barely-trained masked thugs is coming through in spades in Minneapolis. That city is showing what can be done to oppose these modern-day Brownshirts and turn the tide of public opinion against them. His polling on immigration is tanking. CNN ran a poll that found 52 percent find Trump “has gone too far” on immigration. New York Times/Sienna found 61 percent say he has “gone too far” on immigration and customs enforcement. That number included 70 percent of independents. Other polls have had similar results. That whooshing sound you hear isn’t the icy wind bringing the Big Winter Storm. It’s the sound of Trump’s immigration policies flushing down his golden toilet. And these polls were taken before the photo of the five-year-old boy in the knit hat with bunny ears and a Spiderman backpack hit the airwaves. The picture is already being described as “iconic” in the way it shows the inhumanity of Trump’s immigration policy. That’s the hand of an ICE agent holding the boy by his backpack.

Photo: The Guardian

He’s losing it internationally. The kidnapping of Maduro was a big fat bust. He’s leaving the same authoritarian regime in place in Venezuela. None of the Big Three oil companies want to touch Venezuela’s stinky, thick, hard-to-drill-for oil. No major countries want to join his toy U.N. “Board of Peace.” I mean, really – Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan? It’s like a club for wannabe dictators hoping if they please the utterly unpleasable Trump that some crumbs will fall to the table from the Big Mac he’s stuffing in his mouth. Embarrassing. Ridiculous. Absurd. A plaything for Trump’s ever-expanding ego. Europe is gone for him. Not even his pal Putin will listen to his pleadings about stopping the war in Ukraine so he can get another pretend peace prize.

He’s losing it with Wall Street and Banks. That’s what his incredibly rapid shift into reverse on Greenland was all about. The money-boys took a hit to their bottom lines and punched speed-dial for Trump and told him if he wanted to keep the crooked crypto pay-offs coming, he had to finesse a Greenland agreement and drop the threats of new European tariffs, and presto! After screaming for months that he “needs” Greenland for “national defense” and that you “can’t defend a piece of paper,” Trump’s big new deal on Greenland turns out to be a slight expansion of the 1951 treaty signed between the U.S. and Denmark as a – get this – “implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty.” That’s Trump’s bugaboo, NATO, of course. There is new language about “total access” and some filigrees and bows and it will probably be written on stationery in gold leaf lettering, but it’s “old wine in a new bottle,” according to a former NATO official quoted by Politico.

In the end, he is losing because taken together, what has resulted from all his big authoritarian moves is that he looks weak. Panic is setting in. There aren’t enough needles and “not vitamin B” in the world to keep this staggering act going.

That’s not to say he isn’t dangerous. He is. He’s still surrounded by wannabe Nazis like Stephen Miller, and he’s still listening – on the sly now, I suspect – to tech Nazis like Elon Musk. He’s still got a hand puppet running the Pentagon and his hand on a pen that can sign the bloody Insurrection Act any time he takes a mind to. He wants some form of what he thinks is martial law, and if I were to guess, he’s going to try it and end up being knocked back by the courts.

But he’s fading, and he’s fading fast. He is not invincible. Republicans will be heavily damaged in the midterms. If they lose the House and the Senate, Trump’s last two years will be empty theater. He won’t be able to pass a single law. He won’t be able to make a single appointment. He won’t get any new judges on Courts of Appeals. He won’t get any new U.S. Attorneys. Should a Supreme Court vacancy come up, it will stay vacant until 2029, and a Democrat will be in the White House.

He won’t just be a lame duck. His presidency will be a dead letter.