Donald Trump Wants to Psych You Out
He’s not the president now and he may never be again.
SWAGGER, CHUTZPAH, EGOTISM—whatever you want to call it, Donald Trump has taken delusions of grandeur to such heights that he needs an explicit reminder: Joe Biden is president of the United States, and Trump is not.
This sounds like Civics 101, but it’s essential counterprogramming as Trump conducts faux presidential business in fake-it-till-you-make-it mode, and an inevitability narrative takes hold.
Trump has talked about his frequent chats with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who calls him because he “wants my views on things,” and he told a rally audience in Pennsylvania that Israel’s doing well because “Bibi” isn’t listening to Biden. Elon Musk, Trump’s pal and possible future U.S. cost-cutting czar, has been in touch with Netanyahu and, the Wall Street Journal reports, has had “regular contact” with Trump favorite, Vladimir Putin, since 2022.
That raises national security concerns about Musk’s top-secret clearance and the U.S. government contracts with SpaceX, his astronautics company, as well as his future in a hypothetical Trump administration. But, maybe, never mind. The New York Times reports that the Trump crew-in-waiting might entirely bypass the FBI role in security clearances. Instead, they’d hire private investigators to do background checks during the transition, so Trump could immediately give a large group access to classified information. What could possibly go right?
At home and with foreign leaders, Trump is acting like the Big Man on Campus, pretending he’s in charge. It’s gotten to the point where Biden and Kamala Harris both have been asked about Trump seemingly “doing diplomacy while he’s not really representing the United States.” Biden said he was not surprised. Harris said she was not concerned.
Sadly, the bluster is having its intended effect. Political coverage of the race has been abuzz with references to “the current conventional wisdom that Trump will win,” the “hyper-confidence” of “MAGA world,” the right’s “irrational confidence,” and what a Democratic operative called “the okey-doke” that this election is all about “the rage of young white men.”
We have older men—very rich, very powerful—lining up to reconnect with Trump, mend fences, and secure promises of presidential action. We have a rash of newspaper owners and companies suddenly going silent on presidential endorsements. Given Trump’s constant threats against the media and his actual first-term record of going after people and companies he doesn’t like, historian Timothy Snyder’s concept of “anticipatory obedience” has had a moment. “You cannot convince me it’s anything other than worrying about angering Trump and his supporters. They made business decisions,” senior media writer Tom Jones said Wednesday in his Poynter Report newsletter.
Sure looks that way, especially at the Washington Post. Owner Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of Blue Origin, a space exploration company interested in government contracts, was one of Trump’s top first-term targets. Just a few hours after the newspaper announced Friday that it was spiking a Harris endorsement and it became clear that Bezos had made the decision, Trump met with executives from Blue Origin. Bezos said there was no quid pro quo, even as he acknowledged that “when it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.”
MEANWHILE, TRUMP’S BRAVADO is working its usual dark magic of creating a fake MAGA reality that requires listeners to believe him instead of their own eyes. That racist, misogynistic, off-the-charts offensive rally at Madison Square Garden? “The love in that room, it was breathtaking,” Trump said. “It was like a lovefest. An absolute lovefest, and it was my honor to be involved.”
A few days later in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump didn’t bother to apologize or distance himself from a speaker’s explosive (and unfunny) joke at the Madison Square Garden rally that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” “We had a ball” at Madison Square Garden, Trump said. “That was the greatest evening anyone’s seen, politically.” He also claimed that “nobody loves the Hispanic community and Puerto Rico community like I do,” and that he had done more for Puerto Rico than any other president, “by far.”
All this in what Politico described as “a majority-Latino city home to one of the country’s largest clusters of Puerto Ricans—and a battleground area within the holy grail swing state of Pennsylvania.” And after Trump’s memorable attempt to comfort hurricane-battered Puerto Ricans by tossing rolls of paper towels to them.
Teflon Don strikes again? Or will this campaign, against a younger, disciplined former prosecutor, prove to be the kryptonite that finally neutralizes his political superpowers?
Some Never Trump Republican and former Republican allies are trying to mainline confidence into Democratic veins. Here’s former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh this week:
Another former Republican congressman from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger, was only slightly more circumspect:
Former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd counseled worrywarts to calm down:
The Post’s Jennifer Rubin, a Mitt Romney fan in 2012, posted a YouTube video called “It’s OK, Kamala is going to win.”
There is a concrete portent for Harris in math—a huge gender gap that’s showing up in polling (Harris is winning women by double-digits) and early voting (women account for 55 percent of early votes across seven battleground states, versus 45 percent for men). The disparity is driven by one of the rare promises Trump managed to keep: ending the national right to legal abortion. State bans and criminalization of reproductive care have led to tragic consequences for women’s health and lives.
Still, this remains a dead-even, choose-your-own adventure contest. University of Virginia analyst Kyle Kondik offered two contradictory “gut feelings” this week and then wondered if we are now in a “silly season, in which ultimately minor movement in the polls is blown out of proportion, and the confidence gap between the two parties creates the impression of Trump momentum that just isn’t necessarily grounded in reality.”
Trump is indeed the master of the con, or more charitably, the illusion of success, in both business and politics. But faking it doesn’t always lead to making it. This time, if we’re lucky, it will lead to losing. The biggest, most beautiful loss anyone ever saw, by far.
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