As I mentioned yesterday, Trump has seen a substantial drop in support. One poll had him at 50-50 support among white people. Those are dire numbers for a Republican.
The problem is that when authoritarians are weak, they tend to lash out and try to sew discord and crisis. The fundamental rationale for a strong man is to counteract chaos and lawlessness.
Enter the Epstein scandal.
You already have a president who's seeing his approval crater over his tariffs and deportation cruelty. Now, every action he takes seems to scream that he is at the center of even more and more damaging revelations about his links to Epstein and the rape of children. All of this makes him extremely dangerous, as his constant desire to increase division and outrage has been his go-to tactic when faced with scandal.
His release of the FBI MLK files is just...bonkers. The House going on recess so that they won't have to vote on measures to release the "Epstein files" is...laughable. Listening to Trump is like listening to someone decompress in real time.
“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They're the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it's the most unbelievable thing I think I've ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn't have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”
Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.”
How can you listen to that insane drivel and not be convinced that he's in charge of his faculties?
Krugman notes that Trump and his Gestapo are likely to launch an attack on New York similar to the one he launched on LA. He seems to think that - because everyone in MAGA thinks NYC is a hellscape - that images of ICE attacking immigrant neighborhoods will redound to his political benefit. It will give him an excuse to nationalize the Guard again and militarize American streets.
The problem with this is that his efforts in LA made him distinctly less popular on the very issue of deportations and immigration in general. Trump knows about five musical notes on the Wingnut Wurlitzer and he will keep pounding on them in a discordant cacophony like a meth-addled chimp, because in the end that's the only tune he knows.
Maybe if armored cars show up in the streets of NY, Jake Tapper can stop flogging his "Biden is old" book and pay attention to what's actually happening now.
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