Down and down he goes. (Photo by Emily Elconin via Getty Images)
The signs of the downward spiral are mounting. Pay attention to his recent pronouncements and actions, you can tell that Donald Trump knows he’s losing. They are a source of nourishment for all of us who yearn for his overwhelming defeat and a warning that he will continue seeking new ways to escape the reality that he is a sore and felonious loser.
I don’t mean the polling evidence that underscores the country’s shift away from Trump. I also don’t mean the growing number of Republicans who refuse to back him, including many of the high-level staffers who worked directly with him, know how unfit he is and surely don’t want to see him step into the Oval Office again. That includes Gen. H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser, who writes in a new book that the Trump White House was a “vortex of vitriol” and says that foreign leaders saw the ex-president as a “chump.” This also includes over 200 former aides of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney who’ve endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
Remember the days when such people feared speaking out? If they were scared to speak out before, the prospects of a Harris win combined with their growing awareness of Trump’s weakness has clearly strengthened their resolve to do the right thing for their country.
I could make a list of Trump’s posts on Truth Social to underscore his growing desperation, but those are just more of the same sweaty, aggrieved and deranged missives that he’s been spewing for months to manipulate his cult. Consider instead three actions from the last week which exemplify his downward spiral.
On Monday, this disgraceful man who occupied our White House—the guy who spat upon soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country by calling them “losers” and “suckers”—visited the sacred grounds of Arlington Cemetery. This appalling publicity stunt was intended to blame the vice president for the deaths of the 13 soldiers who died from a terrorist attack during the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Let’s put aside Trump’s role in creating the conditions for a troubled withdrawal by negotiating directly with the Taliban and excluding the Afghan Army, increasing the vulnerability of U.S. forces by drawing down the troops to 2,500 from some 13,000, and ordering the release from prison of over 5,000 Taliban fighters. (Asked McMaster this week: "The whole premise of talking to the Taliban before you leave Afghanistan...why the heck were we even doing that?") All this is something Trump and his followers now ignore. The issue here is that this man who despises dead soldiers felt it necessary to pretend to care.
For days, this addled nominee who yearns to be a dictator and a strongman just like his idols—Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un—has made it obvious how much he fears debating Kamala Harris. He’s attacked ABC News as too biased to conduct the Sept. 10 debate. (“Why am I doing it?” Trump whined. “Let’s do it with another network.”) He’s also threatened to skip the debate if the rules change, including the simmering question of whether the microphones should be live or muted when the opponent is speaking. Last night he posted this foolish statement: “I have reached an agreement with the Radical Left Democrats for a Debate with Comrade Kamala Harris.” But let’s see: The Harris campaign insists they haven’t yet reached agreement on the rules.
You might say all the back-and-forth is just typical Trump sowing conflict and doubt to hold the media’s attention. But what it really does is emphasize his fear that she’s going to, frankly, kick his ass, reveal him for the weak and empty man that he is, and further fuel his downward trajectory.
But the most telling sign for me was Trump’s statement a week ago at his campaign rally in Asheboro, North Carolina. "Our primary focus is not to get out the vote, it is to make sure they don’t cheat," Trump said, the kind of comment only a candidate doubting he can legitimately win makes.
It’s no surprise that the insurrectionist who incited violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in an effort to hold onto power is angling again to reject the outcome of the next election and fuel his aggrieved followers. But his statement last week made clear that he’s already focused on how to say he won if and when he loses in November.
This came on the heels of his comments several days earlier in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, making the ridiculous and desperate claim that the vice president is not a legitimate nominee—that President Joe Biden did not exit the race by choice. “This was an overthrow of a president,” Trump said. “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”
We’ve seen this movie before, one that only his cultists will believe to be true. But let’s not doubt that his efforts to undermine confidence in the outcome of the 2024 election is just a tired rerun by a weak man who knows he’s losing. Expect this toxic talk to get louder and more incessant in the coming weeks as his fear mounts.
This notion of Trump’s weakness has been on my mind in the last few days since hearing the speech of former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 House committee, who spoke at the Democratic convention. Trump’s essential weakness is a topic I wrote about earlier this year, an essay that I think is worth a fresh look.
But first I’d like to share part of Kinzinger’s speech, which I hope was absorbed by some Republicans not swallowed up by the Trump cult—and which might have even convinced a few of them to rethink their vote for him.
Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on—listen—he puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.
As a conservative and a veteran, I believe true strength lies in defending the vulnerable. It’s in protecting your family. It’s in standing up for our Constitution and our democracy. That—that is the soul of being a conservative. It used to be the soul of being a Republican. But Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party. His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.
I would make two revisions. I think it’s been an awfully long time since the “soul of the Republican Party” has been concerned with “defending the vulnerable.” I also think that Trump has not simply untethered Republicans from their values, but also untethered them from reality itself as they follow a pathological liar who will say anything if he thinks it will help him.
That said, I’m grateful that there are Republicans like the former congressman with the courage to speak out now. One other GOP highlight at the convention was former Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan with these powerful words: “These days our party acts more like a cult, a cult worshiping a felonious thug…Let me be clear to my Republican friends at home: If you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, you’re not a Democrat, you’re a patriot.”
What follows is my essay from April 1 this year, entitled “The Weakness of a Violent Man.” I hope you’ll read it again now (or for the first time if you’re a new subscriber) as we witness Trump’s dark descent. Thankfully, the joyful ascendancy of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz presents a vivid alternative, illuminating the fact that the downward trajectory is not inevitable.
But that doesn’t mean Trump won’t do anything he can to try and get back into the White House to avoid criminal prosecution, a reality made more likely by news last night that Special Counsel Jack Smith has revised his indictment to overcome the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in the D.C. District Court’s election interference case. A weak and cornered man remains a dangerous thing.
(Photo by Scott Olson via Getty Images)
He attacks a judge’s daughter to stir up hate and conflict. He posts a video of the President of the United States, bound and gagged. He condemns millions of humans as poison, who, in their struggle to survive, have come to the United States to seek better lives. This is not a strong man, a man displaying his strength to lead; this is a malignant man who’s revealing his essential weakness and dangerously exacerbating a climate of violence.
Bereft of any vision of positive change, this is a man who is only capable of exploiting an aggrieved people’s worst instincts—who has figured out that he can get what he wants by stoking the fear, hatred and anger of others. He uses violence, not imagination. Conflict, not collaboration. Cruelty, never kindness. Retribution, not affirmation. These are the tools of a weak man inciting the mob to satisfy his hunger for carnage.
A man like this sells bibles wrapped in an American flag. Desperate for dollars and loyalty, he laughably claims the bible is his “favorite” book and that he has many of them. Empty and broken inside, he needs to compare himself to Jesus Christ on the holy weekend of Easter.
But this is a weak man, a narcissist in the extreme, who cannot tolerate his own failures or the painfully obvious reality that he will never get the total adoration that his bottomless pit of need seeks. This is a sad creature, utterly lacking self-consciousness. When he looks in a mirror, he never sees the truth.
We are living in complex, challenging times, in which our problems are increasingly global and often seem insurmountable. Climate change. Immigration driven by displacement. Murderous rulers set upon stealing their neighbors’ sovereignty, ending their commitment to democracy and exploiting their limited resources by undermining their allies’ commitment to support them.
In such times, we hope for leaders possessed of the necessary intellect and imagination, compassion and competence to engage the public in the arduous task of self-governance. At a time when the problems we face depend on genuinely strong leaders, capable of inspiring the public to pursue their better selves and work together, a weak man relies on scapegoating the most vulnerable among us and promising that he alone can fix our most intractable problems—and do it quick. The demagoguery is as old as the hills, only the details and the targets of hate change over time.
In less troubled times, a man like this would remain in the darkened fringes of society, limited in his ability to incite stochastic terrorism. In times like this, such a man can not only ascend to the nation’s highest office once, he has the potential to regain that office even after he’s been disgraced with two impeachments, engaged in a violent insurrection, lied more than a documented 30,000 times, and has been indicted four times and charged with 88 felony charges. Still today, his followers remain devoted to him, even after he was found guilty of raping and defaming E. Jean Carroll, as well as committing widespread tax and business fraud and facing fines of more than half a billion dollars. For Trump and his cult, rising political violence is assuredly a feature, not a bug.
Times like these make the weak man masquerading as the strong man look like a real answer for the aggrieved voters who are attracted to cruelty and brute force as a promised path to easy solutions. The increasingly poisonous hostility between parties only intensifies their dark desires.
I’ve quoted it before, but the prophetic insight and warning of George Washington bears repeating. In his farewell address from 1796, America’s first president worried about the dangers of factionalism and revenge-filled hostility between factions. “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” he wisely said. “And sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
I have also noted before the necessary insight of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on the topic of cruelty and kindness, but this too bears repeating. “When someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society,” he told newly minted college graduates in a commencement address. “They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their instinctual fears and so their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.”
The responsibility to defeat Donald Trump and the Trump Republicans could not be clearer. In another time, that may sound like a partisan urging. But this is about our commitment to sustaining America’s centuries-old democratic experiment.
Many of our fellow citizens look at Joe Biden and insist he lacks something they want. But his capacity for compassion and kindness, his commitment to democracy, and his record of competence and achievement should be more than enough for doubters to find a reason to support him.
The failure to achieve massive voter turnout can lead to a dark, fascistic future, led by a weak and desperate man who thinks he’s strong. That is a dangerous combination, which each of us has the power to help overcome.
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