Late Nights With Donald

An angry, lonely loser rageposts himself into trouble.

As you’ve likely heard by now, Grandpa Ranty, America’s least favorite living ex-President, spent until roughly 3:40am ET raving on his Dollar Store social media platform.

We managed to get to bed early last night, and slept through most of this, but at 6:00am we were howling with laughter over Trump’s tantrum. There may have even been dramatic readings.

While I was standing in the shower, I said to Renee, “It’s always been to our advantage he’s insane.” She replied, “It’s also to your advantage that you sleep” and I was struck by just how much Trump’s late-night, weird, lonely life shapes his behavior.

Due in court today, he was likely in the ghostly mausoleum of Trump Tower, which much like Trump himself, peaked in the late 1980s. He’s likely alone but for a few household staff, wandering in the vulgar cave of gimcrack 1980s design mistakes and tasteless bric-a-brac. He up because Fred Trump’s cruel voice is in his ear, telling him he’s dumb. A loser. A fake. A failure.

He’s up because is mind is Tarot deck of pathologies that never stop screaming at him, signs and portents of his need attention, validation, and adoration.

It’s a reminder that for all Trump is a vessel for evils of a more competent nature — Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner — he’s also broken, strange, and angry; a catalog of every sociopathy under the Sun. All these reminders are so pressing and sharp; the sheer neediness of his posts, the ugly void of his cruelty towards women, and the crudely fascist threats are a preview of the campaign to come, and the future he promises.

The central target of his ire — and bear with me here, but it’s almost as if Donald Trump hates women — was of course E. Jean Carroll, whose continued litigation with Trump has led to judicial proof of what was intuitively evident but unconfirmed for so long; he’s a sexual abuser and rapist.

When I wrote my first book, a part left on the research and editing floor dealt with stories of women “Laid, paid, and NDAed.” Some of the conversations and leads I had contained vague hints he was ugly to women in many ways, but the fear of Trump kept damn near everyone silent.

I never dove deeper into the research on this front because while his character was clear, at the time the stories felt somewhat repetitive. Girlfriend 11 was largely the same arc as Girlfriend 26, and so on. It didn’t speak to the party politics I was writing about. His character was already a grotesquely evident.

But that low character is now defined by a legal judgement, with last year’s defamation verdict against him. The next defamation verdict is pendant, and with the word vomit of calumny against E. Jean Carroll last night, I suspect another may be in the offing because Midnight Poster Donnie can’t stop himself from defaming her over and over. I hope the dopamine hit was worth it, Donald, but this is an expensive pleasure.

In the post-Me Too and post-Dobbs world, women are a towering political force on the horizon, and Donald Trump seems determined to piss them off one too many time.

In the mean time, we made this ad after the first verdict, and I plan on making a revised version a part of the 2024 case against him:

His attacks on Nikki Haley are getting uglier by the day, and her last-minute decision (I hear things from that camp that it was a pure audible on election night) to stay in the race has clearly triggered Donald Trump’s already fragile ego into a frenzy of hate-Truthing.

In one big splash of crazy early in the evening, Trump manages a superfecta of misogyny, conspiracy, fascism, and political extortion.

The misogyny and anger toward Haley is now par for the course. In the coming month — should Haley stay in the game — it will get louder and nastier, as will the overt efforts by the RNC and its hapless Chairghoul Ronna ROMNEY McDaniel. (Honestly, if you’ll change your name for Donald Trump, you’re a deeply broken person.) Haley’s team knows it’s a doomed race, but every hour she stays in is another opportunity for Donald Trump to hurt his general elections prospects.

The most consequential element of his late night rant was the promise to punish Haley’s donors.

That’s called a “threat” where I come from.

While the Ken Griffins and Ken Langones may initially laugh off Trump’s threat, their lobbyists and regulatory advisors won’t.

They’ll draw out the scenarios clearly; imagine a world where Trump is in office again and uses the SEC, the DOJ, the Congressional GOP, and the bully pulpit to attack them. Imagine the cost and harm when they can’t get meetings, can’t get tailored tax breaks, and can’t get regulatory preferment. (As a conservative actual believer in free markets I can imagine it, and I like it, but that’s a longer story for another day.)

If he threatens the major donors loudly enough — and he will — they’ll break. This is the longest-established pattern in Trump politics; everyone in the donor world breaks.

One rule I’ve long held to is that when Trump is winning he’s at his worst. When he feels like he’s ahead, he lets loose with even more pointed insanity.

Right now, he knows he’s the nominee, he knows the entire Republican Party is broken to his will, with the single exception of Haley. These late-night rant sessions are damaging his general election prospects, one post at a time.

May he have many more sleepless nights.