The Trump Tower Meltdown

Time for managed care for Grandpa Donald.

I know you’re asking the same question I am: “Sweet Mary, mother of God, what the hell did we just watch?” For the good of the order, I watched every second of Donald Trump’s train wreck of a speech today, marveling at how astoundingly, truly, terribly horrible it was in every rhetorical, legal, and political dimension.

Greg Sargent made a phenomenal point in The New Republic today about how this verdict shattered Trump’s aura of invincibility.

He’s right, and Trump’s speech today did more damage than anyone could have expected precisely because Trump felt the need to shore up his damaged ego with a bizarre, discursive speech that will go down in the annals of American rhetoric as a true, zero-of-five-stars flop. It was like Francis Mallman at a PETA convention. It was like Ron DeSantis at Wigstock. It was like Steve Bannon at the annual meeting of the American Society of Dermatology.

His head lemur was askew and frothed into some previously unknown configuration, his body language was low-energy, and he seemed to have shrunken two sizes. His makeup was greasy and more cloyingly obvious than usual.

He looked deeply, profoundly unwell, like a man who wakes up in a flophouse room coved in blood with the body of a dead hooker, a live monkey, and no memory of the night before.

He was a broken, defeated man behind that rickety podium today. Utterly bereft of his old swagger, his energy level was as tired and worn out as the lobby of the decaying office and condo tower of which he was once so proud.

Bad hair day.

I mean, this was just painful as hell. He rambled, he mumbled, he plunged into box canyons of anecdotes and imaginary memories. He busted through the still-in-effect gag order issued during the trial.

He compounded his legal problems further, for nothing. His performance wasn’t strong or commanding or forceful — all adjectives the MAGA base adores and image apply to this moral pygmy.

Rather, it felt more sad and desperate, like a spelunker trying to navigate a dark and dangerous cave. Trump was alone in the echoing lobby of his decaying Tower, even in the crowd of media cameras. No family member stood on stage with them. No elected Republican in matching blue suit and red tie flanked him.

His biggest mistake was his attempt to keep litigating the case in which he was found guilty of 34 felonies. He’s making his sentencing even more problematic, and even causing complexity for his appeal process.

It was a massive mistake, and I assure you that Donald Trump insisted on it.

The man who shook American politics to its roots in 2015 in the same lobby today looks smaller, weaker, more exhausted and more defensive than most Americans have seen before. His defenses were the kind of rote, tiresome alternate facts that won’t work at the appeals level, and won’t work for the electorate.

Even his most fervent allies will find there’s not enough mayonnaise in the universe to make chicken salad out of today’s chickenshit.

The Biden campaign’s response was spot-on target:

“America just witnessed a confused, desperate, and defeated Donald Trump ramble about his own personal grievances and lie about the American justice system, leaving anyone watching with one obvious conclusion: This man cannot be president of the U.S.”

Amen.