Instead of “taking off like a rocket” after his announcement last month that he is running again for the presidency, Donald Trump instead, it appears to “blow up on the launch pad,” Guardian Political analyst David Smith said Friday in an implacable story.
While Trump’s smooth-talking angry-man schtick might have seemed fresh and new the first time he campaigned, the 2016 swagger has given way to somnolence in 2022,” said Smith, who also pointed to Trump’s slew of legal troubles, dismal GOP performance in the midterms and his own appalling “self-sabotage.”
Trump followed his shocking dinner last month at Mar-a-Lago with antisemitism Kanye West – who now goes by Ye – and his white supremacist and holocaust denier friend Nick Fuentes with a call to terminate the constitution so he could be anointed president.
Smith’s attack was just the latest in the press about Trump’s lackluster campaign launch, which many have seen as the most boring of the candidates in a long time.
Trump has barely left Mar-a-Lago, except to play golf at his own nearby course, since his campaign announcement, Washington Post reported. He is largely encased in a hermetically sealed echo chamber of sycophants, spiraling into another dimension and “increasingly isolated in his party,” the paper noted — and alienating voters.
Even conservatives are fed up.
“The former president presents our biggest risk of losing for 2024, and conservatives are tired of losing,” Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Iowa-based conservative group Family Leader, told the Post. “Even the former president’s announcement is met as if it never happened. There is no buzz in my network at all.”
After Trump was blasted for hosting Ye — who later told Alex Jones on his podcast that he “likes” Hitler and “loves” Nazis — Trump doubled down on Friday, saying that the complaint Jewish community that should be ashamed because he was disloyal to him, because he was such a friend to Israel.
“It couldn’t get any worse,” Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, told The Guardian about Trump’s new campaign. “And it’s not because Donald Trump makes mistakes. That’s because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.”
Trump was “something new and fresh and interesting back in 2016,” Lichtman said. But he has since “presided over three disastrous election cycles for Republicans in 2018, 2020 and 2022, and he’s the same old Donald Trump who only cares about himself, wrapped up in his own grievances and his own whining. It’s just playing no longer for the American people.”
Trump’s critical niece, Mary Trumpher uncle thinks is changing — he’s getting worse and traveling further “down the rabbit hole,” she told MSNBC host Alex Witt on Saturday. (See the video below).
“Everything Donald does is transactional,” said Mary Trump, who is a psychologist. “One of the things we have to realize about him is that he’s kind of a black hole of need. And when he doesn’t get what he wants from some people — I think in this case, the majority of Republicans in Congress has had enough and sees him in a way as election poison – he will go where he has to to get his solution, which is attention and sycophancy.”
It “doesn’t matter how extreme; [it’s] whatever works,” she continued. “This has been going on since 2015. The difference is he’s just going further and further down the rabbit hole because fewer and fewer people are willing to stand up for him publicly.”
Taylor Budowich, head of MAGA Inc. super PAC supporting Trump told the Washington Post that Trump will step on the campaign trail — soon.
“President Trump entered the race three weeks ago ready to win, and he’s going to do exactly that — no amount of wishful thinking from the media … is going to change that,” Budowich said.
Trump is “building one of the most ruthless and talented teams in American politics, and he is the only person in the country who is ready and able to reverse America’s decline,” Budowich said.
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