Trump’s 19th Nervous Breakdown

I regret to inform you that our friend David French is trending on Twitter again.

His latest affront to American populists is an eight-sentence account of why he’s supporting Kamala Harris this year despite his disappointment that she didn’t choose a more centrist running mate. “If conservatism is going to have a viable future, then Trump has to lose,” he writes at one point, justifying his decision. “He’s draining the entire right of any meaningful ideology or ethos.”

That’s a seductive argument, one we’ll come back to later.

I think the case for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can be summed up in a line. When one candidate on the ballot has tried to stage a coup and the other hasn’t, you choose the latter. Period.

But if that’s not enough to persuade you, there’s a second reason that David didn’t mention. After eight exhausting years, it would be wonderful not to have to worry day-to-day about the president’s mental health.

The “mood beat” is how reporter Mark Leibovich defined the practice among political journalists during Trump’s first term of analyzing events through the president’s state of mind. They had no choice. When the country is led by a figure as emotionally unstable and monarchical by temperament as Trump, how he’s feeling on a given day might mean more for the course of American policy than the considered advice of his deputies.

Electing Joe Biden was supposed to mean the end of the “mood beat,” but Biden’s own precarious cognitive stability forced voters to once again pay more attention to the daily workings of the president’s brain than they’d prefer. As we sit here in 2024, the last time Americans didn’t need to worry whether the commander in chief might suffer a breakdown of one sort or another was the last year of Barack Obama’s second term.

For all her faults, there’s no reason to believe Kamala Harris would have a breakdown in office. Judging from his behavior over the last month, however, her opponent looks to be having one right now.

Cope and seethe.

“This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown,” a former Trump appointee turned Republican strategist told Politico of his old boss’ maneuverings of late.

Anyone who recently escaped being murdered by millimeters is entitled to more emotional dysregulation than usual, but it’s not the attempt on his life that appears to have sent Trump spiraling. He seemed like his old self—frankly, too much like his old self—during his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, a few days after he was shot.

No, it was Biden’s departure from the race days later and the shocking euphoria with which Harris was greeted that discombobulated Trump. Not only has she erased his longstanding lead (and then some) in national polling, the excitement around her so far exceeds anything seen at one of Trump’s rallies this year. She’s even begun to taunt him about drawing bigger crowds.

Both experiences are new to him despite the fact that this is Trump’s third run for president. Never before had he reliably led his Democratic opponent in surveys, and never before had he suffered an enthusiasm gap with the other side.

Oh, and never before has the outcome of an election determined whether he might go to prison. Three weeks ago, his scheme to win reelection and place himself above the law was working to perfection, better than he could have dreamed. Three weeks later, he’s watching the polls and wondering how many times he’ll be facing a jury next year.

That would be head-spinning and unsettling even for a normal person. For someone who’s unstable even on his best day, his difficulty coping is destined to play out in ill-considered or even embarrassing ways. Trump is flailing strategically right now because he’s seething at seeing the race slip through his fingers and lacks the self-control to channel his anger more productively.

Take his new nickname for Harris. Trump has always been cunning in his juvenile habit of demeaning opponents with memorable taunts: “Low Energy” Jeb Bush and “Little Marco” Rubio still carry those monikers around eight years later. Lately, though, he’s taken to referring to his opponent as “Kamabla,” a name so inscrutable that even his own aides can’t (or won’t) explain it.

Maybe it’s an awkward combination of her name with “Obama.” Or, being a poor speller, maybe Trump means to imply that she’s bland and misspelled “blah.” But I tend to think that because he’s old and his brain doesn’t work as well anymore, he’s sating his anxiety about her by reverting to the sort of nonsensical mockery a school-aged bully would use to assert his dominance over a classmate. Calling Ron DeSantis “DeSanctimonious” is of a piece with it. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t really “mean” anything. It’s just Trump, feeling threatened, throwing a tantrum like the child he is.

There have been a lot of tantrums lately.

His race-baiting diversion last week had the feel of one despite the fact that there may be some strategic logic to it. He could and should spend the campaign attacking Harris for her dubious left-wing policy record, as there’s no shortage of material to work with. Instead, in his panic about his declining electoral chances, he indulged his demagogic instincts by immersing himself in the question of “black or Indian?” 

Challenging Harris to a debate on Fox News before a live arena crowd also smelled like panic, blatantly enough that the Drudge Report mocked Trump for it: “Rattled Trump Only Wants Safe Fox Debate,” the site blared in screaming red font. Harris adviser David Plouffe flagged the fear factor as well, saying of Trump’s proposal that he “seems only comfortable in a cocoon, asking his happy place Fox to host a Trump rally and call it a debate.” (He’s not the only candidate in a cocoon right now, it should be noted.) A child who feels insecure will reach for a security blanket. Same here.

Things didn’t get genuinely weird until Tuesday night, though, when Trump uncorked this doozy on Truth Social:

What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!

There’s zero chance of that happening, as everyone in the universe except him understands. Harris is officially the Democratic nominee; her surge in the polls and blockbuster fundraising are such that no one outside the immediate Biden family would prefer to have Joe back at the top of the ticket. The very idea of it is so stupid that we’re again left grasping for psychological explanations in lieu of strategic ones. Perhaps Trump was simply projecting onto Biden what he would do in Biden’s position. But, more likely, he’s so grieved to have lost the president as an opponent that he can’t help fantasizing about the race as it stood three weeks ago.

This is what it means to be on the “mood beat,” where nothing makes sense without entering the hall of mirrors in Trump’s mind. Leaping to celebrate Monday’s stock-market downturn as a “KAMALA CRASH!!!” was idiotic given the likelihood that stocks would quickly rebound, discrediting his financial acumen. But as a psychological matter, it makes sense that a narcissist who believes all positive developments are somehow owed to him would rush to declare that all negative ones are somehow owed to his enemies.

This is the sort of analysis we have to look forward to, day by day and hour by hour, for four years if he’s reelected.

The scapegoats cometh.

Cringy expressions of anxiety over his declining electoral fortunes are one half of Trump’s “breakdown.” The other half is related: He and his diehards have begun scapegoating Republicans ahead of a potential defeat.

On Saturday night, Trump held a rally in Georgia, a state that was trending solid red this year when Biden was leading the ballot and is now within a point since Harris replaced him. If she ends up winning it, there’ll be no mystery as to why. By boosting enthusiasm among young and black voters, and with help from Stacey Abrams’ formidable turnout operation, Harris could plausibly duplicate Biden’s narrow victory in 2020.

Trump is worried about it, and he should be. And so, with no time to waste, he’s begun a soft launch of Stop the Steal 2.0: At his rally, he told the crowd that he believed Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—Republicans both—“want us to lose.”

“He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor,” he said of Kemp, who crushed Trump’s handpicked challenger in the 2022 gubernatorial primary. “The state has gone to hell” on the governor’s watch, he added. Georgians, for their part, don’t seem to agree, having sent Kemp to an easy 7-point reelection win over Abrams two years ago in a cycle that was bad for Republicans across most of the national map.

Then, for good measure, Trump attacked Kemp on Truth Social, taking care to mention that Kemp’s wife has said she won’t vote for him this fall and doubtless knowing what that will mean for the Kemp household. (Because he hopes to lead the Republican personality cult someday, the governor responded pitifully by emphasizing his commitment to defeating Kamala Harris.)

As a matter of strategy, none of this makes sense. Trump needs every bit of help he can get from Kemp’s organization to get Georgia Republicans to the polls. And the governor has enough admirers on the right, locally and elsewhere, that belittling him will alienate more of those voters than it will impress. One of my own Trump-supporting relatives, an avid Fox News watcher, told me he turned off the network’s coverage of the Georgia rally because he was “annoyed” at Trump for attacking Kemp.

“I’m sitting here scratching my head,” Kemp’s former campaign manager told Politico of Trump’s outburst. “If we want to actually unite, ask for the support of the guy who beat your endorsed primary opponent by 52 points and handily defeated Stacey Abrams.” Right, that would be the logical thing to do—if you’re trying to win.

But Trump is increasingly scared that he’s going to lose, and that’s led to a shift in priorities. Instead of maximizing his chances of victory by making nice with Kemp, he’s maximizing his chances of avoiding blame for another defeat by setting Kemp up as the fall guy in another “rigged election” conspiracy. If Georgia turns blue again this year, Republicans will be primed to scapegoat the governor—who “wants us to lose”—instead of blaming Trump himself.

Anxiety and narcissism, not logic, have dictated his strategic choices. Again, you can’t understand why the man does what he does unless you’re following the “mood beat.”

Anxiety probably also explains his odd remark last week that vice presidential candidates historically have no impact on the outcome of elections. He’s not wrong, but that’s a strange thing for a candidate to say so soon after anointing young J.D. Vance as his running mate and heir apparent. It stinks of buyer’s remorse and annoyance at the bad press Vance’s mutterings about “childless cat ladies” have brought the campaign. I’ll be surprised if Harris shrugs off Tim Walz’s nomination similarly at any point by insisting that VPs don’t matter.

Trump’s comment is a hint that Vance too might eventually be designated as a scapegoat for their defeat, especially if the ticket falls short in the Midwest. Insofar as the “rigged election” spin is insufficient to explain the campaign’s underperformance, Trump will offer Vance as a sacrifice to the disappointed MAGA hordes rather than accept blame himself.

Look closely online and you’ll find Trump loyalists with a media presence also growing testy as his long lead in the polls collapses. Last week, Kyle Rittenhouse, a MAGA celebrity since he was acquitted of homicide charges after killing two people during the 2020 Kenosha riots, declared that he couldn’t vote for Trump given his misgivings about some of the candidate’s positions on guns. Rittenhouse was attacked with so much vitriol that within 12 hours he had publicly recanted and professed his support for Trump anew in a sort of right-wing version of a “struggle session.”

No one cares who Kyle Rittenhouse is or isn’t voting for, and no one should. But watching a right-wing folk hero abandon the cult leader at a moment when the election seemed to be slipping away obviously touched a nerve among the faithful. When you’re having a breakdown about the polls and you can’t safely blame Trump or swing voters for it, you’re stuck demagoguing C-list right-wing “personalities” for disloyalty instead.

The search for scapegoats has even reached Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s top advisers.

Along with Susie Wiles, LaCivita has professionalized Trump’s operation and imposed enough discipline on the candidate to give him, at least on paper, his best chance in three tries of winning the presidency. He didn’t start out as a MAGA guy, but he’s one of the more effective operatives who’s ever worked for Trump.

Everything was hunky dory between him and Trump’s fans—until the polling began to go south. Last month, Democrats began raising alarm about Project 2025, the think-tank initiative to build a nationalist policy and personnel program for Trump’s second term. Those attacks didn’t sting so long as Joe Biden was treading water at the top of the ticket, but once Harris took over and closed the gap, LaCivita and Wiles determined that Project 2025 was a liability the campaign couldn’t afford.

News came last week that the head of the program was suddenly stepping down. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed,” LaCivita and Wiles said in a statement. 

MAGA “influencers” went ballistic, furious that the best laid plans of nationalist chuds would be disclaimed so lightly by the campaign. Fingers pointed at LaCivita, now under suspicion because his career in Republican politics began during the ancien regime, before the revolution of 2016. (LaCivita pointed a finger back—literally.) Sources told CNN this weekend that Trump’s allies want “a campaign shake-up, citing in part the need for more original 2016 Trump loyalists to be involved.”

Someone needs to be the focal point for populists’ nervous breakdown as Harris surges and it sure as shinola isn’t going to be Donald Trump. Chris LaCivita will join Kemp, Vance, and a hundred others as scapegoats in November if the election turns out badly. Anything to spare populists from having to reckon honestly with the reality that Americans don’t like Trump or his brand of politics, that his electoral strength in 2016 and 2020 was mostly a function of facing weak Democratic opponents, and that the right would fare better in elections if it went in a different direction.

“Mood,” not logic or strategy, will determine how they process defeat. How do you think we got here in the first place?

Learning the wrong lessons.

All of this explains why I’m less optimistic than David French that defeating Trump will “pry the conservative movement away from a deranged man who will sacrifice any person or any principle for the sake of power.”

Defeating him is a necessary condition for that to happen, I agree. But unfortunately not sufficient.

Time, not defeat, will pry the right away from Trump. He’ll be 80 in less than two years; even if he wants to run again in 2028, circumstances may conspire to make even cultists leery of the prospect. America is probably done with him as a candidate, at long last, after November.

The trick is prying the right away from Trumpism. There’s nothing in evidence to suggest that losing this election will cause them to doubt its political appeal. (Or, contra what I said earlier, that coup plotters will be punished mercilessly by voters.) They’ll probably react the way radicalized partisans usually do, by conceding that the messenger was flawed but insisting that the message itself is pristine and inerrant.

Trump had too much baggage, they might allow. But postliberalism? Hardly. We’re one DeSantis or Tucker Carlson away from making all of our authoritarian dreams come true.

Populists won’t learn their lesson from losing because the problem isn’t the supply of Trump, it’s the demand for him. Civic-minded people should unite to defeat him without being naive about whether defeat might inspire the right to reform in the near term, just as we shouldn’t be naive about how much worse the collective nervous breakdown that’s playing out right now might get if Harris extends her lead.

The rot is too deep for hope. At least for now.