If we had been living in normal times, Donald Trump would have been relentlessly heckled off the national stage while he was still riding down that escalator five years ago. Instead, he managed to lie and finagle his way into the White House, where he remains the most dangerous, incompetent American president in history.
The thing about Trump’s janky, out-of-his-depth presidency is that a significant number of his biggest derps have negatively impacted Trump himself, leading me to observe (once again!) that Trump always makes things worse for Trump. His deadly laziness in responding to coronavirus, his horrendously dictator-friendly foreign policy, his blindingly obvious racism and the myriad other examples of his ineptitude aside, he constantly paints himself into political corners.
The very fact that Trump routinely panders to the convulsive whimsy of his cult of Red Hat disciples, capping his appeal at around 43 percent of American voters, proves he’s almost deliberately undermining himself, while simultaneously believing he can do no wrong. He thinks he’s winning, despite enraging 55 percent of us. It doesn’t make any sense until we realize that, yeah, Trump always makes things worse for himself.
This past weekend’s fiasco in Tulsa was a huge example of this self-sabotaging phenomenon.
It kind of makes sense, given what we know, that Trump would promote his former T-shirt salesman, Brad Parscale, to the role of campaign manager in charge of a $1 billion disinformation “Death Star” in Rosslyn, Virginia, among other things. It also kind of makes sense that his former T-shirt salesman would be partly responsible for the most hilariously bungled Trump rally ever. It’s worth noting, by the way, that this wasn’t just any random Trump rally — it was his official campaign kickoff and his first public rally since March 2, prior to the national shutdown. So given the stakes: Heckuva job, Brad!