This Will Go Down as the Week the Trump Meltdown Began

The political conventional wisdom is hard to define sometimes. Usually it’s one of those things that’s just there, like your body temperature. You feel it but don’t notice it. And then, bam, you feel hot, you get the chills, and that’s the moment you know you’re getting sick. Something has shifted, and suddenly you notice this thing you rarely think about.

That’s how this week felt with regard to the conventional wisdom. A week ago, Donald Trump was the clear favorite to win in November, and of course he may yet—the polls are close and will remain so. But also, a week ago, Trump had a lot of wind in his sails coming off his smashing Iowa win, and Joe Biden was a doddering old man with a mixed-at-best economic record.

There was no huge sea change this week. But there’s also no question that those scripts started to flip, in two important ways.

First and most important, Trump is now the one doddering his way toward dementia. He has been for a while, but the Nikki-Nancy moment, and Nikki Haley’s subsequent attack on Trump, finally forced the media to make Trump’s mental state into a running narrative. The column I wrote Monday about this did monster traffic, which I note not to boast but by way of observing that the readership means that a lot of people were obviously thinking the same thing.

On Morning Joe, cable’s most influential show in setting the conventional wisdom, they’ve been just merciless about Trump’s addled brain. The Biden campaign put together a very funny ad mocking Trump. And over the rest of the week, Le Grand Orange (apologies, Rusty!) did not disappoint. There was that nutso social media binge against E. Jean Carroll—37 posts in two hours, Wednesday night. Then there was his ridiculous testimony at the Carroll defamation trial, where he was on the stand for three minutes and managed to defy the judge’s instructions twice. Then there was his absurd whining Thursday as he left the courtroom, repeating three times, “This is not America.” No, asshole, this is actually the best version of America. A courtroom is the one place where your lies and slander don’t fly.

Trump’s brain is turning into Jell-O before our eyes. No, not just Jell-O, but one of those ’60s Jell-O molds your mother (or grandmother) made, with cottage cheese and fruit and chunks of canned tuna and olives and a few mystery ingredients for good measure. And it’s not like there’s any chance he’s going to be pulling himself together. The pressure is building, and fast. This month, two judges, Lewis Kaplan in the Carroll case and Arthur Engoron in the fraud case, will announce the size of the damage awards they want Trump and his businesses to pay in those cases. Carroll seeks $10 million. New York Attorney General Letitia James seeks $370 million in the fraud case.

Neither judge seems especially seduced by Trump’s alleged charisma. So let’s say Kaplan socks him with $15 million and Engoron with, oh, $450 million. Hardly implausible. Both are supposed to happen within a matter of days.

Then there’s the campaign trail. Trump is going to win the GOP nomination, sure, but Haley has stepped up her attacks—apparently realizing that now that it’s a two-person race, the only chance she stands is to finally go after her opponent, especially now that he’s calling her “Birdbrain” and mocking her fashion choices. “I know that’s what he does when he is threatened, and he should feel threatened, without a doubt,” she told a South Carolina crowd.

Trump will dispatch Haley in the February 24 primary in that state—and then, possibly, he’ll turn right around and face Jack Smith’s prosecutors in a Washington courtroom the next week. The trial date is March 4, although that’s up in the air, pending the resolution of a pretrial motion. So Trump’s going to be winning primaries—that is, inside the hall of mirrors that is the Republican Party faithful—while out in the real world he’s going to be losing in court, and losing what’s left of his mind. Now that Trump’s mental condition is fair game, he’s just going to deteriorate even more—a self-reinforcing downward spiral into the quicksand of his cankered soul.

The second change, even more important albeit less fun to talk about, has to do with the reality—and the perceptions—of the economy. I won’t throw a bunch of numbers at you, but: gas prices down, Dow setting a new record above 38,000, and a great (not good—great) GDP report this week. More important still were those recent numbers showing that consumer confidence is up more over the last two months than during any two-month period since 1991. Think about that. Thirty-three years. In 1991, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were being potty-trained (though not together!), and Patrick Mahomes wasn’t born.

All this is why Punchbowl News, a reliable reflector of conventional wisdom, led its Friday morning newsletter with “Dems get ready to run on the economy.” Think they would have done that even a week ago?

And by the way, what is Trump’s reaction to this? To say he wants the economy to crash. He wants Americans to lose jobs and health care and houses and small businesses. If that’s not fodder for a 30-second ad, or about a dozen of them, Democratic operatives are more asleep than usual.

This is even more important than Trump’s personal meltdown because most people still vote on the economy. They form their views and reach their conclusions three to six months out from the election, which is the next few months. If these two new narratives—Trump is demented, and the economy is strong—settle into conventional wisdom, the way we talk about this election may be very different indeed by Memorial Day.