TRUMP WANTS TO PROJECT FAKE GREATNESS SO HE CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR A FAKE ELECTORAL VICTORY

As Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post note, presidents who are struggling in the polls as midterm elections approach generally recognize that some voters don't like them and adjust their campaign strategy accordingly.

... recent presidents ... when their popularity sagged, generally gave endangered members of their own party room to run away from them.

In 2006, [George W.] Bush largely confined his late campaigning to places where Republicans believed he could still help, while vulnerable GOP candidates advertised their independence from him and avoided appearances with him. Eight years later, Barack Obama watched endangered Democrats criticize his policies, skip his visits and keep him out of some of the states where they faced the toughest races.

President Joe Biden made that accommodation almost a running joke. During the 2022 midterms, as some vulnerable Democrats kept their distance from an unpopular White House, Biden frequently told candidates: “I’ll come campaign for you or against you — whichever will help the most.”

Not Donald Trump this year.

Next week, as primaries give way to a perilous general election campaign for vulnerable Republicans, Trump will headline two nights of a GOP political convention in Dallas. Over the next two months, his super PAC plans to run advertisements that feature his name and play up his political record. And although he will not appear on any ballot in the midterms, he has told voters they should behave as if he is.

His interpretation of his record is ... well, delusional. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” he said, at a recent Las Vegas rally. “But this is blowing it away.”

This isn't completely insane, says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian.

“What we’ve seen over the course of the past decade is, when Trump is on the ballot, you get better turnout if you’re a Republican,” Troy said.

But when polls are showing that more voters disapprove of your job performance than approve of it in 47 out of 50 states, efforts to turn out your own base run the risk of turning out the Democratic base in larger numbers.

Beyond inspiring base turnout, there's a second explanation for what Trump is doing: he's the most egomaniacal person who's ever lived, and he's massaging that ego. But I see a third explanation.

We know that Trump sees only two possible outcomes for the midterms. They're the same two outcomes anticipated by Charles Foster Kane's New York Inquirer during Kane's run for governor in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane:



The party of Trump might cheat its way to victory in the midterms if the Supreme Court upholds Trump's restrictions on mail voting. Trump might rig elections by seizing ballots or intimidating voters at the polls. Or he might be helped by Republican election officials who refuse to certify Democratic victories, or congressional Republicans who refuse to seat Democrats.

Or Democrats might trounce Republicans. In response to that outcome, Trump and other Republicans will assert that they were the victims of massive Democratic voter fraud (which they somehow can't prove).

One way or another, Trump anticipates a Republican victory -- or at least anticipates an outcome he'll describe as a Republican victory.

I don't know exactly how delusional Trump is. I don't know if he'll really believe that a blue-wave election is actually a Republican triumph, or if he'll merely believe that he can sell that fiction to his gullible superfans. But he expects to announce a triumph -- and he wants to be the one responsible. Even if the "victory" is a total illusion, he wants to say that he gets the credit for it, not the Republicans who are actually on the ballot.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that would occur only to a very diseased mind. But I'm convinced that that's how Trump's mind is working right now.

GRAMPA CARVILLE STILL FANTASIZES ABOUT DEMOCRATS ACHIEVING POLITICAL DOMINANCE WITHOUT MAKING ANY EFFORT WHATSOEVER

Let me take you back to February 2025, when James Carville offered some idiotic advice to Democrats on Dan Abrams's podcast and in a New York Times op-ed. Carville told Abrams:

What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing.... I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

He continued:

“It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks,” [Carville] said of opportunities for Democrats. “Just lay back.”

Abrams asked, “You literally think 30 days to six weeks, the Trump administration is effectively going to collapse in terms of public support?

Carville predicted Trump would find it impossible to pass any agenda items and that House Speaker Mike Johnson would be forced to reach across the aisle to ask House Democrats for help.

“We’re in the midst of a collapse,” Carville said. “It’s over.”

As I noted at the time, thirty days after this podcast appearance, Trump was at 47.5% approval and 49.6% disapproval in Nate Silver's polling average, and was at 47.9% approval and 48.8% disapproval in the Real Clear Polling average. His numbers didn't collapse on their own. It took active resistance on the part of Democrats (starting with Senator Chris Van Hollen's defense of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's right to due process, along with resistance by No Kings demonstrators, anti-ICE protesters, and anti-Trump lawyers) in combination with Trump's mismanagement of America to drive his poll numbers down. Just kicking back and doing nothing wasn't enough.

In the meantime, Trump was highly effective, getting his One Big Beautiful Bill through Congress, and imposing other horrors on America -- DOGE cuts, preposterous tariffs, the militarization of American cities, the dismantling of scientific research funding, and finally a ruinous war -- through executive action.

Nevertheless, Grampa Carville is back with a new "just chill and Trumpism will die on its own" fantasy:

James Carville is refusing to back away from his extraordinary prediction that President Donald Trump will quit the White House next year....

The veteran Democratic strategist revisited his prediction Thursday on his Politicon podcast after listeners asked what a President JD Vance might look like if Carville’s forecast actually came true.

Carville went further than merely standing by his earlier claim, predicting Vance “will be president next April” and describing what he believes would be a severely weakened Republican administration.

“... yeah, Trump’s two years are one thing, alright, he was a year ago everybody had to pay attention to him, everybody had to return his phone call,” Carville said.

He argued Trump’s political influence was already diminishing and predicted Republicans would suffer major electoral losses in the midterms, leaving Vance without control of Congress....

“And then the whole Republican Party is going to fall apart when they lose all these seats because they’re going to know that Trump doesn’t protect him.”

Carville concluded: “So JD Vance, in my opinion, will be president next April. He will be the most constrained, ineffective, babbling president in the history of the United States.”

This isn't new. In June, Carville said of Trump, "I genuinely think that he will resign next spring." He subsequently said, “I’m telling you, this guy, by Easter of 2027, is just gonna walk away from this job.”

I hope no one believes this. I hope no Democratic leader or key strategist believes it's going to be this easy to wrest power from Republicans.

First of all, resignation is the last thing we should expect from Trump. He fears prosecution, which becomes more likely if he's out of office. Moreover, there's nothing Trump fears more than appearing weak. I'm not sure his aides and family will acknowledge that he's no longer president even if he dies in office.

Why does Carville want to believe this? I think it's because Carville, like most Boomer Democratic insiders, suffers from 1980s PTSD. He thinks the three presidential trouncings in that decade prove that America hates Democrats, and his solution is for Democrats to "play possum" all the time, minimizing their differences with Republicans in the hope that enough of them will still be elected for the party to stay in the game. Carville really doesn't like it when Democrats who want to do something make demands, as becomes clear in the full version of the first quote above from that February 2025 podcast appearance:

What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. It doesn’t need Elizabeth Warren and somebody screaming to pacify some progressive advocacy groups in Washington, which, by the way, I wish these people were just useless. They’re actually worse than useless, that they’re detrimental. And they never, ever learn to shut up. And so then this is what I believe. I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

(Emphasis added.)

Also see this passage from that February 2025 op-ed:

... in the first Trump Administration ... Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics. We voiced outrage on social issue after social issue. We spun ourselves up in a tizzy over an investigation into Russia. We fought Mr. Trump at every corner, on every issue imaginable and muddied up our message in an unwinnable war. We were saved only by his lousy governing and a lot of effort on our side finding good candidates to run for the House and Senate in 2018. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.

As I wrote then:

No, the Democrats didn't just get lucky. The resistance worked! It fired voters up and flipped the House in 2018. It drove Donald Trump from office and won full congressional control in 2020. It kept Trump's poll ratings under water for the entirety of his first term. It pushed back on efforts to repeal Obamacare, separate immigrant families, and embrace the racist right at Charlottesville and elsewhere.

People like Carville believe -- or at least want to believe -- that power will drop in Democrats' laps if Democrats never draw attention to the fact that they're Democrats. Carville believes this because he thinks normal people hate Democrats, even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections.

And even if Carville's fantasy were to come true, it's absurd to argue that President J.D. Vance would be "the most constrained, ineffective ... president in the history of the United States." He'll still have the Supreme Court on his side. He'll have the veto pen. (Democrats can't possibly win enough seats to override presidential vetoes, and Republicans in Congress will never break ranks with a Republican president in significant numbers.) He'll have a massively funded anti-immigration machine still at his disposal.

And we still don't know whether we'll have fair elections in 2026 It's quite possible that the Supreme Court will end genuine democracy in America by greenlighting Trump's assault on mail voting. And even if this doesn't happen, Republicans are probably plotting to prevent the seating of enough Democratic midterm victors to maintain a Republican majority in the House, as Michael Luttig warns.

Which means Democrats can't just hang out on the porch in a rocking chair, as Grampa Carville's fantasies suggest. They'll have to fight like hell for every victory, and never stop fighting.

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALMOST CLOSE TO GETTING IT

A New York Times story about Jon Ossoff's Senate reelection campaign suggests that Ossoff's success in the polls is baffling and paradoxical:

In Georgia, Ossoff Courts Broad Appeal With an Anti-Trump Script

Senator Jon Ossoff, the youngest sitting senator and the only Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump won in 2024, hasn’t moderated his message in his critical race.

The story's author, Robert Jimison, clearly regards Ossoff's popularity as a head-scratcher:

Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.

He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.

But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.

Are you sure you want to do this, Jon? Jimison appears to be saying.

The approach risks alienating some members of the coalition whose backing he needs to win re-election in Georgia, including independents and conservative-leaning voters.

Or ... maybe Ossoff has unearthed a secret about the Georgia electorate known only to a few. Jimison tells us that Ossoff appears to be

taking advantage of ... Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings — a Fox News poll in June found him with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him....

Trump's favorability in that Fox poll is 42%. So he's at -14 in the state. And among the independents Jamison says Ossoff "needs to win re-election," the Fox poll says that Trump's favorable rating is a mere 26%. Trump's unfavorable rating among Georgia independents is a whopping 70%, including 51% who say their view of Trump is "strongly unfavorable."

So I have this crazy, wacky theory, Robert. I think being opposed to Donald Trump is centrist in Georgia. I think the median Georgian hates the tariffs, the high prices, the war, the corruption, the measles, the diarrhea lettuce, and the obsession with the ballroom. In other words, I don't think Ossoff's decision to campaign as a partisan Democrat is counterintuitive. I think Democratic ideas are what's normal, and Republicans are the out-of-step weirdos.

Jimison notes that Ossoff's opponent, Mike Rogers, is campaigning as a Republican partisan, and doesn't seem to regard that as weird or counterintuitive.

Mr. Collins, the 59-year-old son of former Representative Mac Collins of Georgia, has focused heavily on the issues that animate the Republican base — illegal immigration, transgender athletes, crime and grievances surrounding the 2020 election....

Mr. Collins is working to draw a stark contrast with Mr. Ossoff on issues including law enforcement and border security in a state that remains conservative.

Donald Trump is underwater by double digits, Ossoff has a solid lead in multiple polls, Georgia's other senator is also a Democrat, and a Democrat leads the governor's race, so how can Jimison call Georgia "a state that remains conservative"? It's clearly a middle-of-the-road state. (Jimison, who's Black, may be arguing that white Georgians are conservatives and the state's large Black population is at least culturally conservative. But that doesn't add up to a conservative state.)

Our entire political culture, including most Democrats and most putatively liberal media outlets such as The New York Times, believes that Republicans are normative and Democrats are outlier freaks suitable only for decadent big cities and college towns. Meanwhile, Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, and in order to maintain the fiction that Republicans are the normal ones, we grade GOP election performance on a curve, treating Trump's victory in 2024 as a 1932-size landslide even though he won the popular vote by a mere one and a half points, against a replacement candidate handicapped by sexism, racism, and a global impulse to toss out all incumbent parties.

And now America hates Donald Trump, and it might hate the entire GOP if Democrats attacked the party as ferociously as Republicans attack Democrats. In any case, Jon Ossoff knows that Republicanism isn't normative in 2026. Robert Jimison and the Times still seem incapable of grasping this reality.

NEW FRONTS IN REPUBLICAN GRIEVANCE POLITICS

Toluse Olorunnipa of The Atlantic reports on the GOP's latest grievance: naturalized citizens are allowed to hold office.

In recent months, an idea once confined to the fringes has gained mainstream traction across the country. Republican legislators in several states have introduced proposals that would restrict naturalized citizens and dual citizens from running for a range of elected positions, including sheriff and governor. In Congress, at least five Republicans have sponsored various proposals to bar naturalized or dual citizens from serving in roles including federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships, and in Congress itself. Florida lawmakers this year enacted a law requiring candidates for several state and federal offices to disclose whether they hold another citizenship in addition to being a citizen of the United States.

Olorunippa tells us, "The movement has been fueled in part by the rise of a new class of foreign-born politicians—most prominently New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani." He doesn't mention Ilhan Omar, a naturalized citizen whom Republicans despise, or, for that matter, Abdul El-Sayed and Rashida Tlaib (both of whom were actually born in Michigan, though most Republicans don't know that). If you pay attention to the right, you know it's hard to tell where the belief that even naturalized immigrants are a menace ends and the belief that Muslims are a menace begins.

The campaign to pass these laws is in its early stages:

When Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen first floated the idea of barring naturalized citizens from serving in elected office, he cited Mamdani’s mayoral run as one impetus. “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders,” he told AL.com last year....

State lawmakers in Alabama introduced legislation earlier this year that would require natural-born citizenship of those seeking to run for governor, legislator, sheriff, or a handful of other elected positions. Republican legislators introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. Although the proposals—which face significant constitutional questions—have not yet passed, the effort is nevertheless building momentum. When the law in Florida requiring disclosure for dual citizens takes effect next year, it will mark the first time such a proposal has become state law.

The mood on the right is punitive:

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that he would bar public schools in his state from hiring H-1B-visa holders. He described the first-of-its-kind proposal as a way to reduce “foreign influence” and “indoctrination in the classroom.”

Even if few of these proposals become law in the immediate future, this fear of contagion will become an effective way for the GOP to maintain party solidarity despite the current Republican president's astonishingly awful mismanagement the country. Just as Republicans relied on the Tea Party to rebrand the GOP after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, and just as the party used crusades against transgender youth and diversity initiatives to rebrand starting around the time of Trump's 2020 defeat, a message of "Vote GOP and Muslims won't gain political power" could sustain the party until the next charismatic leader comes along.

This isn't the only post-Trump assault on citizenship we should expect. Here's Breitbart's John Nolte reporting on a research paper claiming to find a"connection between trans beliefs and violence."

A just-released study from Rutgers University, the Network Contagion Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute has found something not at all surprising...

“These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.”

"Gender ideology" is a right-wing jargon term meaning "belief that trans people are human beings deserving respect and basic civil rights."

Nolte quotes the study:

... broader research on perceived victimhood, moralization, and political violence suggests that identities organized around grievance, perceived victimization, and injustice, when paired with authoritarian or punitive dispositions, can predict support for anti-democratic or violent political action... Taken together, these literatures suggest a common mechanism: ideological content that names an oppressor class, certifies ongoing victimization, and locates remedy in coercive institutional or social action which may supply authoritarian psychology with morally justified targets.

In other words, leftism + trans = all True Patriots being at risk of being murdered in their beds by baristas with blue hair.

It's widely believed on the right that trans people are disproportionately responsible for acts of left-wing violence. This is an attempt to demonstrate this premise using science, or at least pseudoscience. Nolte argues that trans people are dangerous, but it's not really their fault:

You take a group of people who are already mentally fragile, you tell them that whoever does not affirm their delusion is committing a genocide, and then turn them loose into a world that they cannot control.

This is not only a deliberate recipe cooked up by the left and their media allies to activate violent Manchurian Candidates who will always target the people the left and media hate (anyone to the right of Joseph Stalin), but it’s an act of cruelty against transsexuals.

He thinks he's being a nice guy here, while accusing cis lefties, or maybe Democrats, or terrorism via brainwashing. Most on the right just go straight to trans people are sick and twisted, so of course they kill people.

I think it's only a matter of time before some states restrict trans people's right to hold certain jobs, as an intermediate step before depriving them of the legal right to vote, or to be trans at all. And if they never get this far, they can at least brand the GOP as the party that wants to do this. If you can tap into rage this way, why would you even need a charismatic leader?

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you on Friday.

I DON'T THINK TRUMP KNOWS WHETHER HE INTENDS TO STAY IN THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HIS TERM ENDS

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

It remains possible that Trump and the GOP will lose a wave election 75 days from now, and he and his minions won’t have the necessary coherence and organizational discipline to seriously contest that, and he will decide to give up on his current plans to stay in office after 1/20/2029, and King Leer will crawl unburdened towards death. I admit this is possible: I think it’s unlikely.

In short, I think we’re in a disjunctive, paradigm-shifting political and cultural situation, and that Trump does not intend to leave office, or to recognize the results of elections he loses, and that instead he and his inner circle intend to overthrow the current political system with some sort of authoritarian “managed democracy,” that retains the trappings of the old system superficially, but replaces it with a functional one-party state. I don’t know, of course, whether they can manage to succeed in this ambition, but I do believe it is their actual plan, on the basis of their words and deeds, both since 1/20/2025, and most particularly since 1/6/2021....

I don't think we should be talking about "[Trump] and his inner circle" as if they're having the same thoughts about the future. I believe that J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and possibly Pete Hegseth and some other Trump insiders are expecting a normal election cycle in 2028, and their plan is to win the presidency, not to overthrow our constitutional system. Whether any of them intend to overthrow or undermine that system after winning is a different question, of course. But on the subject of 2028, I don't think they want Trump to lead the government for the rest of his life. They want to take over.

You'll argue that other insiders will be afraid of the consequences of elections, and will want the Trump administration to continue forever. I think they know that a Democratic victory probably won't lead to the "Nuremberg trials" so many ordinary liberals and progressives dream of -- Democrats are just too feckless -- and they also know that a Republican really could win an election in 2028 despite the extreme unpopularity of Trump. They assume that electing a Republican successor will ensure their safety from prosecution for at least four years, and permanently quash any momentum an accountability movement might have.

I believe the possible Trump successors might very well move us in the direction of "managed democracy," simply because they don't believe in genuine democracy as long as Democrats can sometimes win elections. They'll do it because they think Republicans should rule forever, not primarily to extend the rule of Trumpism specifically.

I don't believe Trump thinks in those structural terms. He cares only about himself and his family, and he cares about his family only to the extent that he sees the money his family makes as his money.

I believe this, but I also believe Trump might refuse to leave office on January 20, 2029. I don't think he has a plan yet. I think he's keeping his options open.

Trump isn't very good at planning. On some level, I think he knows this. Look at how he's approaching the 2026 midterms: he's trying to subvert them in advance, but in ways that probably won't be effective. Last week we learned that the Trump Justice Department plans to send 1,000 monitors to the polls in the fall. Do you know how many precincts there are in America?

The 2020 survey by the United States Election Assistance Commission found a total of 176,933 precincts or precinct equivalents in the United States, of which 175,441 were in the 50 states plus the District of Columbia and 1,492 were in overseas U.S. territories.

A thousand troops is a wholly inadequate number if you're really planning to subvert democracy. Also:

For Michigan’s primary this month, the Justice Department sent monitors to four Democratic-leaning cities — Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing and East Lansing. Democrats openly worried that the monitors would interfere with the primary, but state officials said they behaved professionally and did not cause problems.

This is half-assed authoritarianism.

Trump is also trying to prevent the Postal Service from processing mail ballots in states that won't provide the administration with lists of eligible voters, but the administration has lost 21 straight court battles in its effort to get those lists. A capable authoritarian would send armed troops or FBI agents into state capitals to seize that information at gunpoint. Trump hasn't done that.

I have a theory about how authoritarian Trump really is. I think he actually believes in the system, and believes he isn't operating in defiance of the system, his evidence being: Well, the system didn't stop me, so I guess I can do that thing I just did. He's used to the way the law works in the business world: you can cheat someone and get away with it if you can afford better lawyers than the people you're cheating, you can file endless appeals to delay the outcome in a case you're likely to lose, you can wheedle and finagle and wear the system down. Sometimes you lose, but you can fight to the bitter end, blow deadlines when you're required to comply with a court order, and then, finally, comply after you've been given a warning.

When I say that Trump is the worst president we've ever had but not the worst president we will ever have, this is what I mean. In his own way, Trump respects the system. A future authoritarian won't -- J.D. Vance, for instance. See this 2025 Politico story by Ian Ward:

In several instances dating back to the start of his Senate campaign in 2022, the vice president has explicitly said that a second-term Trump should defy the courts — even the U.S. Supreme Court — if they stand in the way of him exercising executive authority in ways he deems fit.

Vance’s most comprehensive statement of this radical position came in an interview I conducted with him in January 2023 for a profile in POLITICO Magazine. During the interview, I referred to comments that he had made on a conservative podcast in 2021 suggesting that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

I asked Vance if this was still his view.

“Yup,” he responded.

I think Vance, if he were in Trump's position, would declare a massive election-fraud emergency and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- declare that any elections conducted in November will be in defiance of the law, and their outcomes won't be recognized. The courts would declare that he isn't allowed to do this and he'd defy those courts, perhaps even ordering some lower courts disbanded or defunded. Trump won't do that.

What I think he will do is dispute Democratic wins after the fact, citing nonexistent voter fraud, slow ballot counts, and the presence of a trivial number of people on voter rolls who are ineligible as evidence that the midterms were rigged. I think Trumpists in the states will try to help him do this by not certifying elections, and Republicans in Congress will challenge key Democratic wins. I think courts will reject all of this. It will be a mess, and will be horrible for democracy -- once again, the majority of Republican voters will believe they've been cheated rather than outovted.

Even if there's another January 6 -- or multiple January 6 incidents in the states -- Trump will see himself as having operated within the law. In a way, you can't blame him. He'll be able to claim he was acting as a president rather than as a Republican, so, according to the Supreme Court, he won't be subject to criminal prosecution. It won't be possible to get a two-thirds vote to convict him after an impeachment, if there is one. So, he'll think, it was all legal.

That's more or less how I think he'll approach 2028. Trump likes to troll us with "Trump 2028" merchandise, but he also seems to recognize that he can't legally run again -- "the law’s very strong on that," he has said.

I think we'll have a relatively normal 2028 election. I think Trump, fearing consequences after he leaves office but not being a very good planner, will try to tip the scales in the GOP's favor, more or less the way he's doing it now. I doubt that it will be enough to rig the election.

If the Republican nominee wins, Trump will quietly leave office -- any Republican who could win the nomination will be sufficiently pro-Trump to shield him from consequences. But if the Democrat wins, then Trump might decide that his only recourse is to declare fraud and barricade himself in the White House.

That's how I imagine it will go: Trump won't decide on open defiance until a winner is declared, and then he'll create a constitutional crisis only if he thinks he needs to. But who knows?

NATALIE HARP IS A SYMPTOM, NOT THE PROBLEM

Jamelle Bouie thinks the real Natalie Harp scandal isn't the fact that she's a conventionally attractive young blonde who appears to be an aging, doddering president's most trusted aide -- it's the information diet she feeds him.

Bouie quotes a New York Times story by Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful.

Bouie writes:

... the reason [the Harp story] matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear....

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

But Trump has always rejected information that contradicted his upbeat viewpoint. He's always wallowed in happy talk. If Harp weren't the one telling him what he wants to hear, it would be someone else.

Remember 2019, when he fired pollsters because they told him he was on his way to losing swing states, and thus the 2020 election, to Joe Biden? That was years before Harp became a Trump aide. Trump did go on to lose that election. However, he subsequently leveraged that election loss to create a stolen election myth that is accepted as truthful, or at least possibly true, by an overwhelming majority of Republican voters. This "lost cause" myth probably won him the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and possibly the election.

No matter what happens, Trump believes that things will work out (at least for him). In a New York Times interview in May, Tucker Carlson recalled a conversation he'd had with Trump about the president's decision to go to war with Iran:

... he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is.

In a June Truth Social message about the Iran war's critics, Trump wrote:

But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively “chirping,” at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!

This isn't happening because of the influence of one sinister personal assistant. This is who Trump is. He's a lifelong believer in the Power of Positive Thinking.

And to some extent it's understandable. It all has worked out for Trump, more or less. The reason is that he's operated in arenas where people like him get multiple additional opportunities when they screw up.

Our plutocracy, particularly in the post-Reagan era, allows well-off people who fail to keep going until they're not failures anymore. Even when you're a billion dollars in debt, someone will lend you money or provide you with opportunities to recoup. The system is rigged in favor of people who've attained a certain level of wealth -- it's nearly impossible for them to completely fall through the cracks, the way an ordinary person with $20,000 in medical debt might. It's also nearly impossible to beat the rich in a court of law, no matter how illegal or lawsuit-worthy their actions are.

Now Trump operates in another field where the game is rigged for people like him: Republican politics. If you're a Republican with enough voter appeal to win elections and you're a congenital liar, our political culture will keep you afloat even as you continue to lie. Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media will back up your falsehoods -- about election fraud, about the glories of your failed economic policies and failed war, about how evil your enemies are -- and the rest of the media and the opposition party, cowed by decades of Republican ref-working, will never fully challenge you. A supine GOP Congress and a Supreme Court rigged for the Republican Party will let you get away with things no other president was ever allowed to do.

At long last, Trump may have come up against troubles he can't outrun: a dug-in Iranian regime, a bond market that's tired of his economic nonsense, restive voters in a heretofore solidly red heartland.

But until now, Trump's delusional positivism has made a horrible kind of sense. Things always did work out for him. Maybe only now, at age 80, is his luck running out.