President Donald Trump's biographer Michael D'Antonio noted Monday night that the failure on the trade deal was inevitable if not predictable given the long history of bad deals.
"I think he’s desperate," D'Antonio told CNN's Don Lemon Monday. "This is a man who’s failing on many fronts. He’s got the economy going well for him but he steps on his message every time he gets positive news. So he has to go back to talking about Russia. He’s, I think, embraced Vladimir Putin as his mentor. I think we’re now in this sort of slow motion, soft-push towards authoritarian rule and he wants to solidify it so he gets reelected. I think he’s terrified of what could happen to him legally were he not reelected. This opens him up to prosecution. He’s desperate to protect his son Donald Jr. This is all terrible."
Lemon noted that Trump appeared to have a meltdown over the weekend with 64 tweets, some of which were retweets of himself.
"He’s agitated," the biographer explained. "He’s handling this the way he handled his business in the 1990s when he lost a billion dollars. Look at the way he’s managed things with China. Gee, who would have guessed that the stock market would go down 600 points on a day when the trade war gets ratcheted up? Everybody knows this stuff. So it’s not the — it’s incompetence as well. He’s way out of his depth."
Political commentator Catherine Rampell agreed, noting that Trump believes he's doing some kind of "mafia-style shakedown" with China when he's actually hurting Americans.
"It's like, 'Stop or I'll shoot myself in the foot,'" she said.
Watch the panel below:
