As the polling keeps cratering for Republicans, red districts tilting to purple, purple states turning blue, and blue states turning to midnight blue, some pundits have been saying that Donald Trump doesn't actually care about the midterms.
Jonathan Swan was on Deadline White House with Nicolle Wallace yesterday. He talked about how the book he wrote with his fellow New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman makes this case. When Trump isn't on the ballot, he essentially has no interest. There’s that and, as Swan said, Republicans telling him that when his name isn't on the ticket, they lose.
That may explain why he's made it clear he wants to make the midterms relentlessly about himself. There is no one more selfish on the planet than Trump, and when a selfish person doesn’t get their way, we all know what happens next.
What happens next is something I think the pundit might be missing, and that is the psychological toll of a cratering GOP and how Trump’s help is backfiring. Obviously, because he’s Donald Trump, he’s not being told the real truth about what’s happening, so when he sees the opposite on cable news or reads about it, he thinks it’s all lies.
However, even Trump can’t be that stupid or obtuse, so deep down, seeing that the impending disaster is due to the fact that America is done with him, he lashes out.
On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, "effective immediately," accusing them of "constant 'reporting' FAKE NEWS." "Media Outlets shouldn't be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they're covering the President of the United States," he wrote, warning that more outlets could be added to the list.
Think about what has to be happening in his lunatic mind for that sentence to make sense to him. Trump is watching these networks, reading Politico, and seeing coverage of these polls, and the historically atrocious numbers that are genuinely disastrous for his party, and concluding it must be fake. Not just disparaging. Fake, one of Trump’s trifecta of favorite words that include tariffs and groceries.
His lashing out can only be about the polls and nothing else, because if you’re addicted to cable news and political sites like I am, you know that is the only thing that everyone is talking about right now. That and Trump’s obsession with the Kennedy Center.
So his media ban is not the reaction of someone who's checked out. That's the reaction of someone who is watching the walls close in — and can't process what he's seeing.
Trump surrounds himself with sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear, and when they do have to deliver bad news, they deliver it in the simplest, most digestible terms possible.
We saw this literally illustrated this week when an AP photographer caught Trump on Air Force One studying a poster board about demolishing part of the Kennedy Center. His aides give him happy picture books and not detailed briefing books.
It's not hard to imagine his own people doing the same thing with polling data: rejiggering it, dumbing it down, telling him it's not so bad. And probably, “Sir, they're teeny weeny bit weak because you’re not on the ballot.”
And then he turns on CNN or MS NOW, or opens Politico, and sees the opposite. Real numbers. Real trend lines. And because they contradict what he's been told, he decides they must be lying.
And then he goes crazy!
I've come to firmly believe Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline, some real deterioration in how he processes information that contradicts his preferred version of reality. And banning news organizations that report accurately on how badly his party is polling is a trigger.
So, what happens when a man who cannot tolerate being told the truth stops being able to distinguish "teeny tiny bad" from "false"?
People ask me a lot if Trump will get worse as his term progresses. They can’t imagine the answer could be yes, but my answer is always yes. Always.
When you have a man convinced he's surrounded by liars, a rabid narcissist, an unstable idiot, and when you combine all that with authoritarian instincts and a shrinking grip on reality, he will do whatever it takes to suppress the criticism he can't process.
Thus, silencing the press should not be a surprise, made even more so because that’s one of the first moves in an authoritarian society.
We're already watching at the Pentagon, which is exactly why soldiers have had to leak photos of damage from strikes in the Middle East rather than trust it would ever be reported through official channels, because the media is being blocked. It's unable to report bad news.
None of this is normal, and none of it is really about CNN or MS NOW or Politico. Seriously, it’s not. It's about a psychotic madman who cannot metabolize the fact that his party may be about to get wiped out in November, all because no one likes him. Not even a teeny-weeny bit.
I think it’s time for Jack Nicholson to visit the White House and tell Trump, "You can't handle the truth!" Well, I wish it was that easy, or if that would make Trump come to his senses, but he’s too far gone for that.
I've stopped trying to predict exactly what Trump will do next. But I'm certain of one thing: when a deranged and demented maniac starts to come apart, we haven't seen anything yet.