'A diminished figure': Columnist says Trump is weakened by loyalists flipping

All of the erstwhile allies of former President Donald Trump cutting deals with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in the Georgia election racketeering case is a sign of the former president's power shrinking from what it once was, wrote Moira Donegan for The Guardian on Friday.

This comes after attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis, who all played roles in the scheme to overturn the 2020 election, pleaded guilty — sometimes throwing other members of Trump's inner circle under the bus in the process.

"The dominoes began to fall," wrote Donegan. "Willis’s generous terms to the cooperating witnesses – along with the growing number of testimonies that are now lined up on the prosecution’s side – seem to have incentivized other co-defendants in the Georgia case to flip."

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

"How does Trump feel, watching all of these former loyalists agree to testify against him?" wrote Donegan. "Trump stands now a diminished figure, still ominous and still very much capable of winning a presidential election, but increasingly isolated. On the one hand, his various criminal and civil cases are distracting him from the campaign trail, and he seems doomed to lose many of them; on the other hand, his grip on the Republican presidential nomination is so firm that his challengers increasingly look silly for running against him, and he seems to have retained at least some degree of kingmaking power in the House, where this week he was able to instantly sabotage the short-lived speakership candidacy of the Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer."

All of this, she continued, added up to a moment at Trump's civil fraud trial, in which, when a reporter asked the former president about Ellis' guilty plea, he responded, “Don’t know anything, we’re totally innocent of everything.”

"Increasingly, it’s hard to tell who is 'we' is," Donegan concluded.