'Trump is indulging in his greatest act of self-sabotage yet': biographer

Writing that it is almost a psychological issue, one of Donald Trump biographers accused the former president of "self-sabotage" as he tries to ramp up his 2024 presidential hopes.

In a column for CNN, Michael D'Antonio claimed that the former president is actually damaging his chances of returning to the Oval Office with his most recent antics, with the biographer writing, "There Donald Trump goes again. Abandoning the path to possible victory just to prove a point."

At issue, D'Antonio writes, is the one-term president's claim in a Wednesday statement where he wrote: "If we don't solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 Republicans will not be voting in '22 or '24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do."

The biographer said that Trump never learned the lesson from the 2020 Georgia run-off that saw Republicans hand over two seats in the U.S. Senate because the ex-president ramped up fears of election fraud which, in turn, led to reports that he depressed GOP voter turnout.

"The Perdue/Loeffler debacles echoed Trump's destructive meddling in Alabama in 2017. There he campaigned hard for Roy Moore, even after he had been publicly accused of sexual misconduct, which he denied," D'Antonio wrote. "Other examples of Trump snatching defeat from the jaws of victory are easy to find. As president, he denied the severity of the Covid-19 threat and embraced a host of anti-scientific ideas about the virus and the pandemic. At the same time, he failed to adequately tout his Warp Speed project to accelerate vaccine development. These two blunders meant that instead of being seen as a warrior against a terrible threat he came across to many as a bumbling crank."

As D'Antonio notes, even prior to politics, Trump has long had a reputation for failure, including managing to bankrupt his own Atlantic City casinos, with the biographer writing, "Given that gambling halls set the odds to benefit the house, it's hard for operators to go under, but somehow Trump managed."

As for the former president's latest comments, D'Antonio claimed they indicate a predisposition for "self-sabotage."

"The times when Trump has acted as his own worst enemy seem to fit what mental health experts call 'self-sabotage.' This isn't something people do deliberately. Instead, it's an unconscious process that can be evidence of a fear of success," he explained. "

"A writer in Psychology Today connected Trump with self-sabotage as he struggled near the end of the 2020 campaign. "Trump may be the absolute best at one thing in particular: self-sabotage," wrote Lili Stillwaggon Swan, Ph.D., before adding, "Today, it's the GOP that has allowed Trump to take over. He's demanding that party leaders do the impossible by somehow proving voter fraud that doesn't exist. There's no way to explain this other than to suggest that Trump is indulging in his greatest act of self-sabotage yet."

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