Former George W. Bush speechwriter Tim Miller says the Trump train is running off the rails as Trump faced arguably his worst week in his second term.
“We think the wheels are coming off of the Trump train right now,” said Miller, who spoke with MSNBC anchor Nicole Wallace and used U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan’s appearance in court as a springboard to a greater collapse.
“The incompetence almost papers over ... the perniciousness of this,” said Miller, adding the conclusion hit him as he watched Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff take a selfie with U.S. AG Pam Bondi at a state dinner for Saudi Arabia leader Mohammed bin Salman.
“I think that there's something to the fact that we all kind of know that this is a preposterous case and that Jim Comey's not a real criminal and that they're doing this for show. … [T]his is the government of the United States. That's the attorney general in that selfie with a tech CEO who is ordering an investigation against a political foe that's purely political. It's based on nothing," Miller said.
“It's just based on pure politics because their boss told her to do so, like it's a banana republic,” Miller added. “And she assigned a Florida insurance lawyer to do it because none of the professionals would actually do it. And then that lawyer botches it so badly that the judge is gobsmacked. To me, that series of facts would want to make anybody in polite society … say, I don't want to be seen with Pam Bondi.”
Wallace cut to MAGA-soft podcaster Tim Dillon, who helped recruit young men to Trump during his 2024 election. Dillon called recent developments “the end of the Trump administration.”
“This is the beginning of the lame duck presidency. … Now we'll start three years of talking about the ballroom, he will trail off. He will get older. He's adorned the White House in gold. [Jeffrey] Epstein's going to suck the oxygen out of a lot of this,” Dillon said.
Nobel economist Paul Krugman also interpreted the signs of an impending White House breakdown on Wednesday, writing, “Trump seems to be collapsing on multiple fronts with the collapse on each front reinforcing the collapse on others. The Epstein affair is coming to a head even as the public loses all faith in his economic policy and the whole structure of fear on which his regime rests appears to be evaporating. He also seems to be unraveling personally.”
Miller said people who voted for Trump who “aren't the people in the red hats” are realizing that Trump is failing to lower prices and improve the economy.
“Now we're coming up on this first round of elections, this first inflection point. And what is Trump doing? Trump is turning the White House gold, and he's bulldozing part of the White House. And he is gallivanting around, having great Gatsby parties, and he's having foreign dictators over for the fancy ball last night with MBS at the White House,” said Miller. “And if you're one of these people and you're looking and, all of a sudden, you're saying, ‘what is he doing? He's not doing anything to help me.’ And that's what Tim Dillon was basically getting at.”
Miller’s opinion was backed by the latest Marist poll showing registered voters prefer a Democrat over a Republican by 14 points on the generic ballot, the highest advantage Democrats have had since the year 2017.