#47 is a Compulsive Gambler Whose Luck Has Run Out
History and mythology are full of examples of powerful people who combined arrogance and ignorance into ruinous overreach. Hitler invading the USSR. Ponzi believing his scheme was a perpetual motion machine. McCarthy getting high on his fake list of 287 Communists. Nixon thinking he could lie his way through Watergate.
Now comes Donald Trump, whose erratic meanderings about war, courts, the economy, and Epstein have turned him into a new Icarus flying straight into the sun. Do you think his collective pathologies now add up to a critical mass likely to destroy him? I do.
What is breathtakingly unique is his strategy to keep “doubling down” in crises — which means there’s no floor he can’t fall through. It’s almost impressive how he’s so insatiably vain and greedy that he publicly makes the case for his own impeachment and prosecution.
Consider just four current failures and scandals:
IRAN & OIL
Trump, Hegseth, and Leavitt seem oblivious to their cascading lies that sustain their war of choice. Claiming a non-existent imminent threat after rejecting a signed nuclear deal, he now threatens surrender or obliteration after gleefully killing scores of religious leaders and downplaying the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz.
All this has steered Mr. Big Talk to the brink of a huge occupation like Vietnam and Iraq. Is Trump suicidal or bluffing? Tonight, he addresses the nation in an attempt to square his circle.
Something’s gotta give.
STAGFLATION
Trumpers want to take credit for a great economy before his air and possible land attack on Iran…except for awkward facts: inflation rose and the employment rate fell in his initial pre-war year.
Now, with the greatest disruption to energy markets since 1973, plus the continuing pressure of tariffs on prices, the risk of stagflation is something mainstream economists increasingly fear.
Having been previously bailed out of key crises by a wealthy father, a Mueller with Parkinson’s, and a venal Judge Cannon, he appears to be the beneficiary of a lucky streak who compulsively wants to gamble one last time — or two or three. But something’s gotta give.
MEDIA & MONOPOLY
Despite his and Musk’s expressed devotion to “free speech” and hatred of “woke,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr just said out loud at CPAC what everyone assumed: Trump has advanced far in his effort to own or bully much of the mainstream media into backing off — modeling Orbán’s misrule in Hungary.
“President Trump took on the fake news media and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid gone from MSNBC… John Dickerson gone. Stephen Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”
The Trump–Carr duo earn an A for candor but a D– for attempting to merge the Fourth Estate into the Third Branch of government — desecrating the First Amendment in the process.
LAW OF RULE
Given the over 200 times that federal district courts have ruled against Trump’s DOJ — including yesterday against his Albert-Speer-like Billionaires’ Ballroom — even hardwired MAGAs would have to admit that Trump doesn’t so much believe in equal justice under law as in the law of the jungle.
In the spirit of a Brendan Carr, Deputy AG Todd Blanche also went to CPAC to gloat about lawyers who had prosecuted civilian Donald Trump:
“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions still there. FBI Director Patel has cleaned house there too. There isn’t a single man or woman with a gun — federal agent — still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump.”
How much longer can Trump’s blasé monologues simply blame others and declare that everything will be okay in the war, in oil prices, in the economy? Something’s gotta give.
It has.
All his incorrigible lies, misjudgments, and incompetence have led to No-Kings Days of record peaceful and joyful protests, the GOP losing 30 state legislative races in special elections, and this week a record-low Trump poll rating of 33 percent favorable in a University of Massachusetts Amherst survey.
A Fox poll this week showed that independent voters — who usually decide elections — had swung 3–1 against the GOP: 75 to 25 percent. Does this anticipate — finally — some accountability? What might that look like?
MARKET REACTIONS?
Trump can manipulate markets only so many times with his on-again/off-again assertions, but the Dow and other indexes are indeed on a downward curve. CBS News’ ratings are tanking, and Disney had to rehire Jimmy Kimmel.
POLL PUNISHMENT?
Since polling indicates a landslide for Democrats in Congress this year, Trump would then lose his leverage of legislative threats and even undercut his regular pardons for corruption if it looks like he may exit office with Nixon-like record-low ratings.
MIDTERM ELECTIONS?
It’s now probable that the GOP loses its House majority — and nearly even money that it also loses the Senate. But Trump appears to be angling to interfere with a free and fair election by scaring Latino voters with ICE agents and using the Insurrection Act of 1807 to seize ballots in blue cities within swing states.
IMPEACHMENT
Impeachment seems likely in 2027 if Democrats indeed win the House, and even conviction is now considered a 20% possibility in prediction markets if Trump keeps blundering in his pursuit of vanity and money.
NATIONAL & WORLD ECONOMY?
It’s likely that the Iranian conflict will continue to diminish economic growth and that predictions of normality will fall flat when people compare what he’s saying with what they’re seeing.
So yes, something is giving due to the collective weight of failed promises and incompetence on inflation, war, and metastasizing corruption… though no one can know where, when, or how Trump’s stress test of our constitutional democracy will conclude.
As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of Black Tuesday, 1929:
“The end had come but was not yet in sight.”
Maybe he'll resign on his televised speech this evening! One can only hope.