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Donald Trump – December 19, 2020
TrueNewsBlog- TNB
By: Nathaniel Ballantyne
(TrueNewsBlog) – These days Donald Trump has very few friends. The people he relied on most in the last four years have all jumped ship and proclaimed him not just a loser but a “sore loser”.
In addition Trump has never had a week like the week he just had. On the heels of the Supreme Court’s knock-back and the Electoral College’s knockout, some of his most reliable supporters — Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Newsmax — all acknowledged and affirmed the fact of the matter. Trump is a loser.
This is new territory for Trump, who over the course of a lifetime of professional and personal transgressions and failures has assembled a record of remarkable resilience, emerging all but unscathed from every one of his brushes with ruin.
“He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,” Mary Trump , his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and hugely bestselling book about him and their family, told me the other day. Consequently, he is manifestly out of sorts, say former close associates, longtime
Trump watchers and mental health experts. It’s not just his odd behavior — the testy, tiny-desk session with the press, the stilted Medal of Freedom ceremony, the cut-short trip to the Army-Navy football game. In the month and a half since Election Day he has been seen and heard from relatively sparingly and sporadically. No-showing unexpectedly at a Christmas party and speaking mainly through his increasingly manic Twitter feed.
The only moment in his life that remotely compares to what’s happening right now is early 1990, when Trump was mired in a high-profile marital breakup and billions of dollars in debt. That spring, according to Vanity Fair, Trump ordered in burgers and fries and stayed up late in bed, staring at the ceiling.
Sometimes, he paged through periodicals looking for his name. But even when he was all but broke, he got to keep living in the penthouse of Trump Tower, the building that had made him famous. “He was always there in his castle,” Alan Marcus, Trump’s publicist later on in the ‘90s, told me.
This time, he’s getting evicted.
The combination of this unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has people wondering if there is a chance that Trump’s unusual actions are evidence of something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown?
“No,” Sam Nunberg, the former political aide, said in a text. “No chance,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who very briefly and semi-famously was his top White House spokesperson. But that’s not consensus .
“His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,” Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, told me. “As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.”
In the estimation of Bandy Lee, the forensic psychiatrist from Yale who’s spent the last four years trying to warn the world about Trump, it’s not something that could happen.
It’s something that is happening, that’s been happening. “We’re at a stage now where his detachment from reality is pretty much complete and his symptoms are as severe as can be,” she said. She likened Trump to “a car without functioning brakes.” It can look for a long time like it’s fine, and keep going, faster and faster, even outracing other cars. “But at the bottom of the hill,” Lee said, “it always crashes.”
