Fear of losing

Trump’s conduct is so outsize and crazy, and his advisers’ defenses of it are so strained and absurd, that we often end up overlooking the much more mundane explanation for all of this — that Trump is failing on many fronts, and as a result, he and his advisers fear he’ll lose reelection.

  WaPo

Making him more dangerous than ever.

Trump’s own advisers are aware that there are multiple flashing indicators right now that very well might put Trump’s reelection in serious doubt.

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Trump’s trade war with China will likely worsen; his rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement might not pass Congress, denying him a badly needed victory on a signature issue; and the likelihood of a recession has increased.

What’s more, the U.S. manufacturing sector just contracted by one very closely watched metric, and Trump’s trade wars are a key reason for that.

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Trump internal and external advisers know one of their biggest vulnerabilities is weakness in American manufacturing, a sector the president promised to revive with his aggressive trade policy. The pledges helped Trump secure surprising — and quite narrow — wins in key states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.

But the manufacturing numbers are moving in the wrong direction for the president.

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Yet the unexciting explanation for much of what we’re seeing — that Trump and his advisers fear he’s failing and might lose reelection as a result — sometimes gets short shrift in cable discussions, which too often still proceed as if Trump has some sort of clever political trick up his sleeve.

Trump himself regularly tries to feed that impression. [...] He is tweeting that China would prefer it if a Democrat defeats him in 2020, because that Democrat would allow China to keep ripping us off.

“And then, think what happens to China when I win,” Trump boasts. “Deal would get MUCH TOUGHER! In the meantime, China’s Supply Chain will crumble and businesses, jobs and money will be gone!”


Indeed, implicit in Trump’s new posture is an admission of weakness. If you accept it at face value, it’s an acknowledgment that China actually does have an incentive not to make a deal with him — to make his reelection less likely.

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China doesn’t have to play along with Trump’s alternate reality, a place where Trump’s victory is certain and preordained, simply because he says it is. It might choose to wait him out instead — not because a Democratic president would be weaker, but rather because she wouldn’t be crazy, reckless, wildly erratic and impervious to fact and reason.

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All this erratic behavior points to yet another underlying problem Trump faces:

Even a surprise detente with China on trade in the coming months — a prospect that seems increasingly unlikely given escalating rhetoric — may not be enough to reverse the sector’s decline.

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In this scenario, even if Trump does get a deal, his wild gyrating has already done its damage. If the deal isn’t a good one, he’ll still pay a price for it, because all that damage — which will continue — will show that it wasn’t worth it.

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One former administration official tells Politico that Trump does believe that no matter how long the trade war drags on and no matter how much damage it does, he can spin it as a political win for himself, presumably in the Rust Belt, where his structural advantage in the electoral college resides.

Sure, if you think you're god, you don't question your powers.

It’s plausible that Trump fully believes this, and his advisers do not. It’s more plausible that Trump is feigning this belief even as doubts creep in; hence his yelling at aides.

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Trump probably fears he’s in serious danger, and he’s acting out more and more as a result.

That could also just be from getting so much bad press.

Trump has a record of serious failure to defend, and it very well might get worse from here. Whether Trump knows this or not, his advisers surely do.

It's not like he listens to his advisers, unless we're talking about Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.