Trump's Barbie Dream House

Donald Trump has refused to come to terms with private life and insists on continuing to behave like an imperious president in his “Barbie Dream House” at Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

And that’s triggering major political stumbles and increasing his risk of criminal liability.

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Trump is no longer untouchable, as he seemed to be in the White House. He’s now missing a critical coterie of “handlers” he had in the Oval Office who might have protected him from some controversies, like his disastrous Mar-a-Lago dinner with antisemitic rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

“He needs someone there to say, ‘Here’s a really bad idea, and this is why.’ I don’t think he has that kind of crowd around him right now. Nor does the president want anybody like that,” David Urban, a longtime Trump adviser, now critic, told the newspaper.

  HuffPo

Which is more to the point.

Trump is currently served by just a couple of “sycophants,” according to the Post. One aide, Molly Michael, who was Trump’s assistant in the White House, reportedly phones around to ask his allies to call Trump to “boost his spirits with positive affirmations,” the paper reported.

A longtime Trump confidant compared the former president’s Mar-a-Lago existence to a “sad,” isolated life in a “Barbie Dream House.”

It's not sad. It's insane. It's a Hollywood movie about an aging, out-of-work actress.

Trump had a difficult transition to Mar-a-Lago, according to the Post. He was reportedly stunned by how much his Secret Service detail and motorcade had shrunk — along with his living space.

He was reportedly annoyed that his statements to the press weren’t getting much attention, advisers told the Post. In early 2021, Trump reportedly asked advisers if he could summon a press pool like the one at the White House for a Mar-a-Lago event.

“We had to explain to him that he didn’t have a group standing around waiting for him anymore,” a former aide told the Post.

[Trump] tends to wander aimlessly around Mar-a-Lago, bored and lethargic, depending on his attendants to call around to allies to ask them to deliver "affirmations" and cheer him up.

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To say that his campaign rollout has been a disaster is an understatement. In fact, it hasn't been a rollout at all. There have been no campaign appearances or rallies, no speeches, no interviews, no book tour — none of the things you'd expect any declared candidate to do in the early phases of the campaign. Last week, Trump teased a "big announcement" that turned out to be another one of his tawdry grifts, selling NFT trading cards. As far as we can tell, he's just been playing golf and showing up in the dining room each night to receive obligatory applause from his paying guests.

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Just as Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, he will be the first ex-president ever to be referred for criminal conduct by the Congress. What a legacy.

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The Justice Department has no obligation to do anything with the coming referral, but is already conducting its own investigation, now led by special counsel Jack Smith, whose team will no doubt be very anxious to see the report and all its underlying evidence, which the committee plans to release by Wednesday.

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I think [Trump is] still convinced that the government will never actually indict him — and he may be right. Right now, however, he needs to be back in the spotlight — and in that respect, this criminal referral is just what the doctor ordered.

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Axios reports that Trump's Republican henchmen in the House are plotting to release their own rebuttal report from the "shadow" Jan. 6 committee, which has never done anything until now. It consists of the five Republican members who voted to overturn the election on Jan. 6, whom Speaker Nancy Pelosi later refused to seat on the real committee. This pseudo-panel is led by Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who says the report will "focus on security failures" which they claim the select committee didn't bother to investigate. (In fact, it did, and those findings will be included in the final report.)

  Raw Story

And that shadow "report" may never come.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.