Does the Cornered Old Criminal Have a Plan B?

By DICK POLMAN

His poll lead has evaporated, his foe Joe has abdicated, his veep choice is a national joke, the ascendent opposition ticket is kicking his capacious ass, and with each passing day it seems more likely that the cornered old criminal will spend his remaining golden years fighting to stay out of jail.

How’s he holding up these days? Not too well, it would appear. Confronted with the reality of Kamala Harris and her America’s Dad wingman, Donald Trump hasn’t the faintest clue what to do.The entire week after Harris unveiled Tim Walz as her running mate, Trump’s sole rally was in reliably red Montana. His basic recourse is to melt down on social media and flee to the safe space of Fox & Friends. Someone in his inner circle really needs to step up and get him the mental health care he badly needs.

For starters, he just can’t quit Joe. He’s so nostalgic for the bygone days of a Biden matchup that he’s typing his demented fantasies for all the world to see. Here he was earlier this week on “Truth” Social:

“I HEAR THERE IS A BIG MOVEMENT TO BRING BACK CROOKED JOE … What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

It’s not worth our time to parse all that imbecility, except perhaps to point out that not even the stupidest graduate of Trump University would have argued that Biden’s ’24 candidacy was “Unconstitutionally STOLEN.” Even his MAGA courtiers on the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t buy that one.

But in his saner moments (grading on a curve), he’s trying to move on from Joe. He had lots of “thoughts” (grading on a curve) about the “Kamabla”-Walz ticket Aug. 7 when he phoned in to the Fox & Friends couch mates, knowing full well that those lickspittles would let him rant and ramble with nary a challenging query. And that’s how it went.

For instance: “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.” (Um. What is “sooner” than “immediately”?) According to the voices in his tooth fillings, it is apparently “communist” to feed hungry school kids, offer people health care, offer paid family leave, offer child tax credits, expand background checks for gun buys, promote renewable energy, and allow women to make decisions for their own bodies.

For instance, referring to Tim Walz: “He is not where the country is, on anything.” The Fox hosts sat there, mute and enraptured. But it just so happens that the aforementioned “communist” policies – staples of the Harris-Walz agenda – have landslide majority support in the polls. This is the center of gravity in America now.

He also said that Walz is terrible on “security.” Which is a fascinating observation, given the fact that in 2019, when then-President Trump named some new appointees to the Council of Governors, a panel that advises the feds on security issues, one of the governors he chose was … Tim Walz. (I’m sharing that fun factoid with you because, naturally, the Fox hosts either didn’t know it or didn’t want to know it.)

He also said “the stock market will collapse like in 1929 if they’re elected,” which is the same thing he said about Biden, baselessly, on Oct. 22, 2020 (“If he’s elected, the stock market will crash”), and the only reason he’s recycling his old doomsday mantra is because he has nothing new to say.

He also said he does want to debate Harris, although he’s still wobbly about when and where. In a social media post in late July he said he’d do it on Fox News on Sept. 4 (a date and setting he dreamed up on his own), “or I won’t see her at all.” But he apparently has come to realize that ducking the long-scheduled Sept. 10 debate on ABC News leaves the impression that he’s scared sh*tless – split screen: babbling old man and feisty Black woman – so here’s where he is right now: “I don’t know how she debates, I hear she’s sort of a nasty person but not a good debater but we’ll see because we’ll be debating her I guess in the pretty near future, it’s gonna be announced fairly soon.”

Meanwhile, Aug. 7, Harris and Walz have filled a Wisconsin arena to the brim. But Trump is on the case. He thinks he has found something to turn the tide. He has dispatched J.D. Vance to attack Walz’s 24-year service in the National Guard (accusing Walz, without evidence, of ducking service in Iraq), which is a tad odd as tactics go, given the fact that Trump faked a medical condition to avoid military service and said that STDs were his “personal Vietnam.”

The convicted criminal, who faces sentencing in New York on Sept. 18, has no idea what to do, and it’s joyous. There may be anxious times in the next 90 days, but for now, it feels so good to feel good again.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024

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