"Study in contrasts" is an entirely inadequate phrase to describe the different experiences of President Joe Biden and Donald Trump over the weekend. Regardless of one's opinion about the conflict in the Middle East, there's no doubt that Biden spent Saturday overseeing an impressive multinational effort to shoot down hundreds of Iranian drones, preventing what could have been a devastating attack on Israel. Meanwhile, Trump spent Saturday night babbling for more than an hour at a crowd of thousands in Pennsylvania, who gamely ignored their leader's incoherence enough to cheer whenever he dropped some of the buzzwords they know so well from Fox News.
Trump has never been big on making sense, but close observers have noticed that he's suffering a rapid decline from his already low standards lately. Saturday was a particularly cringeworthy demonstration, with Trump frequently drifting off into nonsense and stumbling over his own words.
For some reason, he felt he had to talk about the battle of Gettysburg, with the usual adjective dogpile he uses to distract people from the fact that he has no idea what he's talking about, and probably couldn't tell you who won. (It was the Union.)
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This contrast between Biden's steady leadership and Trump's mental decompensation is only going to get starker now that Trump's first criminal trial is finally underway in a Manhattan courtroom. This is not like Trump's civil trials, where he could show up when he felt like it, or not at all. As a criminal defendant, he is required to sit in court every day. If he tries to hold campaign events at night or on the weekends, he's going to be exhausted. He can sometimes barely speak clearly as it is. Add weariness and stress, and the confusion will likely rise even further. The trial had barely started when Trump hit his first wall.
Trump knows that's a bad look, which is why he tried to conceal it with brute-force lying. As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported, Trump’s campaign sent out a fundraising email shortly before the trial adjourned for the day, claiming he had just "stormed out of court." In reality, he spoke to reporters listlessly and with uncharacteristic brevity, while looking thoroughly wrung out.
Being in court every day is hard enough for normal people, but Trump is likely to make it much harder on himself with his bad personal habits, starting with his well-documented unwillingness to sleep like a normal person. While most of us were sound asleep at 5:30 on Monday morning, Trump was going full-tilt on Truth Social, with his usual mix of hysterical lies, poor grammar and random capitalization. He's also frequently known to post social media tirades at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.
That early hour probably wasn't a one-off, either. Getting Trump ready for court likely means a lengthy session to lacquer on his makeup and coax what remains of his hair into that fluffy combover. As president, he apparently concealed that process by calling it "executive time," often not rolling into the Oval Office much before noon. But now all that has to get done before he shows up in the morning at court. No wonder that on day one of this trial it looked like no amount of Diet Coke and bronzer could conceal his fatigue.
Trump's infamous legal strategy of endless delay won't do him any favors either. On Monday morning, at the risk of angering potential jurors by making them wait even longer, Trump's lawyers tried to drag the process out with a bunch of noisy arguments about what evidence will be allowed at trial. As Politico's Kyle Cheney pointed out, the snail's-pace proceedings makes it likely the actual trial itself won't start for weeks to come.
Trump is understandably focused on fending off that day when a jury foreman reads the word "guilty" out loud — but in terms of maintaining what is left of his tattered mental acuity, that's not a great strategy. It means many more days of Trump trying, and likely failing, to handle the pressure of being a criminal defendant while running a presidential campaign. As his regular meltdowns on Truth Social and at his rallies suggest, it's not like he's able to put the trial aside to focus on, let's say, social or economic issues.
Trump is understandably focused on fending off that day when a jury foreman reads the word "guilty" out loud — but in terms of maintaining what is left of his tattered mental acuity, that's not a great strategy.
Stormy Daniels will likely be prevented from using the colorful descriptive terms she's employed in media interviews, but on the witness stand she will be asked to recount what sounds like a miserable and effectively coerced sexual encounter with Trump. His former "fixer," Michael Cohen, may have credibility issues the defense will certainly bring up, but Cohen can respond that whenever he lied, he was doing it for Donald Trump. There's at least one recording of Trump sounding like a two-bit gangster, and there may be others. Most importantly, Trump himself knows how guilty he is, which is probably why his eye-bags seem to be expanding at a rate that no amount of Sephora products can conceal.
As rich as he claims to be, Trump lacks many of the resources other wealthy defendants, or even ordinary people, might have. He's 77 years old and doesn't take care of his health, probably because thinks doing that would be doing an admission that he's not the genetic superman he so often claims to be. Most people have a network of family and friends to rely on, but the people around Trump are mostly leeches and hangers-on, not folks who genuinely have compassion for him. He was eventually able to hire top-notch lawyers for this case, but that was a struggle. As the Washington Post reports, "most prominent white-collar practices have no interest in taking on such a controversial and combative client as Trump."
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Trump's struggle to hold it together came up in court on Monday, regarding the gag order he has consistently tried to ignore. He complains incessantly about the judge forbidding him from talking about witnesses, jurors or court staff in public, but has already violated the order by posting vitriol about Cohen on Truth Social. As Judge Juan Merchan indicated, this looks to be a cut-and-dried transgression.
There is absolutely no reason to feel sorry for people who choose to work for Trump, but one is almost tempted to have some sympathy for the impossible situation his campaign team find themselves in. If they try to push out their candidate's public utterances on social media, they're just creating more video clips of Trump saying stuff that damages him: bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade or drifting into bizarre monologues about killer whales, windmills and the deep state. What little hope they ever had of running a "disciplined" campaign has been dashed, since his already shaky emotional control cannot stand up to these circumstances. If they pull him off the campaign trail, on the other hand, then only Trump news anyone sees will be about this trial. Besides, it can't be good for fundraising to deprive the faithful of their opportunity to inhale the reported hamburgers-and-underwear aroma of their beloved former president.
The smart move, no doubt, would be to keep Trump at home when he's not in court. Sure, Democrats would seize the opportunity to mock him as old and tired — but every time Trump gets in front of cameras these days, he removes all doubt. But all of this is likely moot. Trump is so profoundly narcissistic that having to sit still in court all day every day would break his already fragile mind. He needs those cheering crowds to make him feel better about himself, which can only mean that the library of startling, nonsensical, meme-worthy video clips will just keep on growing.
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