It’s going to get worse.
As his unlikely campaign to become president unravels in a painfully predictable fashion, Donald Trump moved Monday to set up the excuses for his loss. In tweets directed at Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the GOP nominee accused Ryan seeking to undercut Trump’s campaign. And in a broader indictment Trump, a longtime Democrat who rose to prominence criticizing Republican leaders, tweeted that Republicans are not sufficiently loyal to their leaders.
“Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting Republican nominee,” Trump wrote Monday.
On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted: “Despite winning the second debate in a landslide (every poll), it is hard to do well when Paul Ryan and others give zero support!”
And then, a couple hours later, he continued: “Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty.”
Then: “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.”
And: “With the exception of cheating Bernie out of the nom the Dems have always proven to be far more loyal to each other than the Republicans!”
Naturally, Trump’s tweets included errors, exaggerations and outright falsehoods. Ryan is not “fighting Republican nominee,” a fact that has frustrated some of Ryan’s most loyal supporters. Trump did not win the second debate “in a landslide” and, of course, not “every poll” found that he’d won.
A Politico/Morning Consult poll of 1757 voters found that 42 percent of those polled thought Clinton prevailed, with just 28 percent saying Trump won. In a CNN/ORC post-debate, 54 percent said Clinton won, 37 for Trump. A YouGov poll had it 47-42 for Clinton.
Trump’s tweets came after Ryan held a conference call with Republicans in the House of Representatives to discuss his approach to the last month of the dreadful 2016 campaign. Ryan told his members that while he would not pull his endorsement of Trump, he would not be campaigning for the GOP nominee. Ryan told his members that they were free to handle the rotting Trump campaign in a manner that best suited their own interests.
Trump’s tweets may have been little more than another in a long line of petulant reactions to a perceived slight from an individual he believes owes him unconditional loyalty. Trump is a childlike man with the self-control of a grade schooler.
But it could be something else. Trump may well understand that he’s headed for an embarrassing loss in a month and his tweets may well be an effort to shift the blame from his own failure. Trump has attempted to explain many of his previous disappointments by pointing to external factors. He blamed his poor performance in the first GOP primary debate on Megyn Kelly’s question about his treatment of women (and, later, her biology). He cast his loss in the Iowa caucuses as the result of Ted Cruz’s cheating. He sought to explain his setback in the first general election debate as the consequence of a bad microphone and Lester Holt’s bias as a moderator. He blames the “disgusting” media for quoting his own words.
In the hours after the tape story broke Friday, Trump told associates that he was sure it would blow over. He’d said similarly provocative things before, he reasoned, even written them in his book. And he’d weathered all of the previous controversies that were said to be campaign-ending. In some cases, he’d even emerged stronger. Beyond that, Trump believes that all men really do talk like he did with Access Hollywood‘s Billy Bush.
But as Trump watched the coverage of the growing controversy Friday night, he began to realize that this might not be a survivable storm. At midnight Friday, he released a video that included, among other things, an apology for his language. (What Trump did not do in that video—or at anytime until he was pressed repeatedly on it Sunday night at the debate—was deny he’d done the things he claimed he’d done.)
On Saturday, as Trump continued watching cable news, he was surprised at the number of prominent Republicans who were withdrawing their support and wanted to lash out immediately. The campaign distributed talking points to surrogates that New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin described as “total war” on establishment Republicans. One of the bullets on non-Trump Republicans: “They are more concerned with their political future than they are about the future of the country.”
Cooler heads in Trump world—the few remaining—encouraged him to focus on the debate and eventually prevailed. It was a temporary reprieve. By the beginning of the week, Trump was lashing out at the leading Republican in Congress and other unnamed Republicans for their disloyalty.
It’s a moment that distills the 2016 Republican campaign perfectly. The Republican nominee for president engages in a social media flame war with the top-ranking Republican in Congress four weeks before Election Day. And as that Republican nominee torches a movement conservative and man long-regarded by non-Breitbart Republicans as the future of the GOP, another movement conservative long-regarded by non-Breitbart Republicans as the future of the GOP, Marco Rubio, restated his support for that Republican nominee.
And it only gets worse from here.
