Trump Is a Hot Mess—and He’s Cooking His Party

Republicans are rotting from the top, following the president down the path of crashing out and complaining instead of governing.

Did you land here looking for an account of the Republican Party’s latest angry crashouts and epic meltdowns? Well, you’ve come to the right place. From Truth Social to Capitol Hill, Donald Trump and his merry band of hangers-on are in incredible disarray. Led by a corrupt idiot, they are mired in a dumb war they can’t win, overseeing an economy that’s eating the livelihoods of ordinary Americans, and even facing some internal blowback as Trump’s demands for an increasingly varied array of vanity projects and a slush fund to reward his criminal goons are getting spiked by his GOP allies.

Trump isn’t capable of sorting out any of the nation’s myriad problems—dilemmas mostly spawned by his relentless pressing of the “cause another problem” button. So he’s up late, whining to anyone who will listen that this is all everyone else’s fault. This week, he spent the wee hours angry at the Michael Smerconish podcast for hosting Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, who claimed he was “coerced into testifying against Trump.” The president made one of his trademark staggered-caps replies: “Michael Cohen has come out and unequivocally stated that the Radical Left Prosecutors, Tish James and Alvin Bragg, pressured and coerced him to testify against your favorite President, ME, when they made him the key player in their Political Witch Hunts.”

Trump has also been monomaniacally preoccupied with the crashing and burning of the concert he’d planned for America’s semiquincentennial, a word that I’m looking forward to forgetting how to spell. Some weeks ago, it was announced that an array of aggressively tertiary-to-pop-culture performers had been lined up to play for the president’s pleasure. That bill has since dwindled to Vanilla Ice, who says that he would be willing to perform for Vladimir Putin and the Iranian mullahs, and Flo Rida, whose absolute commitment to getting that bag—any bag—would have a Saudi royal exclaiming, “Have some shame, habibi!”

We know that this was a humiliating moment for Trump because he once again went on Truth Social to tell everyone about it. “We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he wrote.

That’s all pretty rich coming from someone whose every online utterance is a tantrum laced with either petty complaints or high-test AI slop. Past targets of his ire include “Dumocrats and RINOs” (with Thomas Massie, Thom Tillis, and Bill Cassidy coming in for specific scorn), the Supreme Court (this time spurning Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett), critics of his Iran war blundering, the judge who ordered his name be stricken from the Kennedy Center facade, and, of course, the Iranian people, against whom he routinely threatens war crimes. Pope Leo, in particular, seems to be living rent-free in Trump’s head at all times.

The fact that Trump has chosen a midterm election year to become ungovernable is piling increasing pressure on those few Republicans who want to appear to be capable of governing. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who like Mitch McConnell before him seems to be hyperaware that allowing his GOP colleagues to go as feral as they’d like to would hurt their reelection chances—has reached a “breaking point” with Trump over several matters, including the nomination of Bill Pulte to be the director of national intelligence and the proposed “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—which seems to have been shoved back into some sort of procedural limbo after Democrats successfully raised a hue and cry over it.

Republicans like Thune have a hard row to hoe right now. I’ve spent no small amount of time trying to figure out if there is any problem the GOP can solve in timely enough fashion to save their bacon for the midterms, and the conclusion I keep reaching is that this is simply a physiological impossibility for a party that seems to only have whining and trolling in its locker. This week, we saw some excellent examples of what Republicans are capable of doing: In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee, in an effort to stick it to the LGBTQ community, declared it “Nuclear Family Month” (with no evident concern for the affordability crisis affecting those families). Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the state Republican Party made news for holding a moment of silence for the corrupt cop who killed George Floyd.

Sorry to throw the thesaurus at this, but this is all stupid, puerile, insipid pissbaby nonsense. But it’s also the ne plus ultra of Republican ideas—right now and for the foreseeable future. Trump may still hold sway over his party, but the main evidence of his influence increasingly just seems like rot. The only real question now, as Trump mashes “send” on another hundred inscrutable Truth Social posts, is how much of that rot creeps into our lives—and how quickly we can evict these crashout kings from power.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Trump Is Now a World-Class Kleptocrat

The president’s demand for a slush fund to pay billions of dollars to his cronies places him among the planet’s most infamous political criminals.

Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.

There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.

The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”

There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)

But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media........

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