President Donald Trump is on a losing streak and getting angry, says Salon columnist Brian Karem.
“On Wednesday, Donald Trump went nuts when a reporter asked him about a Wall Street acronym mentioning him and his tariff policy: “TACO” or “Trump always chickens out."
The question came after Trump backed away from a series of tariff threats against Mexico, Canada, China and, most recently, the U.K.
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“It’s called negotiations,” Karem reports Trump saying. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question.”
Karen says a pool reporter conceded Trump had already “lost it a long time ago.”
Then, a few days later, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled his unilateral tariffs on most U.S. trading partners were illegal, handing Trump one of his biggest defeats. But the day before, Karem says Trump “stayed home, didn’t see the press and the sum total of his contribution to society was 10 rage tweets on Truth Social, threatening California, Canada, and Vladimir Putin, while praising himself and blaming Joe Biden for everything wrong on the planet.”
Despite a list of routs, Karem said Trump still has his “traveling crew of sycophants who hang on his every word in order to feed their empty souls” as well as his “ability to warp reality” thanks to a “corrosive political environment.”
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“His status is nearly mythical with those who purchased his gold athletic shoes, golf balls and four different colors of their favorite ‘MAGA’ hat,” which Karem says is “more troubling as Trump’s mental decline becomes more obvious.”
“Trump has said, ‘just say it and they’ll believe it’ so much that he now believes it — as do millions of voters who’ve ingested way too many microplastics,” writes the White House columnist. “… Donald Trump is an angry old man at war with everything in his life, including the reality he can’t accept and his greatest fans will never admit: Donald Trump is the ultimate loser. He is a shriveled husk devoid of empathy.”
“Trump wants … revenge, but he wants to twist reality enough to make us all suffer for him,” said Karem, adding “the eunuchs in Congress haven’t stopped him from this destruction.”
Hoping for “a viable, independent media that cannot be leveraged by government contracts and other entanglements,” is “mostly a pipe dream,” he said, but the “federal judiciary, NPR, some attorneys and Harvard University are at this moment the lynchpins of resistance to this madness.”
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Without this opposition Karem says Trump will continue to push for “a reality in which he controls every corner of our lives; dictating what we read, who we spend time with, how we worship, what entertainment we can watch, our ability to speak our mind, dissent and challenge his government.”
“God knows we cannot let his reality become ours,” writes Karem. “I, for one, am not a chicken taco fan."
Read the full Salon column at this link.