U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while hosting a dinner in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 2, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
On Wednesday, as the GOP began its rare midterm conference that was demanded by President Donald Trump, a leaker from his first administration said the chief executive has been “mentally unraveling” in the days leading up to the Dallas event as it has become increasingly clear that it has flopped. This is according to Miles Taylor, a whistleblower who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration, who asserts that the president’s “panic is on full display.”
Reporting from Dallas, Taylor notes that Trump’s “political opposition” has flocked to the city, while “the people who the convention was actually built for are staying home. Politico surveyed more than seventy Republican candidates and members of Congress; forty-five said they weren’t coming to Texas or still needed to ‘check their schedules.’ Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, defending a district Trump carried, explained his absence by saying ‘our bosses are back home.’ Even Melania Trump isn’t on the speaker list.”
All the while, writes Taylor, “Trump’s own supporters are being begged to attend to fill the seats. When the event was first announced, access carried a high price tag. Organizers were charging $250,000 for a roundtable with Trump, $88,600 for a commemorative photo with the president and a $25,000 minimum for the Republican candidates to attend an event supposedly held in their honor. By last week, the party was blasting out text messages promising free tickets to anyone who’d take them, so much so that locals thought it was a scam.”
Trump himself claimed that the arena is “totally sold out,” but according to Taylor, “you can tell how well it’s going by how loudly he insists it’s going well. His panic is on full display. You could see it rising in the White House over the weekend, when the president unleashed an hours-long, thirty-seven-post spree of AI-generated fantasies, including his own face on Hulk Hogan’s body, Trump on horseback beside George Washington, Trump commanding a robot army and Trump laying claim to the moon. He’s hardly projecting strength. He’s a man mentally unraveling in plain view and retreating into a digital fantasy world where apparently the crowds are infinite and the founding fathers gaze up at him admiringly.”
In reality, notes Taylor, the president’s approval sits at historic lows. What’s more, “the mere fact that this convention is being held in Texas — Texas! — is itself a defensive concession, a decision to spend the week shoring up ground in a place that Republicans never needed to worry about. A Texas pollster I know, a woman who has spent years rolling her eyes at Democratic promises to turn this state blue, told me something yesterday I didn’t expect to hear: ‘This is the year.’”
According to Taylor, the enthusiasm gap is “palpable” in Dallas. As he writes, “Nearly three-quarters of Democrats say this is the most important midterm of their lifetimes (22 points higher than their Republican neighbors). GOP enthusiasm has fallen off a cliff, and honestly, what did Trump expect? He’s spent years assuring his base he’d rig the system so Republicans would never lose again, and he’s spent this year trying to prove it, from redrawing election maps mid-cycle to attempting a federal takeover of mail-in voting. He stood in front of Mount Rushmore this July and promised that because of his efforts, Republicans ‘will not lose an election for a hundred years.’ If Big Brother has it handled, why stand in line to vote? Autocratic promises, so it seems, are a turnout killer.”
As Taylor concludes, “There’s a deeper truth behind the Dallas flop this week. And it’s that Donald Trump’s autocratic experiment is entering more than just the “fail phase.” It’s backfiring spectacularly. This is the story of every would-be dictator. They sow the seeds of their own demise by manufacturing enemies at wide scale, until — one day — the enemies actually start outnumbering the loyalists. The intimidation that once cleared rooms for the strongman starts filling those same rooms with his opponents.”
