According to the Atlantic, President Donald Trump is “raging” toward his “ruin.”
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This is the assessment of Atlantic editor and speechwriter to three Republican presidents Peter Wehner, who noted that there was something appropriately symbolic to Trump’s “garish, lurid, and crass” UFC birthday bash, which Wehner described as “the apotheosis of his administration.”
Writes Wehner, “It was Trump’s version of the Roman imperial games — state-sponsored brutality as public entertainment, staged to please the emperor and his courtiers, desecrating a public space… But the regime — and the 80-year-old man who leads it — is breaking apart.”
Trump’s UFC event, he said, was a manifestation of the president’s second-term goal of ruling without restraint, an impulse that created “something new and frightening: a psychotic state. The administration is consistently detached from reality; the normal policy process we have seen in past administrations is nonexistent in this one. No one around the president even hints that anything he does is inappropriate, unpopular, or unwise… Trump, left on his own without adult supervision, has lurched from blunder to catastrophe.”
Wehner offers a laundry list of examples, from the war Trump lost to Iran, to his fracturing of NATO, to his wide-ranging economic calamities, to his unprecedented self-enrichment. He notes that Trump has “gutted” American medical research capabilities, destroyed its humanitarian missions, weaponized the Justice Department, transformed ICE into a domestic paramilitary force, shredded due process, put “an anti-vaccine activist” in charge of public health, and put “a fool” in charge of the world’s most powerful military.
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In response, writes Wehner, “Trump’s approval ratings have cratered. Consumer confidence has fallen to historic lows. Public sentiment is in ‘complete collapse’ on key issues. The mood of ordinary Americans has soured, with many more dissatisfied than satisfied. For the first time, we’re seeing signs that Republicans in Congress may resist the will of the president. And Trump’s MAGA coalition, which until now has been cult-like in its loyalty, is fracturing and turning on itself.”
“And then there is the matter of age.” According to Wehner, there is plenty of behavioral and physical evidence for Trump’s decline: “His need for adulation is more desperate than in the past; the vanity projects are more grandiose. He’s more disinhibited and impulsive. His rage is more easily triggered, and his displays of temper less intentional and less strategic. He’s more detached than ever from reality.” His “meandering soliloquies during Cabinet meetings… The increasing number of deranged, middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts. The fury and indignation at routine questions from the press. And the steady narrowing of his vocabulary, his simplified syntax and reliance on a small number of stock phrases and superlatives.”
Wehner suspects that “what must be especially hard on Trump, a man of renowned vanity, are the signs of physical decay — his bruised hands that makeup cannot wholly conceal, his swollen ankles, his stooped posture and slowed gait, his weight, and his face turning the color of a Halloween pumpkin. It is as if these are the outward signs of inward ruin.”
“This isn’t going to end well,” Wehner concludes. “Trump is seeing the world he has wounded turn against him. He’s discovering that the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. And like another old ruler, vain and volatile, who divided his kingdom and whose reign ended in ruin, Donald Trump is bellowing at the storm, raging at his enemies, raging into the night.”
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