Trump’s remarks on Iran were brief, however. For the most part, he stuck to his comfort zone: the same shopworn boasts and insults he’s rolled out a hundred times before, the same unshakable conviction that — polls be damned — the American people are behind him one hundred percent. The president said that his takeover of D.C. law enforcement has been a scintillating success, claiming that he is constantly beset by grateful young women who tell him it’s safe to walk around the city again. He did his usual two-bit comedy shtick about Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “I mean, he’s a Palestinian. He should be fighting on the side of Palestine. He’s actually become a Palestinian leader.” He did his usual bit of braggery about how nobody names bills like him: “You know, they called it the SAVE Act. . . . I said, you have to call it — you have to, under any circumstances, call it the ‘SAVE America Act,’ because everybody knows what that is.”
Most tellingly, he offered his belief — which seems to get stronger all the time — that he has no genuine popular domestic opposition. On some of the culture-war issues he’s pushing, he said, his people should stop describing them as “80/20 issues”: “They’re not 80/20. They’re 99/1.”
He looked old, and he seemed tired. His speech slurred. More than anything else, he seemed utterly unattuned to the many crises that are all piling up around his many careless decisions. He finished speaking, everybody else at the table took turns lavishing him with praise, and then it was time to head to Graceland.
We’ve made the point many times during Trump’s second term, but it bears repeating: There’s little reason to believe that any of this is an affectation. Trump is a lifelong pathological solipsist. He’s fed that solipsism by vacuum-packing himself in an information environment of buttery flattery, spending his days marinating in the most over-the-top praise both in person and online. And it hasn’t helped that, as he’s gotten older, he’s seemingly fallen prey to the same tendencies that many old people do: the strongest parts of his personality just keep getting stronger. Any day now, he seems genuinely to believe, it’s all gonna turn around. Everybody just wait and see. The golden age is mere moments away.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-in-his-elvis-in-vegas-era-graceland-iran-war-ice-dhs-funding-midterms
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