Transcript: Trump’s Anger Spirals at Presser as Another Bad Poll Hits

Marcotte: He has, in the past, been convinced to save face by backing down when he gets into these spirals. Especially in the last term, there were people who understood that his strongest desire is to save face. As long as he had some face-saving excuse like Oh, I won the tariff war, declare victory, let’s move on, he would do that. He’s a lot older now. He was never an emotionally continent person to begin with, obviously, and it’s getting worse. It’s definitely getting worse. I’m not a doctor, I couldn’t say, but this happens to a lot of people as they age. Their impulse control gets much worse, and he doesn’t have as many people around him to steer him in the right direction. On the contrary, he seems to be spending all his time with Elon Musk, who is taking advantage of this entire situation to manipulate the old man.

Sargent: And Elon Musk is very good at that. Elon Musk really knows how to pump up Trump. And I wonder whether the assassination attempts that he survived as well as the comeback, which was really startling, reinforced the sense in him that he can basically get away with whatever he wants. And yet here again, there’s a nuance, right? He clearly is getting very angry that he can’t get away with whatever he wants.

Marcotte: Yeah. He obviously doesn’t believe in God or anything like that, so I don’t know where he would get the idea that he’s been magically imbued with these powers. He’s also not a very smart man and he’s a narcissist, so he might not actually have some causal relationship in his head between I can do whatever I want [and] I live without consequences. He’s probably just high on the supply of having escaped prison, having escaped death, having escaped all these nooses that he had worked himself into.