Dallas, Texas, already known as the site of one of the most tragic days in the history of the American presidency, was on Wednesday home to another dark political chapter, albeit one of a starkly different nature.
Appearing before a crowd of loyalists and seat-fillers in a not-anything-like-full auditorium, President Donald Trump fell to his knees, drenched in flop sweat, and begged the American people to vote Republican in November. His desperation was so palpable—a realization that a defeat in two months will mean the effective end of his era—that he resembled nothing so much as a gangster in a 1930s movie being dragged by his armpits to the electric chair while pleading for his life.
“Give me another chance! I’ll turn over a new leaf! You’ll see! Hey, screw, let me outta here and I’ll make it worth your while! Hey, Ma, don’t let ‘em do this to me. Little Donny is too young to go!”
What was supposed to be a celebration of Trump turned into a pathetic public freakout.
Naturally, while the perspiration and the agitation were apparent, Trump’s pleas took the form we’re most accustomed to hearing from him: fraudulent promises wrapped in lies inside a welter of threats and lunatic non-sequiturs.
The most notable of those fraudulent promises was also the most desperate.
Trump “offered” to pay American voters $5,000 each if they returned Republicans to the majority in Congress in November. Never mind that it was an overt bribe and therefore patently illegal. Never mind that it was an old con that he has tried before and that has never materialized—are you currently living in the lap of luxury thanks to your “Doge dividend?” Never mind that such a scheme would cost over $1 trillion dollars and add to our already incomprehensibly large debt.
Never mind that the money Trump was offering the American people is actually our own money… that he is trying to bribe us with our own cash in order to return him to power so he can continue to take even more of that cash and direct it into the coffers of his family businesses and the enterprises of his cronies worldwide.
Never mind that the idea was so out there that Vice President JD Vance immediately tried to walk it back, and that on Thursday morning even the crew of merry little MAGA lapdogs at Fox and Friends shot the proposal down as too costly.
Never mind all that. The point is not the substance of what he was proposing. It is that he was proposing it at all.
He’s out of tricks. He’s just trying to bribe the guards on his way to the fate that destiny and his manifold failures and abuses have decreed for him.
An event intended to infuse the Republican Party with confidence and momentum as it headed into the home stretch of this midterm election cycle is actually having the opposite effect. It is reminding the world that Trump 2.0 is, amazingly, even more feckless, corrupt, and disastrous for the American people, the country, and the world than the former-reality-star-turned-blot-on -American-history’s first term was.
He’s got no record to run on. His proposals for the future are sparse and absent the slightest hint of credibility. For example, he promised, yet again, a big healthcare plan. You know, the one he has been promising was just two weeks away for nearly a decade now. He said it would redirect Americans’ cash away from insurance companies and back to the American people; he didn’t mention that something like 25 million people will be knocked off federal healthcare programs or lose subsidies that made those programs affordable over the next few months. He didn’t mention, either, that his head of Health and Human Services is a crackpot former heroin addict who is rejecting 250 years of science and, in so doing, unleashing a new wave of formerly preventable diseases on America.
He didn’t mention the real costs of his illegal Middle East war or his tax cuts for the rich or the consequences of his blowing up America’s debt burden or the damage he is doing to America’s standing in the world or the crimes committed in his name by ICE or his efforts to undermine democracy in this country—because well, we all know that stuff. We know that’s why his poll numbers and those of the GOP are so desperately underwater. We know that’s why he’s coming to the end of his relevance as a political leader in the U.S.
Still, he’s a con artist. The only move for a con artist who is failing is to try to think of a new con. It has been his stock in trade throughout his career. That bribe he’s dangling is no different from his promises that his casinos will be the biggest and best in the world or that Trump steaks will be the tastiest you ever overspent your hard-earned cash on.
But he also knows that his time is running out. That his lies are landing flat. That he is not going to be able to talk his way out of this final reckoning. Which is why he appears so shaky and frantic.
The groundbreaking psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her landmark book On Death and Dying, refers to five stages patients go through as they come face to face with mortality: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We’re roughly at bargaining now. Natalie Harp handles the denial, while Walt Nauta and his handlers are in charge of the isolation—even if it means squirreling him away on secret aircraft. Nobody handles the anger, but there it is in the form of tantrums on Marine One and in the Oval Office.
And the bargaining, well, that’s the offer of the $5000 bribe he made yesterday.
Before this campaign season is over, there will be more. And then, for Trump, will come depression. Will he ever get to acceptance, or will he circle back to more anger, lashing out like Jimmy Cagney on his way to the chair in Angels with Dirty Faces—or like Bruno Ganz in the bunker in Downfall? We shall see.
And we know, based on Trump’s history and his performance in Dallas, that it won’t be pretty.
