A political analyst says President Donald Trump is staring down a full-blown “political disaster scene,” with both his polling and his cognitive health collapsing.
“The word for this in politics is free fall,” David Rothkopf said on The Daily Beast Podcast. “This guy is in uncharted territory and... he’s got nothing.”
Trump, 79, was dealt his latest political blow on Monday when a new New York Times/Sienna poll found his approval rating falling to a historic low of 37 percent.
“He is in bad shape,” Rothkopf, the Daily Beast’s Chief Global Affairs Columnist, told host Hugh Dougherty, noting that Americans oppose most of Trump’s handling of key issues by overwhelming margins.
The Times poll found that nearly seven in 10 voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the cost of living, while 64 percent of voters said the president’s decision to go to war with Iran was the wrong decision.
Though the president’s camp has taken comfort in victories by Trump-backed challengers in Republican primaries this month, Rothkopf argued that the results reflect only the views of the party’s “most active” voters—not the broader electorate the GOP will face in the midterms.
“They’ve got some problems between now and the general election, which is: Nothing looks like it’s going to get better,” Rothkopf said. “We are no closer to solving the war in Iran. The price of energy is up. The price of food is up. The job production in the United States is in a lousy place.”
Since Trump launched his war with Iran in February, energy prices have spiked as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, with the national average price of gas climbing above $4.50 a gallon, according to AAA. At the same time, inflation climbed to 3.8 percent in April, marking its highest level in almost three years.
“Nothing’s working for Donald Trump,” Rothkopf said, likening the president to “an anvil around the neck of the Republican Party.”
“This country is being squeezed,” he continued. “So, you know, to the Republicans and to MAGA, enjoy this last moment of thinking what you’re doing works.”
When reached for comment, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast: “David Rothkopf is a far-left loser who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Rothkopf noted that the elderly president’s health is also deteriorating: “The polling data says politically he’s in free fall, but physically and mentally he’s also in free fall.”
Anxiety over the president’s condition is mounting even among his allies, according to the author and former Foreign Policy editor-in-chief.
“I think a lot of people in the White House—and I’ve talked to people in the White House, I’ve talked to people on Capitol Hill—I think a lot of people are worried because these trends don’t get reversed,” he said.
“And they’re worried that over the course of the next several months, you’re going to see a more unhinged Donald Trump, a more angry Donald Trump, a more unfiltered Donald Trump, a more unfit-to-be-president Donald Trump, simply because the clock is ticking, he’s declining, and this is all happening at the same time that he’s in political free fall.”
The president’s angry and erratic outbursts have often played out during his frequent manic posting sprees on Truth Social, where he has threatened to kill off Iran’s “whole civilization,” depicted himself as Jesus Christ, and on Sunday reposted an unhinged AI-generated image of himself commanding a fictional space war from an imaginary spacecraft.
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