Donald Trump is reportedly losing sleep, battling anxiety, and obsessing over his polling numbers as the GOP nominee hopes to hang his hat on any sign that he will return to the White House.
A campaign official told Axios that Trump is asking more questions and pushing his staff to work even more to ensure that he will come out ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris come Election Day.
“Trump’s anxiety is evident in his late-night and early morning calls to aides in which he peppers them with questions on how things are going—and whether they think he’ll win,” Axios reported.
Honestly, I’m slightly skeptical of that. The man is old, and his health already appears to be visibly starting to degrade a little. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be dead in 4 years, but barring some medical breakthrough on reversing aging in the next couple years, I suspect he probably won’t be in good enough shape to campaign by then. Plus, it would be much more difficult for him to win the nomination in such a case. He’s got a cult following that would help, but the republicans also want to win, and if he loses this, that will be 2 elections in a row, almost a decade, that they’ll have lost the white house with him on the ticket.
The bigger issue is that his “deny losing elections and actively court bigots while saying whatever inflammatory thing he can to stay in the news” strategy will probably get picked up by whoever replaces him.
Republicans didn’t even want him running now in 2024, but his cult are fanatics and enough of them that unless they start unified behind an alternate candidate he’ll keep being where he is. During the R primaries this fact was talked about a lot. All the other candidates together had enough to beat him but none of them were willing to be behind another candidate. All the losers endorsing Trump instead of others really didn’t help.
He has to start running for 2028 right away if he loses in 2024, because his DJT stock will be in the toilet once his foreign investors can’t get the ROI they were expecting to bribe a US President, and grifting campaign funds is the only avenue left to maintain his lifestyle.