Trump Knows He is Going to Lose

But It's Vitally Important to Sprint to the Finish Line Anyway!

Donald Trump knows he is going to lose.

That is a bold statement, I realize. Not because it suggests a more decisive outcome to this election than many pollsters and pundits have predicted. I am already on the record with my belief that will happen.

No, it is bold because most of the time these days, Trump doesn’t appear to know quite where he is. As in the part of the cold open on SNL last night that did not get quite as much press as the portion in which Kamala Harris appeared, he stands on stage in East Bumfuck, Wherever the Hell, U.S.A. and appears disoriented, dislocated, as lifeless and dead-eyed as a discarded mackerel in the dumpster behind a fish store. Or as his wife has always been.

(But wasn’t Kamala great on the show? Wasn’t the audience reaction to her—which was electric—amazing? Didn’t she convey everything you could want from a candidate in such a situation—charisma, a great sense of humor, comedy chops, and the ineffable sense that she was one step closer to victory?)

But you don’t need late night comedy shows to portray Trump as hopelessly adrift and increasingly disinterested in this election or his supporters. Just watch his rallies. Look at this body language.

He is tired. He is bored. He is not just bored with his stump speech which he now drones through as if it were a chore. He seems—remarkably for a raging narcissist—bored with himself, with his own voice, with his jokes, with his “sure-fire” lines to rouse the crowd.

The boredom may explain his increasingly erratic behavior during these events. From talking about the size of Arnold Palmer’s putter to this weekend’s truly insane display with him fellating his microphone, the dude is keeping himself awake on stage by revealing yet again that he has the inner life of the 15 year-old military school bully that he once was.

That he gets away with that kind of behavior deserves some study after this is all over. From Ed Muskie to Howard Dean, Gary Hart to every other candidate whose career was ended by a peccadillo, history has shown that violations, gaffes and missteps much more minor than anything Trump has done are typically career-enders. Not for our Donald. Someday we need to think about why that is? Is it because it is precisely his status as a serial transgressor that makes his supporters think he will shake up the system that they think needs shaking up? Is that he entertains in a world that cares more about being stimulated in its lizard brain than it does being led by worthy leaders?

Let’s leave that to future PhD candidates, shall we?

What is striking to me are the signs that Trump recognizes he is losing this election. I mean just look at him. The slumped shoulders. The relentless sullenness. The comments he repeatedly makes about how he’d rather be somewhere else doing something else. He doesn’t want to be doing this any more. He hates humiliation and knows it is coming.

Also supporting the theory that he knows what is about to hit him are the social media posts arguing that the results are being rigged against him. (He never, as we know, assumes responsibility for anything. If he does not achieve his goals—and let’s be clear this “very successful man” is one of the great serial failures in American history—it is always someone else’s fault.

Now, it has always been his plan to contest the election results if they went against him. But now I am going to make a prediction which is even more bold than my prior assertions that Kamala Harris would be a great candidate for president (and president) or that she will win this election. I predict that the active resistance of Trump and his supporters to Harris’ win will be less than expected.

Oh, it’ll be there. They’ll launch court challenges. He will whine and whine as he always does. Conspiracy theories will circulate. But the effort to reverse the results will not last as long as expected because Harris’ win will be bigger than expected and because Trump’s performance as a candidate has been so ghastly that even many of his supporters, not known for their wisdom in such matters, realize he is way past his sell-by date.

That’s the key. Trump has had, from time to time, enough energy or momentum to project the idea that he was an irresistible force. But no longer.

There is a twisted irony in the middle of all of this. I don’t think Trump ever seriously believed he would become president when he ran in 2016. I think he thought he would lose (which, according to first hand accounts remained his expectation into Election Day of that year). He was running as another exercise in branding, trying to build up the Trump name a bit more into something he could use in his marketing…you know for beach front condos on the Aral Sea and that kind of thing.

Then, to his surprise (and ours) he won. And like the dog who finally catches the car, it didn’t turn out exactly as he had hoped. The power went to his head. Unbelievably, his overinflated ego inflated further still. And the greed and lust for prestige and power (in that order, I think) that fueled everything he ever did in his life, drove him as always to overreach. He committed crimes. Big ones. And then he realized that if he did not win reelection the consequences might be grave.

So he has sought the presidency this time around not to satisfy his ambition or to help sell more golf club memberships, he sought it as an act of self-preservation. What was ambition-driven became desperation-driven.

In addition, he aged. Not well. A lifetime of self-indulgence began to catch up with him. If his medical records contained good news about his health and fitness he would have released them ages ago. But they did not. He’s collapsing under the weight of years, crimes, public scrutiny and a never-ending political campaign that was for him, like the curse of Sisyphus. Once he entered the cycle, his character flaws ensured he could never safely leave it.

Which has brought us to now. He is exhausted, out of ideas, carried forward not by ambition but by fear and anger at those he feels have put him in this position. (He, of course, fails to recognize that only he is to blame on that account.) And he is being soundly beaten by a vastly superior candidate and human who herself is being carried forward on wave fueled both by support for her own manifold qualities and for disgust with Trump.

A human who sees and senses their own end changes. You can see it in their eyes.

Look into Trump’s eyes. You can see it there.