Donald Trump: The Biggest Loser

For a man who divides the world into winners and losers, Donald Trump is on a long losing streak.

It started last fall with the Democratic Party victory in the midterm elections. Not only did the Dems win the House, ending the President’s two years with a rubber-stamp Congress, the opposition party emerged from the election with some exciting new leaders and a reborn commitment to progressive social change. That’s anathema for Trump and the GOP. And Trump seems to be tasting defeat ever since.

The latest is Senate President’s Mitch McConnell’s announcement that the motion of disapproval of Trump’s unprecedented declaration of a national emergency to grab money for a border wall had the votes to pass the Senate. The measure already had passed in the House. Congress had denied the executive branch the funding. The rare burst of bipartisanship comes because enough Republican members of Congress cannot stomach a move by Trump that could make the legislative branch irrelevant.

Before members of his own party voted to extend Trump’s prolonged place in the loser’s lane, the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi beat Trump in the fight over the budget. By denying the President the more than $5 billion Trump wanted for his wall, Pelosi put the president between a rock and a hard place: either admit defeat, enrage his base, and move on or try to blackmail Congress by making the unpopular move of closing down the government. He chose to shut down the federal government.

It didn’t work. The Democrats wouldn’t budge and most voters blamed Trump for the shutdown. Trump had to admit defeat and anger hard-core supporters like Ann Coulter by reopening the government. Coulter, an ultra-right pundit, who in 2016 had written a kiss-ass book fawning all over Trump, called the President an idiot.

That double whammy—the political cost among the general electorate from shutting down the government and the backlash from hard-core supporters for caving without getting more wall money—led directly to the national emergency declaration and the next defeat to be consummated in the next few days when Congress approves the motion of disapproval of that action. Trump will veto it, but it will be his first veto ever and a tacit admission of defeat.

Then there was the summit with North Korea, which failed spectacularly. Trump accomplished nothing except to show once again that his foreign policy is based on fantasy. Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election. Putin did not illegally seize Crimea from Ukraine. The leader of North Korea Kin Jong Un is a little rocket man. Wait, that was before Trump fell in love with him. Then he was pulling troops out of Syria because ISIS had been pulverized. Now he is leaving some in because ISIS is still around. And so on.

The string of losses Trump has suffered extend to the home front. The latest data show the economy slowed down in the last quarter. Trump has been bragging about the great economy he produced with his tax cut. Any stimulus from the tax cut seems to have already petered out. Now it looks he might have to campaign for president amid a recession.

There’s also the trade deficit. As reported by The New York Times, “America’s trade deficit with the rest of the world rose to its highest level in history last year as the United States imported more goods than ever, including a record amount from China, ballooning the deficit to $891.3 billion and delivering a setback to President Trump’s goal of narrowing that gap.”

Did I mention former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified, before Congress, the president knew ahead of time about emails Russian intelligence stole from the Democratic National Committee and later dumped by WikiLeaks to hurt Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign?

Cohen clearly has real legal dirt on Trump, including a series of checks Trump or his close associates wrote to reimburse him for hush money Cohen paid to porn star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from revealing her affair with Trump. That was a move to affect the outcome of the election and therefore the payments are a violation of campaign finance law. For good measure, Cohen described Trump as a racist, a cheat, and a con man who ordered him to threaten more than 500 people on his behalf. The reason for the threats are not clear.

To conclude the list of Trump’s recent woes, I turn to his physical state. His latest medical checkup showed the President has entered one of the biggest and least desirable clubs in America, the American legion of the obese. His doctor sharply raised the dose of cholesterol medication Trump is to take. These results, although not hugely alarming, are not last year’s “picture of health” results.

Stress adds to the risk of excess weight, a sedentary lifestyle, and a love of fatty food. Trump showed that stress when he spoke before the CPAC conference, a very friendly ultra-conservative audience. Trump gave a rambling two-hour speech in which he ranted and raved at his favorite targets and mocked former Attorney-General Jeff Sessions’ Southern accent.

The President obviously saw the occasion of the CPAC event as a chance to blow off built-up steam before a group of supporters. It was a catharsis amounting to a meltdown. That speaks volumes about the mental state of the man who controls the buttons that would trigger the end of civilization.

Before becoming President, Trump starred in his own reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” Now he’s starring in a different reality show, “The Biggest Loser.”