Is Donald Trump afraid of being president? It would certainly explain his inexplicable behavior in the post-midnight, pre-dawn hours of Friday morning.
Let me roll out my old Berkeley psych minor (that's a little joke) in noting that Trump is again sabotaging himself in a period in which a Trump presidency has become an all too real prospect.
Consider.
After he locked up the Republican presidential nomination, once again proving the vast majority of the punditocracy -- which kept claiming various spurious "ceilings" to his support -- embarrassingly wrong, Trump proceeded to spend many weeks shooting himself in the, er, foot. Then he drifted back into contention with the very intelligent but very vulnerable Hillary Clinton.
Again, Trump proceeded to screw up, making an uneven Republican national convention much worse in its aftermath.
Yet again, with practically the entire news media proclaiming his candidacy to be dead, Trump moved back into a strong position in the race, finally freaking out previously in-denial Democrats around the country.
He then lost his first debate to Hillary, being under-prepared and over-reactive. But his situation was hardly dire; make some obvious adjustments (like, say, remembering what he's supposed to talk about) and, with the next debate a more friendly town hall set-up, bounce back in St. Louis and possibly take command of the race.
And maybe that right there is the core of the problem for Trump.
Trump was on the verge of taking command of the race Monday night in Long Island. But, despite a strong start, he did not, instead opting to play defense on nettlesome but hardly earth-shattering personal attacks from Hillary rather than press home his big narrative on supposed American decline, corruption and the perpetual connection to the Clintons.
So then, amazingly, it got worse for Trump. Because he made it worse. Instead of fairly simple damage control after the debate, we've had days of Trump whining about how unfair it all was (turns out he was right on one thing, his defective microphone), and a mind-boggling series of ad hominem attacks on a long ago Miss Universe named Alicia Machado.
Instead of simply pointing out that an overweight Miss Universe is a problematic contradiction in terms for that particular business and then moving on to what his campaign is supposedly about, Trump and his dumber allies have issued days of highly charged invective about the poor woman.
I'm not going to get into the weeds of the Miss Universe Pageant, something I haven't paid much attention to since I was a teenager, but I do know the most important thing about it. A President of the United States does not get into a pissing contest with an ex-beauty queen. I mean, we learned that with Bill Clinton, right? (Which is why Hillary must beware overplaying this.)
Then came the pre-dawn meltdown of Friday morning, during which Trump tweeted out a string of attacks on Machado.
What anxiety about himself and his situation Trump must have to get out of bed so early in order to sabotage himself. It's quite stunning. And not reassuring about middle of the night national security assessments.
So maybe the rather brilliant Hillary is even smarter than I thought. Maybe she and her usually able team really did figure out how to trigger Trump's deepest misgivings and doubts about himself and he is now in an endless downward spiral.
I'm certainly far past tired thinking about the guy. Spending more than a year warning about his ascendancy was not something I wanted to do. And gaming out a Trump presidency is not particularly pleasant.
And yet.
And yet the surreal default reality of this election, the "surrealistic pillow" (to borrow Jerry Garcia's phrase) upon which our collective heads lie, continues to exist. If Trump just stops his dumbass abusive and self-destructive behavior, if he, to make it even clearer, shuts the f--- up about this garbage and pivots back to his quite effective blather about America-in-decline, the threatening other, the rigged system, and the came-to-do-good/stayed-to-do-all-too-well Clintons at the center of it all, he is back in business.
The question is whether the Presidency of the United States is a business that Donald Trump really does want to be in.
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