Has Trump Considered Shutting the Eff Up?

That pro-life rebellion against a lukewarm administration we wrote about earlier this week? Donald Trump seems to be tracking it, too. Today, Semafor reports, the White House is expecting to hold a “staff level pro-life focused meeting” with top activists—and recent critics—like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser in attendance. Should be an interesting meeting! Happy Friday.

Catherine Rampell and JVL are going live on Substack and YouTube at 12:30 p.m. EDT for an economic update on this “golden age” we’re in.

One Speed Only

by Andrew Egger

Something weird’s been happening lately. Donald Trump will be doing some unremarkable event surrounded with cheerful citizens, sometimes children. He makes small talk, banters with them, as one does. Only the small talk often turns out to be insane MAGA gobbledygook, like an in-person reenactment of Trump’s latest Truth Social rant.

Just this week, Trump staged an Oval Office event announcing his revival of the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, the annual grade-school fitness contest. “Barack Hussein Obama—have you heard of him?” the president groused to the kids around him. “The Obama administration phased out this wonderful tradition. Thank you, Barack, very much. Great job.” When one boy told him he was planning to try powerlifting, Trump immediately began yammering about the unfairness of biological males participating in women’s powerlifting—before suggesting he didn’t think this kid (who looked all of 13) would stoop to such tactics: “I don’t think we have to worry about you.”

Or consider last month, when Trump used an even more implausible event—the White House Easter Egg Roll—to share some of his favorite conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. “He was incapable of signing his name, so they’d follow him around with a big machine,” Trump told a table of coloring children. “Do you know what it was called? An autopen. He’d have the autopen sign for him. . . . That’s not too good, right?”

Or how about his tax-week stunt with DoorDash? Trump’s choreographed “delivery” last month of McDonald’s to the White House was supposed to be a straightforward victory lap on his affordability accomplishments for service workers. Instead, Trump peppered “DoorDash Grandma” Sharon Simmons with questions about whether she’d voted for him and whether men should play in women’s sports. “I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons demurred. “I’m here about no tax on tips.”

Now Andrew, you might say, this is not new. And you’d be right, to a point: Trump has a longstanding habit of injecting his particular manias into even the most incongruous proceedings: During last year’s Thanksgiving Turkey Pardoning, Trump joked that “some of my more enthusiastic staffers” had been drafting paperwork to ship the turkeys “straight to the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador.” Already during Trump’s first term, it was a running joke that he could never hold himself in the register of respectability for long—and that it was some monumental accomplishment when he could make it the length of a full speech without major incident (“today is the day Trump truly became president”).

But what we see now is different. It isn’t just that Trump can’t keep his id under control for long stretches of time. These days, it seems, he can’t sublimate it at all.

We could spend productive hours speculating about why this is—the weakening impulse control of advanced age, the brain-puddinging effect of being surrounded at all times by bowing, scraping yes-men. Or maybe it’s just the same solipsism and monomania Trump’s been carrying around in his skull all along: He is so incapable of imagining the world as others see it that he actually thinks kids want to yuk it up with him about trans sports and autopens.

Whatever the psychological explanation, Trump’s growing inability to turn off The Trump Show™, even in short bursts, couldn’t be coming at a worse time for him politically. As a person, as a leader, as the head of a political project, Trump has rarely been less popular: Nate Silver’s polling aggregator puts him at just 39 percent approving, with 57.6 percent disagreeing.

Presidents are not without tools to try to fight against headwinds like these. That’s the whole point of all these smaller events: To try to show different (less odious?) sides of the president’s personality, or at least to remind voters of specific things they’ve liked that he’s done.

But successfully pulling off a strategy like this would require Trump to exercise a little self-discipline—to recede into the background, to keep a hold on his tongue, to let his strategists take the lead for a change. It would require him to admit to himself that his stream-of-consciousness shtick—his secret sauce, his essential himness that has kept him in the driver’s seat of American politics for a decade—might not be what this moment calls for.