Is Trump Sabotaging His Own Campaign?

Or is he simply doing what comes naturally?

I don’t have hard evidence, but I keep thinking Donald Trump must be a mole, that he must be an undercover agent working for the other side. I don’t mean Putin and the Kremlin. I mean Biden and the Democrats.

This uneasy suspicion about our former president has become a reoccurring thing with me. In this space in 2022 I wrote about how Donald Trump was the best friend the Democrats ever had, no matter what nasty things they say about him in public.

At the time, I wrote: “I wondered whose side he was on when during his chaotic presidency he managed to rile up enough voters and get them so fed up with his combative style that they turned on him and turned the House, the Senate and the White House over to the Democrats.”

And now, here we go again. Donald Trump is back at it, doing things no candidate would do if he really wants to win a general election.

Take his victory speech in New Hampshire. He won by 11 points. But instead of being happy about it, instead of trying to unify the party and win over undecided voters, he threatened to exile anyone who wouldn’t kiss his ring.

“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful,’” Trump told his supporters. “Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She [Nikki Haley] did very poorly, actually.”

And then, sounding a little like Richard Nixon when the walls started closing in, he added, “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”

In Iowa, he had said, “We’re going to make this country so successful again, I’m not going to have time for retribution.” Really? Then what does “I get even” mean?