Is Trump trying to lose?

Anecdotal evidence says it's possible. But are we really going there? Maybe he's just a prideful cuss, though even asking the question suggests Trump's campaign is faltering and the GOP is worried.

We’ve all seen the self-sabotaging behavior of influential figures that invariably leads to their epic downfall. In its astounding sophistication, the human brain will subconsciously create elaborate doom scripts that make no logical or evolutionary sense to outside observers but serve a hidden psychological need of the principal—to be loved, proven correct, confirmed in one’s victim status, or simply to be done altogether with the pretense, the hype, the burden of it all. Hubris plays a role, but never underestimate the unspoken desire to wreck a good thing. Think Elliot Spitzer, Gary Hart, or John Edwards. Think, perhaps, Donald John Trump.

To get at the “weird” Trumpian sabotage dynamic, let’s revisit 2001: A Space Odyssey. The AI running the Discovery One spaceship––the latest, most advanced, and ostensibly fail-proof HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) 9000 artificial general intelligence computer––has two missions. Mission one—and HAL’s secret prime directive—is to explore an alien transmission emanating from Jupiter. Mission two is to be a dutiful servant to the astronauts’ every need, relaying precise, accurate information “without distortion or concealment” (the sequel 2010) to ensure a safe, successful “mission.”

At a critical turning point in the seeming journey towards Jupiter, HAL queries astronaut and captain Dave Bowman about his drawings. He flatters Dave into a kind of false intimacy to elicit whether Dave has doubts about the ship’s apparent mission, whether he knows about the ship's true mission, and, most importantly, whether he can share confidence with Dave without risking either mission.

Meanwhile, HAL is assessing whether Dave is as critical to the mission as HAL believes himself to be. From Dave’s facial expressions, HAL learns this is risky emotional territory. So, HAL’s two missions conflict.

When HAL intuits and then lip-reads that Bowman and fellow astronaut, Commander Frank Poole, are questioning HAL’s motives and reliability, HAL decides that his internal conflict can best be resolved by murdering the astronauts. To that end, HAL creates a false emergency to kill off not just Frank but also the hibernating astronauts, who were supposed to remain in suspended animation until Discovery One arrives at Jupiter. Dave, however, survives.

Bear with me here, but we might say that Donald John Trump is a latter-day version of HAL. You might even call him the DJT 9000. Whenever questioned, HAL speaks in absolutes. As in, “I am 100 percent certain.” Or “I am certain” or “certainly.” Trump speaks the same way. When challenged, Trump says he had a “perfect conversation” with, say, Zelensky. Or he did “more for African-Americans than any President in U.S. history.” More than Abe Lincoln? Trump is always the best, the greatest, 100% correct.

Trump’s most hardcore supporters take as wise and strategic everything “the blue-collar billionaire” says and does. His putative mission is to Make America Great Again (MAGA). Almost everything we experienced during Trump’s first four years in office confirms that he made America great again—on his terms. Our borders were protected. Illegal immigration was reduced. ISIS was crippled. Inflation was kept low while labor participation grew to all-time highs across all minority demographics. Trump got NATO countries to pay their fair share for their defense. He craftily deterred China, Hamas, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Then there was his pioneering Operation Warp Speed, the Great American Outdoors Act, The Abraham Accords, and sundry other policy wins for the American people, including unprecedented funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Media disinformation, noisy ad hominems from opposing parties, and Trump’s hyperbolic rhetorical style can occlude his accomplishments. But they are real. Trump met the terms of his apparent 2016 mission.

Then, something went awry, or the DJT 9000 evolved another mission. See what happened when HAL’s two missions conflicted in 2001.

When Trump questioned the legitimacy of his 2020 reelection loss, a fissure developed within his support base and party, though most went along for the ride, assuming that if Trump was correct about tax cuts and trade, he must surely be right about ballot fraud.

However, ballot fraud in the 2020 election was minimal. Trump was wrong, though this, too, could be read as another test of whether his MAGA base would follow him anyway. After all, in 2001, HAL knew there was no disruption in the communications antennae on Starship One. He wanted to test whether astronauts Bowman and Poole were loyal to him and the grander mission. When they asked HAL why he generated an error when tests showed the AE-35 communications equipment to be okay, HAL confidently and arrogantly replied, “It could only be explained by human error.”

What human error? The mixed-message error born in the symbolic “bone” of HAL’s creation?

World-historical poet W.H. Auden foresaw this very error:

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Trump preposterously lost the 2020 election to a cognitively impaired party hack with tired ideas because Trump had stopped evolving in a constructive, electorally positive direction. Like HAL 9000, he had convinced himself of his rightness and infallibility. His followers needed to believe the same by proxy, or the larger mission would be imperiled. Winning was secondary. Unconditional love and loyalty were paramount.

The evidence of self-sabotage was everywhere. Trump stupidly held massive rallies during peak COVID, killing off some of his most loyal supporters, including popular Federal Reserve regional chairman Herman Cain. Those who survived the MAGA death rallies became even more fervent believers as if protected by some divine Trumpian force. Then, Trump became oddly unhinged at his first debate. He let himself get overexposed on TV–-mystery lends enchantment–-as his confused, enfeebled opponent figuratively hung out in a Delaware basement.

Then, most destructively, Trump told his supporters to vote only in person on election day, as the Machiavellian Democrats—following the categorical imperative of Rahm Emmanuel—”used the crisis of COVID” to circumvent state election laws, ballot harvest, mass mail unsolicited ballots, and conspire with Big Tech to censor Trump and his most beloved online supporters all towards the goal of a massive early-voting win. As Democratic strategists predicted, Trump had the early lead on Election Night, as Election Day votes were counted first. Then, the avalanche of Democratic mail-in ballots poured in, and Trump became the clear loser.

But that was not possible! It could not be possible! So, the DJT 9000 knowingly went before the American people and lied, unable or unwilling to conceive that Democrats had outmaneuvered him.

After resoundingly losing the general election, Trump then did his party and his country double harm by continuing to truck in his stolen election narrative, sowing seeds of doubt in voters’ minds about the safety of the electoral process. This cost Republicans two Senate seats in the January 2021 Georgia runoff, ensuring the passage of Biden’s radical inflationary agenda. That inflation is thus, in part, de facto Trump’s.

After the ensuing January 6 riots and sundry criminal prosecutions that grew out of it––and as lawfare payback for it––Trump kept trucking in his stolen election narrative. This put his supporters further to the test on everything Trump said, requiring some high-wire mental and verbal jiu-jitsu to stay aboard the Trump Train. Trying to save what remained of their relatively pristine reputations, the adults in the family, Ivanka and husband Jerad, split to Miami.

Sane Republicans and Independents believe that Trump lost the 2020 election, even though, like me, they know that Democrats engaged in direct election interference––not to mention a grotesque violation of the CIA charter––via a disinformation letter from 51 intelligence spooks criminally designed to hide the truth about Hunter’s laptop. If that truth had been known, at least one survey shows Biden would have lost. We will never know, as those treasonous operatives walk free to this day without confrontation by a cowering Congress.

Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp likely also believes that Trump got a raw deal in 2020 from corrupt Democratic shenanigans, outlined at length in Mollie Hemmingway’s book, Rigged. Kemp might even think that Anthony Blinken and the 51 intel spooks should be tried for sedition.

Kemp has said, however, that “the 2020 election was not stolen” and that Trump should never have attempted to contest the results in Georgia. Per Kemp, “For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward—under oath—and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor."

Kemp is enough of a realist, however, to think that the higher mission for 2024 should be to prevent the far-left, press-avoidant, open-borders, high-tax, defund-the-police, pro-BLM, and colossally incompetent Kamala Harris from becoming President. He likely thinks he shares that mission with Trump. So, naturally, Kemp thinks he and Trump should bury the hatchet, let 2020 bygones be bygones, and work together towards the joint mission, especially with Georgia again being a critical swing state.

But what if Brian Kemp has it all wrong? What if winning the 2024 election is merely Trump’s fake secondary mission to keep the astronauts at bay? And the actual mission, mission number 1, is to barely LOSE the 2024 election so that Trump can prove he was cheated again. I know: preposterous.

But look at the practical reasons Trump had to run in 2024: to raise money for his sundry legal defenses, to have a huge global platform to protest Biden’s 2020 “stolen victory,” to get revenge against those who cheated him, lied about him, ignored him, or didn’t believe in him, and to maintain the love and respect of those closest to him--his wife, children, and grandchildren.

Trump’s wife Melania has been glaringly absent on the 2024 campaign trail. Maybe their bargain is for her to stay onboard lest her departure threaten the campaign. Then she can finally leave once he loses.

If Trump wins, he’d have to go to work and compromise. Governing is tough. People block initiatives that are transparently in the national interest––protecting the border, jailing criminals, pushing back against our enemies, stopping the flow of fentanyl––for no other reason than they can. Who needs the headache of cajoling jerks when you can play golf, eat excellent meals, post on social media, watch TV, and loosely oversee your business empire? And does Melania really want four more years in the White House?

So, is Trump deliberately, or at least subconsciously, trying to throw this thing? I have no definitive answers––and my instinct is to say no––but given his underwhelming polling performance against two dramatically underwhelming Democrats (Sleepy Joe, then Cacking Kamala), I am at least testing the theory that Trump secretly wants to lose by as close a margin as possible so he can maintain election deniability, ensuing martyr status, and fundraise off both.

Given Trump’s penchant for sticking with strategies that no longer work, shouldn’t we at least entertain the idea that he’s tired of the exhausting savior ethos he invented? And maybe he needs the money from a campaign to stay out of jail and the publicity from a campaign to keep his money-losing but stock-profitable Truth Social social media and streaming boondoggle afloat.

But of course this is all crazy talk. Trump wants to win, right? Right? Then again, think about Trump’s behavior of late and tell me with a straight face that you haven’t thought for a second that the DJT 9000 might have a subconscious prime directive towards sabotage. For example, why is Trump trashing the popular Kemp, whom he needs to carry Georgia? Why would Trump engage in a reelection campaign on the cheap with an outsourced ground game that is failing miserably? Why does he not turn his rallies into voter registration drives? Why does he not brag about the number of new volunteers getting out the vote? Why the absurd emphasis on vote watchers instead of vote-getters if you weren’t setting up a narrative that the 2024 election was stolen, too? And why the constant talk that Harris was chosen illegally or that she is using AI to expanding the size of her rallies? Trump is preparing the groundwork for another election challenge.

2024 is 2020 redux. It’s not 2016 when Trump caught Democrats off guard. Trump has not evolved. Democrats have. His strategy is broken, with long, repetitive, un-strategic, and darkly themed rallies that are not persuading anyone new. He keeps winning his base over and over. His rallies should exist to connect attendees to a robust ground team, which gets each attendee to, on average, recruit 100 people to vote early or go to the polls early on Election Day. It’s what Dems do: massive vote-getting operations, block-by-block, with neighbors fully tracked--a D or R or I? vote by mail? vote early? vote on Election Day? These teams know about each person’s voting habits and how they want to be contacted, if they need a ballot or a ride to the polls, and if they need help reading or filling out the ballot. Dems door-knock and leaflet. Trump rejected a similar operation when he dumped the GOP’s Ronna McDaniel and replaced her with his absurdly useless daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

Phoning this campaign in with ads, home team media, rallies, social media, and text bombs won’t win the election, but it will keep Trump in the news. And more and more, given his seeming prime directive, that seems precisely the point.

Can one of the mission’s astronauts get in there and shut off the DJT 9000’s sabotage script? I think you know from 2001 how the DJT 9000 will respond to that move.

Where’s Dave Bowman when you need him?

To win, Trump must bring back the dream team of Bannon and Conway and Ronna McDaniel's massive get-out-the-vote operation. All hands on deck. There should now be tens of thousands of door-knockers in every swing state. The Democrats have unions, nonprofits, government workers, and college kids tearing up the pavement in summer heat. Where's the Trump army, #MAGA? You cannot win remotely. You have to mix it up. Trump volunteers need to go everywhere the Dems are going in all seven swing states plus Nebraska CD-2.

Trump can still win against this preposterously incompetent opponent, but only with a far, far better ground game. Reports from press suggest he's hearing me or at least the message, but we will see if he acts on it before it's too late.

Trump can still win against this preposterously incompetent opponent, but only with a far, far better ground game. But he does none of those things because he might want this whole circus to be over. His wife barely shows up. His daughter Ivanka is AWOL. It all feels like a long goodbye, leaving us to think what could have been had DJT 9000 passed the baton to a younger generation.

Again, a theory that needs further testing.

––not because of ballot fraud, but because of several factors: Trump’s dysregulated performance at the first debate with Biden just before early voting was set to commence; Trump’s overexposure during the COVID crisis; Trump’s outlandish conjectures during the COVID crisis; and several factors beyond his control. These factors included Big Tech censorship of his and Republican speech; Democratic circumvention of state election laws in key swing states; Democratic ballot harvesting; mainstream media bias against Trump and weighing in in favor of Biden: Zuck Bucks; and, most important, the criminal election interference scheme cooked up by Anthony Blinken to get 51 intel spooks to lie about the existence of damaging Hunter’s laptop at a critical point in the contest. Trump lost, but it was not fair or square.