Opinion | Trump’s fantasy-based outbursts are getting out of hand, even for him

His newest social media meltdown is flirting with delusion.

By Eugene Robinson
August 12, 2024 at 5:09 p.m. EDT

Former president Donald Trump’s ongoing meltdown over his changed electoral prospects is becoming genuinely bizarre. It is foolish to underestimate him, but this doesn’t come off as any kind of subtle gambit in a game of three-dimensional chess. It looks and sounds like angry, disoriented flailing that inflicts more self-harm than damage on his opponents.

Trump’s frustration is not without cause. Recent polls show that Vice President Kamala Harris has erased the lead Trump had over President Joe Biden, and the RealClear Politics,polling average — often more generous to Trump than some other aggregators — on Monday had Harris nosing into the lead. Perhaps more galling, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been barnstorming the swing states and drawing the kind of huge, enthusiastic crowds that Trump boasted he alone could muster.

That might be the reason for Trump’s transparently false and really strange Truth Social post on Sunday that claimed “there was nobody there” at a rally Harris and Walz held last week at Detroit’s airport. In fact, as documented by news photographers and television crews, an estimated 15,000 supporters greeted and cheered the Democratic candidates. A crowd that size is hard to miss.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists had posted a photograph of one of Air Force Two’s shiny engines, claiming that a dim reflection showed there was no crowd at all when Harris and Walz arrived, and that the images of the event were created by artificial intelligence. This kind of paranoid, fantasy-based nonsense gets put out there all the time by unscrupulous provocateurs for whom lying is a business model. But it was unusual that Trump would expose himself to ridicule by endorsing a lie that lacked even the slightest whiff of plausibility.

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Opinion by Eugene Robinson
Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section. Twitter