Home Alone, Trump: ‘I Have Senators Coming To See Me, I’m Not Isolated’ Others say ‘He’s Got A F**king F-Team, He’s Embarrassed By It’

There is being by oneself and there is being alone. Being by oneself can be a wonderful thing. There is no artist or thinker of any magnitude who has not spent many hours in seclusion, immersed in creative or analytical endeavor, putting something new into the world. Solitude is the very soil from which creativity springs.

Then there is the kind of alone that Donald Trump is experiencing now and that is more akin to social pariah time than to the meditative concentration in which great works germinate. Hucky Boo Boo Sanders has not come out and publicly endorsed him for president in 2024. She won’t say why. His son-in-law, Jared, did not leap forward when the contretemps with Kanye West and his Nazi rhetoric occurred. In fact, Jared has been quick to give out Trump’s phone number to people to let them contact him themselves. No more the protective go-between, he.

Olivia Nuzzi has written a lengthy profile in New York Magazine on Trump’s new status in the world, going from the non stop spotlight of worldwide attention the four years he was president and the disgraceful fallout of his post-presidency to a new place, where he posts campaign ads sometimes two and three times daily and they get little if any coverage. And then there is his stutter stepping non-campaign, which was announced mid-November and has gone nowhere. He himself has not left Mar-a-Lago in 28 days. Trump is not coping well.

Before a wall of American flags, each kept in place by a gold screw in the shape of an eagle, Trump was alone. He is sensitive about this, too. He does not like how it looks. “I’m seeing people all the time. I have congressmen outside right now waiting to see me. I have many people from Congress coming to see me, I have senators coming to see me, I have a lot of people. I’m not isolated,” he told me. I said, “But at the announcement, Ivanka was not there, and Don Jr. was not there — ”

He cut in. “Don was going to be there! Don was going to be there!” he said. “But there was a very tremendous storm, and he called up. He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Don’t. Just relax and stay where you are.’ But Don was going to be there.” And Ivanka? “Jared was there, I believe,” he said. “I think that all members of my family are with me. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to work on the campaign, but they’re always 100 percent with me.” He couldn’t blame Ivanka, he said. “She did a very good job, and she was treated unfairly, and I don’t want to see that happen, you know? It’s a nasty business.”

Wild horses couldn’t keep Junior away from his pops but a “very tremendous storm” did.

And it’s not just his children deserting him. Trump has been politically isolated for quite some time. The pandemic did that. He had a perfect chance to get on top of it in late fall of 2019. He blew the chance. If he had called back the pandemic readiness team that he had eliminated early in his reign, he could have been prepared. Had he done the right thing, he could have made himself a hero, insured his reelection.

He chose not to do that. He chose instead to bluff it out, to have Sean Hannity and others claim that there had been no deaths and the entire thing was a hoax. That lasted until March, 2020 when the entire thing blew up.

In essence, Trump has been isolated that long. That was the beginning of the end. Many far greater presidents than Trump have seen events get beyond them. Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson come to mind. Trump had zero skills in coping with the pandemic realistically and he had a one-two punch when the George Floyd matter followed swiftly on the pandemic’s heels.

“I think that really fucked up his head,” the first former White House official said. “He was already on that path, he was so desensitized and emboldened, and then during COVID, his interactions with real people were so cut off. During this tragic time where horrible things were happening, he wasn’t experiencing any of it. It was an ugly cocktail of the pandemic and race — after George Floyd — these things that activated his worst features. He lost touch with what was real, whatever limited ability he had before to connect was just gone.” He was more inclined to crack than others. “Here’s a person who is so untethered as it is, who largely escapes accountability, and there were always weird people around him, but the more the normal people disappeared, and all he’s surrounded by are the cuckoo birds,” the official trailed off. “His brain was vulnerable too because I think he was probably whatever his version of depressed is.”

“I don’t want to excuse it,” the official continued. It wasn’t like working for Trump had ever been defensible. But it was easy to live in the fantasy world he had created. It encouraged fantasies of your own. “I always wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,” the official said, “to see the good things, and I think a lot of that was just giving myself a reason to be there.”

This is Trump’s one gift, to be sure. He creates a world of fantasy. He originally wanted to work in the motion picture business but his father wouldn’t let him. Instead, Trump took his intuitive understanding of television, the only thing he was ever good at, and learned how to create illusions and perception. That’s how he got where he got. The trouble is, now he’s out of gas. Can the F-team get him going again? And if so, could he win?

The second former White House official said, “I think if he’s even our nominee, we may lose our country. Even if I don’t believe he can win a general again, I think he could burn down the country. I think it’s that dangerous. I’m terrified.” The current staff, this person said, reflects this. “No decent people want anything to do with him,” the former official said. “I think he knows he’s got a fucking F-team and he’s embarrassed by it.” Still, this person admitted, the F-team may have a point: “There are so many gross opportunists, the minute it looks like he’ll win, they’ll all be back.”

And does that include the gross opportunists in his own family?

On the phone, he was defensive about Ivanka and Jared. “I don’t need anybody’s advice! I don’t need any advice! I’m pretty good. I think I’m pretty good at doing advice,” he said. If he was so good, why did he have dinner with an anti-semite? “I had dinner with a very troubled man who was asking for help, and I didn’t know his views on Israel because I don’t study Kanye. I didn’t know that Kanye said anything negative about Israel because it’s not exactly something that I would be in a position to know.”

The situation is out of control. There’s even a lack of agreement about the physical location of Trump’s campaign headquarters and that is pretty basic. The campaign is registered with the Federal Election Commission at a P.O. box in northern Virginia, but Steven Cheung, who is the communications director of Trump 2024 says that headquarters are located in the Palm Beach area. It’s a good metaphor for the entire campaign, that they literally don’t know where they are, whether they’re coming or going.

Trump won’t be able to get back to where he was, ever, but it will be entertaining watching him try. The first thing he’s going to have to do is figure out a way to get peoples’ attention, because the screaming promos on Truth Social are not doing it. They simply are not being rebroadcast much beyond the scope of right-wing media. Even left-wing media isn’t featuring his campaign ads that much and mainstream media is virtually ignoring them.

Ergo, Trump’s got to do something flashy and pyrotechnic — and fast. I shudder to think what that might be. Maybe that’s what his former aide was referring to when he said that Trump could burn down the country. Bear in mind, we don’t know the full scope of what Top Secret materials he had in his possession or what ones he had at one time and then possibly sold to foreign agents. Trump is still a force to be reckoned with, not because he’s a political threat, but because he’s an unstable lunatic who would not hesitate to put his own wellbeing above his country. A wounded, cornered animal is the most dangerous and that’s what we’re dealing with here.