Trump's Troubled Times Two-Step

I’m no doctor, but it seems pretty obvious Donald Trump is not okay.

The late-night social media binges, the rambling press conferences, the random blurting, the confusion and word fumbles – saying “Iceland” repeatedly instead of “Greenland,” as just one example – none of it inspires much confidence that the leader of the free world is all there.

He’s also racked up some pretty humiliating losses of late. The Greenland folly was particularly embarrassing on the world stage, but in Minnesota, too, his administration has been forced to admit it needed a change in strategy. Polling shows voters are dissatisfied with his handling of immigration as well as the economy, his signature issue. For a guy who likes to win, he hasn’t in quite a while.

However, none of this is new. As long as I’ve covered Trump – which is too long – he’s rambled, he’s blurted, he’s confused words. And maybe that’s not because of his age, but just who he is, a man that can’t be bothered to know stuff or study, who doesn’t have the time to be deliberate and focused with his words, who has no utility for concision or forethought.

Losing isn’t new to him either – Trump’s weathered considerably bad news cycles before and come out the other side relatively unscathed.

But he does have a couple tells that let you know when even HE thinks he’s in trouble politically. And we’re witnessing them right now.

When Trump is on the ropes, he often does two things. First, a social media blitz.

It could be late night, it could be in the middle of the day. This week, while he’s been bombarded with worsening news out of Minnesota, he posted over 50 times on Truth Social late Wednesday night.

They were deranged, unhinged, unrelated attacks on everyone from Barack Obama to Gavin Newsom, plus his favorite memes, videos and election conspiracy theories – a greatest hits playlist, if you will.

He does this for two reasons, I would imagine. First, it feels good. Trump likes to interact, mix it up, launch grenades, and social media offers him unfiltered and direct contact with voters and immediacy.

But he also does it strategically, to flood the zone. When he’s really in the midst of a bad news cycle he can’t get away from, the social media blitz, he believes, can rejigger the conversation and break up the endless drumbeat of criticism. Maybe, he thinks, one of these crazy posts will distract everyone from the thing that they’re all talking about.

It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does, and Trump is increasingly turning to the blitz to alleviate his agita.

The other thing he does in the midst of a dogfight with the press, voters, polls, and opponents is hold a Cabinet meeting for no other purpose than to air fawning compliments from people who know what their job is. He held one today, where department heads performed as expected, in cartoonish fashion.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick piled it on thick, saying “You are fixing everything with your policies. You have changed America and created the golden age.” LOL.

SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler parrotted Trump’s nonsensical and ridiculous claim that he ended eight wars. She added another for good measure: “...but probably the most important and under-reported war that this president ended was Joe Biden and the Democrats’ war on Main Street and hard-working families.” Groan.

The social media blitz and cabinet meeting two-step combo seems to soothe Trump’s soul like nothing else can.

See December 2nd, 2025. Following news of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s controversial drug boat strikes in the Caribbean and a bruising government shutdown that had ended only 20 days earlier, Trump was once again in a news cycle he could not escape.

He fired off a whopping – and alarming – 160 posts in less than five hours, in what one outlet described as “a maelstrom of messaging surpassing previous prolific bouts of ranting.”

The Daily Beast calculated that at one point the president’s posts were coming in faster than one a minute.

Once again, they were far-ranging, unrelated and unhinged. He went after political foes like Sen. Mark Kelly and Gov. Gavin Newsom, but also posted Republican lawmakers praising him. In another, he posted a picture of him and Macaulay Culkin in their scene from Home Alone 2 because…why not?

What else did he do that day? You guessed it – held a Cabinet meeting, the NINTH of his second term.

They don’t always go hand-in-hand. On January 5th, while lawmakers at home and leaders abroad were demanding answers on his bombing and kidnapping of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, he would forgo the cabinet meeting and instead opt just for the blitz, posting 80 times in less than two hours in the early morning.

But for a guy who fashions himself strategically unpredictable, impossible to outsmart, he’s actually pretty easy to figure out. He’s an impatient, impulsive narcissist who rather than ever admit defeat would rather self-soothe with unhinged social media binges and praise from people paid to give it.

We can read all the polls we want, or tune into cable news or read our favorite creators on Substack to find out how things are going. But if we really want to know how bad it is, just look to Trump and his Troubled Times Two-Step.