Let’s start by stating the obvious; John Bolton isn’t a hero.

If Bolton thought Trump was a real threat to the United States, he could have, I don’t know, testified during Trump’s impeachment. If there’s something damning Bolton knew that he refused to tell until some publisher paid him a handsome to say it in a book, Bolton is still a scum bag, a liar, and another in a long line of grifters that have passed through the White House who have been more than willing to let Trump be Trump right up until the point where it was obvious they wouldn’t get to suck on the federal government’s teat anymore. Fuck John Bolton, fuck his book, and fuck anyone else who knows that Trump is a criminal thug but keeps letting him get away with it as long as their bank accounts are full and Trump isn’t threatening to ruin them.

With that said, Trump’s lawsuit against Bolton is more or less a desperate fucking gasp for a man who files lawsuits like Karen’s mom buys toilet paper during a pandemic. Of course it has basically no chance of succeeding. Of course it doesn’t matter if it does work, because then a copy of the manuscript will “leak” from “anonymous sources” and it will all end up being for fucking naught anyway. (Hey, would you look at that; every media company already has a copy!)

This is Trump’s primary job nowadays; doing fuck all but trying to appear as though he’s doing something. Trump is literally every middle manager in a cubicle farm, constantly appearing to do something but having no real power and no real authority and no real desire to actually manage anything unless it looks like his ass will be on the line. I was going to say Trump is like Michael Scott, but Michael had, at the very least, a heart and a soul, even if he was woefully ignorant and kind of dumb. Trump is more Todd Packer than Michael Scott, a con-artist, a bully, a sheep in wolf’s clothing , every bit as dumb and insecure as Michael but lacking the self-awareness that even Michael has to know what a huge and unyielding piece of shit he is.

Take for instance Trump’s executive order on police reform. Trump spoke for an agonizingly long time (then again, anything longer than two minutes is agonizingly long to me at this point), never mentioning the word racism once, repeatedly mentioning his support for the police, and then doing his sunsetting grandpa routine by pivoting to talk about how good the economy is doing.

Trump’s executive order, like almost all of his executive orders, will do precisely jack and/or shit. They are a figurative gesture made more so that lazy people read “Trump writes executive order” and never question what the executive order does, if anything.

Trump’s never-ending barrage of screaming that everyone who says anything negative is FAKE NEWS while interpreting seemingly promising data in the most advantageous, disingenuous way possible has only begun to ramp as poll after poll after poll shows Trump lagging behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden, all with sizeable margins, all doing their best to not undercount Trump’s wayward base of uneducated white people.

I’m about as untrustworthy of polls as anyone is, and come November all this “JOE BIDEN HAS A GIGANTIC LEAD!” shit could evaporate into a second Trump term in a heartbeat. But there’s a reason why our notoriously unhinged President seems even more unhinged than ever, and it’s only partly because he’s an evil old fuck who can barely walk down a ramp without looking like a complete goon.

Trump’s entire Presidency is essentially a game of inches at this point. Trump’s re-election hopes more or less hinge on Joe Biden not being able to flip any of the states that Trump narrowly won in 2016.

I mean, for gets and shiggles, if Biden flips Michigan (where Trump’s down an astounding 16 points right now), Wisconsin (the latest Fox News poll — yes, that Fox News — has Trump down 9 points) and flips North Carolina (where Biden is up a more modest 4 points according to Public Policy Polling), and Trump wins literally everywhere else he won in 2016, he still loses. If Trump slips on a banana peel and somehow loses the humid hellscape of a miserable state like Florida and flips for Biden along with Michigan? Trump loses. In bizarro fantasy land where the 2016 map stays exactly the same but Biden flips Texas and only Texas (where the latest poll has Biden and Trump in a dead heat)? Trump loses.

This is the reality that Trump faces. Granted, Trump has defied conventional reality before and more or less shifted us into The Darkest Timeline where it’s the “Berenstein” Bears and not the Bernstein Bears. But if it seems like Sunny D Stalin definitely sees the torrent of bad info and is desperately trying to convince a world that still has people getting sick and dying every day and that hasn’t stopped protesting even in the face of armed white men showing up to kill cops and frame them that all the number and the data that points against him is faulty, but all the numbers and math that allegedly help him are right.

But this is still Donald Trump we’re talking about, and whereas smarter, more adept men would, ya know, pivot to something approximating a new strategy, Trump just keeps doubling down on his old bullshit, hoping that he can still kick up enough of a fuss and anger enough racists to stay perched atop his precarious position. Bolton’s book is full of claims about the desperation Trump has to be re-elected, which is weird, because the guy doesn’t want to do the fucking job.

How dumb do you have to be to ask foreign governments to interfere in an election so you can keep a job you don’t even fucking want?

I mean, the worst thing about Trump is that, if he was merely corrupt, he could have at least handsomely grifted millions of taxpayer dollars into his private businesses, and then would’ve been fine with losing the election, dying happy and rich as fuck. Instead, Trump seems hellbent on staying President, mostly because he seems to like the title “President”, even though he has no desire to actually be President, and even weirder, seems to have little interest in actually grifting as much money as possible from the system.

Like, if you’re going to be corrupt, at least being fucking good at it.

But that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s not good at anything, nor does he have a desire to be good at anything. He’s fine with sucking.

What he’s not fine with is everyone else realizing he sucks.