Is Trump Dying?

Of course Donald Trump is dying. In fact, we all are, technically speaking, slogging onward toward our inevitable appointments with the undertaker. The actuarial tables, grim and humorless things, have held a solid 100 percent accuracy rating since humanity first tallied our mortal scorecards.

Unless the tech bros of Silicon Valley have quietly cracked immortality in some subterranean bio-hacking lab beneath Palo Alto — and if they have, God help us all, because an immortal Peter Thiel is the last thing we need — Trump is no exception to the universal rule. But this particular question, when posed today, carries implications far richer and stranger than the mere physical breakdown of an obese septuagenarian lardbottom who treats exercise like vampires treat sunlight.

Trump is dying this week, all right, but not merely in the banal, biological sense. He’s dying in that uniquely Trumpian way, with spectacular explosions of flame, betrayal, scandal, and rage. He's dying politically, spiritually, psychologically, and perhaps neurologically, too. And, true to form, he's going down kicking, screaming, and bleeding orange foundation onto the White House carpets.

Politically speaking, Trump’s iron grip over the party he seized in a fit of populist fever back in 2015 cracked this past week in ways previously thought impossible. For those of us hardened veterans of the Never Trump wars, those weary souls who lived through the hundreds of premature declarations that “this will finally end Trump” in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, and, well, you get the idea, skepticism comes naturally. We've grown accustomed to watching Trump’s voters gaze upon the charred wreckage of their illusions, shrug, and ask politely for more gasoline.

Yet something profound shifted with this Epstein fiasco. The Epstein affair landed like a hand grenade in the middle of Trump’s MAGA picnic, scattering the faithful, burning the drapes, and utterly ruining dessert. For nearly a decade, the Jeffrey Epstein files have achieved a kind of mystical, holy-grail status within Trump’s political base. His allies built their grift on tantalizing hints about dark conspiracies, whispered secrets, and imagined perversions of every liberal figure they despised. Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, a dark sorceress in the bowels of Comet Pizza. Joe Biden was an irredeemable deviant, Barack Obama surely must've been in there somewhere, the villainous rogues’ gallery was complete and ready-made, and Trump voters lapped up every drop of conspiratorial nonsense like starving raccoons in a roadside trash bin.

But then, suddenly, the files are no longer safely hypothetical. ...