Donald Trump knows he’s cooked.

It doesn’t matter what he babbles and spews at this point: he just sounds desperate. He lost the independent voters and mobilized the Left who are not going to stay home come midterms. Him pandering to MAGA is a real riot because they are, at best, a vocal minority, and he’s even lost many of them. He’s not going to recruit a new generation at this point. He’s tapped out.

But Trump was never a long-term thinker. He always thinks in the now, without thinking about the consequences. Not surprisingly, it got him far, however, and he doesn’t know another way. It’s not genius that made him get this far: it was his privileged background that paid for the cleanups over the decades. For people who can figure this out, the mid-terms will be a simple affair, and then the president’s options will only decrease from there.