Donald Trump has finally lost his mojo. All it took was a horrifically bungled pandemic, an economic disaster, a national uprising, a teetering walk down a not-very-steep ramp, an arena that was only 1/3 full and a battered dejected walk from his airplane. And presto! Mojo gone.
Trump is all about being powerful, invincible, indomitable. He became a household word by firing people and abusing them on national television. He can construct tall buildings in a single bound. He can, by the sheer force of his mighty will, create hundreds of miles of big beautiful wall -- and he will make Mexico pay for it. He can sign an Executive Order to do anything he wants any time he wants. He comes up with facts and figures off the top of his head in any situation to prove his point. He knows more about ISIS than the generals. He “gets” epidemiology as well as the experts do. He is the smartest person you’ll ever meet. People believe he was chosen by God! His whole mystique is about how powerful he is.
But without his mojo, Donald Trump is nothing. He is the proverbial “man behind the curtain.” Stripped of his façade of power, Trump is a sniveling hobbled shell, with all the authority of a lunatic railing on the street corner. Virtually overnight, “I alone can fix it” has morphed into “I alone will ‘f’ it up!”
Can a weak, tired, frightened,desperate, stumbling Trump, a Trump with no mojo, hold onto a base that loves him for his mojo? When the thin veneer of superhuman might is pierced, can he carry on as Donald Trump, the Omnipotent? The answer is obviously “no.” No, because then he is no longer the Donald of his worshipers. He is the carnival barker Mitt Romney once warned of.
Trump is being re-invented as something entirely different – a failure, a loser. He has suddenly become the guy trying desperately to get his mojo back, who spends 20 minutes making up laughable excuses for why he can’t walk down a ramp,meanwhile endangering the health and lives of a dense throng of adoring youths and the safety of their countless neighbors and loved ones. Now his standup act has degenerated into articulating “Chi-na” three times in a row with three different mocking intonations and goofy faces to demonstrate that he still has a little of that mojo left, that he can still win at the blame game. He thinks he can get his mojo back by railing about “long prison sentences for the terrible people who attack our monuments.” He has resorted to warning that those who would topple him are also “tearing down statues of Jesus.”
In the throes of a historic public health crisis, our “President” brazenly defies every rule that the rest of us have painstakingly restructured our lives to comply with. With the determination of an overindulged two-year old, he refuses to do a simple thing like put on a damn mask and merely urge everyone to do the same. Against all sane advice to the contrary – he insisted on holding literally the only two mass gatherings in this country during the past three months. He is the antithesis of effective leadership and dutiful public service.
And whining about being treated unfairly by the news media is wearing thin. It doesn’t work once your mojo is gone. In fact, it plunges you into a vicious cycle of looking more and more pathetic, then more desperate, then more weak and less powerful. And as poll after poll shows Trump losing the presidency by double digits, tanking virtually everywhere, he is hemorrhaging mojo. It’s just about gone.
Jimmy Lohman is a death row defense attorney and musician in Austin. @JamesCLohman1