Trump has just entered his ‘Fat Elvis’ phase

I hear it often on my radio/TV show: Americans are baffled by what happened to Donald Trump.

He once seemed so formidable, a real threat to American democracy, an accomplice to dictators everywhere. Now even Putin despises him, making a prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said weeks ago the Russian dictator would only make with him.

In the minds of many Americans, he was no longer a danger, but simply a strange being. What happened?

The simple reality is that Trump has entered the “Fat Elvis” phase of his career.

He hasn’t grown up or developed new routines; he simply relives his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic, mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.

His pathetic attempt to question Vice President Harris’ racial identity was just a rehash of his anti-birther smears about Obama; they worked well in the first decade of this century, but now they’re just old and flat.

His claim that Hispanic immigrants and asylum seekers are “taking jobs from black people” is just a rehash of his 2015 speech. It was new and innovative at the time and it caught the attention and love of racists across America; today, it is just a rehash.

The fact that he forced House Republicans to reject the border bill, primarily authored by Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford, only adds to the perception that he is a complete hypocrite with little interest in solving America’s problems.

His latest fundraising scams—”golden” tennis shoes, bobblehead dolls with bloody ears, raising the Mar-a-Lago admission fee for spies and hangers-on to $1,000,000—are every bit as pathetic and sloppy as his past campaigns for Trump steaks, Trump water, and his failed Trump “First Class” airline.

His entire media career has been characterized by frat-boy extravagance and testosterone-fueled excess, from his public infidelities with each of his three wives to his dressing-room braggadocio at teen beauty pageants to his role as a fake “successful businessman” on NBC. Today, however, no one is shocked, surprised or impressed; more Americans pity him than are impressed by his proclaimed masculinity.

The only aspect of his public image that hasn’t changed much is his blatant racism, even if that has become tiresome. He is now desperate to carve up the American electorate so that he can play distinct groups off against each other or pander to the faction that he thinks might save his doomed candidacy.

He’s trying to woo baby boomers by saying he’s going to repeal the income tax that Reagan put on Social Security; it’s not working because boomers remember that every one of the four budgets his administration produced when he was president included deep cuts to Social Security.

He thinks he can curry favor with Jews by claiming that Kamala Harris “doesn’t like Jews,” when most Americans know she is married to a Jew. When that didn’t work, he tried to flatter Benjamin Netanyahu and invite him to Mar-a-Lago; most Americans realize that both men are spinning political plates as fast as they can to avoid going to jail for corruption. Now he just looks like an aging anti-Semite who is afraid of prison.

He thinks young people will be won over when he says he wants to eliminate the income tax on tips, but most young workers are still old enough to remember that in 2020, as the Economic Policy Institute noted in its headline, “Trump administration finalizes rules that will cost tipped workers more than $700 million a year.”

He thinks that insults against women, calling them “mean” and other epithets, will create bonds between men; instead, they imagine him barging in on their mother, sister, wife or daughter in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room.

In each of these efforts to pit Americans against each other or to segment and pillory a segment of the electorate, Trump ignores what most citizens fundamentally care about: the physical, emotional and financial health of our entire country.

No one — outside of his Greene/Gaetz/Boebert fan club in the House — believes his promise to pardon the people who tried to beat to death over 140 police officers is fair; it just makes him look like a sleazy, fallen, wannabe mob boss who hates cops.

The only “new” policies that Big Elvis Trump has come up with are those offered to him by billionaires who dangled campaign contributions in front of him:

— He wanted TikTok banned until billionaire Jeff Yass — the platform’s largest American investor — visited him at his seedy golf motel.

— He rightly pointed out that Bitcoin is a risky commodity rather than a currency until Bitcoin aficionados and billionaires Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Antonio Gracias and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss came to its defense.

He has no new vision for America: he just wants to be the star of his own version of America. The apprenticereliving highlights of his glory days and, of course, keeping himself out of prison by taking control of the Justice Department.

He oversaw the needless deaths of half a million Americans, giving America the second highest Covid death rate in the world due to his incompetence.

He gave us the worst economy since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.

It nearly destroyed an international alliance of democracies that took brave men and women from dozens of nations – and two bloody world wars – a century to build.

Big Elvis Trump thinks he can keep playing the old hits, but polls now show that, outside of his old white audience at his rallies, Americans have figured it out, are tired of his scams and have moved on.

And it couldn’t come at a better time: a new day is within reach if enough of us show up to vote in November.

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