The headline I most wish I'd written ran in an Irish newspaper when a certain beloved publican changed a Dublin establishment, and one of the local journals declared, "The Ship Is Deserting The Sinking Rats." If I'd have written it, it would be perfect for the story in The New York Times on Tuesday in which what appears to be a general revulsion toward El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago reached maximum volume in perfect harmony. The queue at the ratlines apparently looks like the one at the top of Mount Everest.



After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well. Mr. Biden seems to have gotten into the president’s head — at least for now. And on Tuesday, the president will engage with him, if indirectly, for the first time during the 2020 campaign when they both make appearances in Iowa.



Now this could be a please-don't-toss-me-in-the-briar-patch riff to prop up Biden because somebody at Camp Runamuck wants to run against him. But the level of detail in the story makes me tend to believe that whoever the People Familiar With are, they're as remarkably unattached to the president*'s re-election effort as they say the president* himself is.



In a recent overarching state-of-the-race briefing in Florida with Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, Mr. Trump was consistently distracted and wanted to discuss other things, according to people familiar with the meeting. When it came to the campaign, his main focus was on his own approval numbers. Unlike nearly every recent modern president who sought re-election, Mr. Trump rarely if ever speaks to aides about what he hopes to accomplish with what would be a hard-won second term; his interest is entirely in the present, and mostly on the crisis of the moment.

Joe Biden seems to have burrowed into Trump’s head. Drew Angerer Getty Images

He has shown no interest in formulating a new message for his campaign, instead continuing with the winning “Make America Great Again” slogan from his last race and adding that he also wants to “keep America great.” Mr. Trump has griped about traveling too much, but then lashed out at aides, demanding to know, “Why am I not doing more rallies?” He insists on having final approval over the songs on his campaign playlist, as well as the campaign merchandise, but he has never asked to see a budget for 2019.



He hates the job, but he loves running for it. That's been obvious since the threadbare inaugural crowd wandered off the mall. But the People Familiar With who talked to the Times indicated that this particular presidential crochet has become more intense as the election cycle begins to ramp up, and it also has turned against itself. He's not that interested in how to run for president* anymore, either.



Mr. Trump may be indifferent to the mechanics of running a presidential campaign, in part because he continues to view his 2016 victory as driven almost entirely by his own force of personality and messaging. “His counterintuitive gut instinct that drove much of the 2016 race was spot on through the primary and the general elections,” said Jason Miller, who served as a communications aide on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I wouldn’t expect that to change going into 2020. He’s always going to be the one who drives the message and makes the important political decisions.”



Trump is not interested in bad news. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

Mr. Trump is also aware that his signature campaign promise — to build a wall along the border with Mexico — has not come to fruition. He has been looking for opportunities to demonstrate to his core voters that he is fighting to get it done, according to aides, and that he is being stopped by intractable political forces.



The story is the story. This is somebody, or a whole bunch of somebodies, who either want the president* to get his act together, or they want him to lose and, in either case, they want to work in or around government again and are already undertaking ethical prophylaxis on their resumes.



But just a week before the rally, Mr. Trump continues to function without a chief political strategist, people involved in his campaigns said. The president’s lead pollster, Mr. Fabrizio, is someone Mr. Trump resisted hiring in 2016, and his blunt approach is not always welcome by a candidate who prefers good news and can take a shoot-the-messenger approach to receiving information he does not like.



Loyalty in a political context is a fungible commodity. This is especially true of a political context in which the candidate doesn't have the faintest notion of what loyalty is.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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