“I am not only fighting Crooked Hillary, I am fighting the dishonest and corrupt media and her government protection process,” Trump tweeted. “People get it!” It’s all a plot, don’t you see. He bellyached, “My rallies are not covered properly by the media. They never discuss the real message and never show crowd size or enthusiasm.” None of that is true, but Trump is now flailing away. “If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%,” he said. Putting “false meaning into the words” actually amounts to covering his rallies and repeating his own statements. Under the pressure of the campaign and in the face of widespread public rejection he seems to be unraveling, unable to control his worst instincts. It’s a vivid display of someone whose temperament and intellect render him unfit for the presidency.

The New York Times story that ignited his latest tweet storm confirms what many Republicans already knew. He can be irrational, abusive to underlings, peevish and paranoid. Those closest to him apparently cannot control him, or decline to do so. (His children, so eager to get into the spotlight during and directly after the convention, have been keeping out of sight.) Trump is “exhausted, frustrated and … bewildered,” the report says, based on interviews with more than 20 Republicans close to the campaign. In short, he’s having a meltdown as his self-image collides with reality. He’s not a “winner” and not smarter than everyone else; he’s a huckster who cannot keep up the image he has been selling to voters for more than a year. By virtue of the fact that more than 20 Republicans close to him went to spill the beans to the Times, we know he no longer can command unwavering loyalty and silence dissenters.

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It’s not the media. It’s not #NeverTrumpers. It’s not “cheating” by Democrats. The problem is and always has been Trump. (“He’s on message. And then what did he do shortly after? He went out and decided his talking point for the week would be that [President] Obama founded ISIS,” Amanda Carpenter pointed out on CNN. “He made his surrogates go out and defend it for an entire day. And then he came out a day later saying he was only being sarcastic. He blew his economic speech and then spent three days on the talking point that he then took back as sarcastic. That is the problem.”) Eventually the electorate would see that the emperor has no clothes. He’s just a crass ignoramus.