A delusional President Trump claimed in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Byron York on Air Force One, that his approval rating is really about 60%, his belief drawing alarm among some notable conservatives. His RealClearPolitics average at the time was 38.8% with Trump calling it “fake — I’m not at 38.” York asked him if he meant he’d be at 60 if he were on the ballot himself, he answered, “I don’t believe I could be beaten by anybody. I think that if I needed it, which I don’t, I think 60. Yeah, I think I’d be in the 60s now,”  the subsequent X post spreading pretty quickly. York wrote that Trump “sometimes views his Republican base as if it is the electorate as a whole, which is why the low rating just doesn’t make any sense to him.”

Conservative senior fellow Henry Olsen at the Ethics and Public Policy Center responded, “Very problematic if the President actually believes his job approval is at 60 percent.” Rasmussen Reports founder, Scott Rasmussen, only contributed, “Wow, just wow.” Physician and conservative commentator Pradheep J. Shanker did a harder take: “He probably thinks he looks like a thirty-year old, too. Delusional people are delusional.” CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter thinks his belief in a higher rating explains a lot about his behavior, and anti-disinformation activist Jim Stewartson observes that his habit of inflating numbers is only getting worse. “He lives in a sealed alternate reality — “the hottest country in the world'”— and expects the rest of us to live in it with him,” says Stewartson.

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski paints a darker picture, more pointedly after Election Day. “He is 100% going to try to steal this election after an historic blue tsunami. This country is in for a very, very rough stretch.” Frank and Ernest, the comic strip drawn by Bob Thaves, portrays four characters standing beneath a ‘Wonderland Campaign Consultants‘ sign, surrounded by stacks of poll data sheets. One character is introducing a potential client to Rumpelstiltskin, a media adviser who claims to “do a great job of spinning straw polls into gold for you.” Perhaps this is the alternate reality where Trump is gleaning his gold.

Alexander Willis writes on Raw Story that Trump is fuming over former President Obama’s Michigan crowd size, complaining at a Georgia rally that the media outlets never give his own crowds proper recognition. Obama had campaigned earlier for Abdul El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson in Detroit, leading Trump to whine, “Now, he’s making a speech for Mohamed in a massive crowd! A massive crowd has shown up? Where are they? They never talk about my crowd!” as he repeatedly hurled his middle name ‘Mohamed‘ as an epithet against El-Sayed. He had the gall to dredge up Bernie Sanders speaking to massive crowds — “they weren’t bad, but they were a tiny fraction, 900 to 1,000 people” insisting that his own draw pulled in 35,000 to 40,000, yet the press “gushed” over Sanders.

The Donald’s “beautiful aide” Margo Martin may have some ‘splainin’ to do after filming a Trump rally in Florida, resulting in videos of empty seats. The clip of the crowd chanting “USA! USA! USA!”  toward the podium as Trump took the stage, and a second clip of the president saluting a ‘patriot’ in the audience to strains of the disco hit ‘Y.M.C.A.’ drew satisfied smiles, but the sparsely attended venue shots that were posted were unimpressive to MAGA. One person responded, “Wow…very small crowd…there were more people at our bingo hall tonight…” and another declared, “The midterm game is over for Trump!” Others jumped on the bandwagon with, “Can you book a smaller place?..Can’t fill a junior college gym, hilarious.” Supporters wouldn’t back down with one calling Trump “best president of my lifetime.”

Barack Obama struck a few blows toward Trump as he spoke to a crowd in Cleveland, in the state that has received much attention in the lead-up to the midterms. The former president was in Ohio to campaign for Amy Acton’s gubernatorial candidacy, and Sherrod Brown’s Senate run, using his words to question where Trump’s attention has been directed in his presidency. “I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV.” Obama gave a rundown of the projects by naming the ballroom, the Rose Garden makeover, the new helipad, and particularly, Trump’s gold-finish-fetish. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” commented Obama.

After his White House appraisal, Obama took up Trump’s handling of Iran, blaming the war for pushing domestic costs higher — a war that “he decided to start that nobody asked for and nobody voted for.” He defended his own 2015 agreements with Iran, “a deal that everybody knows kept them from getting nukes,” by placing limits on their nuclear program while allowing international inspections and at the same time removing sanctions. Those inspectors reported that Iran was staying within the guidelines until Trump terminated the agreement in 2018 during his first term in office, causing Iran to push uranium enrichment beyond the limits of the Obama deal.

Obama added that the current administration was marked by “incompetence the likes of which we have not seen in modern times,” populated by unserious people. He accused Trump of excelling “so wildly at just straight-up grifting,” and framed the midterms as an “inflection point” to allow the electorate to say “enough!” Trump’s campaign promise to control costs were a smokescreen, the administration’s actions being directly responsible for rising costs, with Obama singling out tariffs and the Iran incursion. The former president tore into Vivek Ramaswamy for his campaign ad using Amy Acton’s estranged mother, saying that “the standards have gotten so low that somebody can run an ad like that,” adding that “There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials.”

Obama also went after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, pronouncing him as an unserious person who is “focused on important matters like the jawlines and testosterone levels of our male troops. And live streaming executions. How much time do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning? He’s working his hair because that’s how warriors look. These are not serious people, and the problem is, you end up having to pay the price for their lack of seriousness.” The latest from U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, told the the Financial Times, the war could still be going 12 months from now, a bit different than Trump’s claims that it would last “four to five weeks” or some other random claim for a short duration. Unless of course, we end up “taking all the oil” by taking over “the whole country” as Trump threatens, but in his mind “the real question” is whether to “finish off Iran or let it wither on the vine,” or whether the stock market is up, down, or sideways, or perchance, Melania brokers another deal? So many decisions in this alternate reality!

The MAGA sycophants are still coming out of the woodwork with fake awards to ingratiate themselves to President Trump by stroking his insatiable ego. At an Iowa rally last week, House candidate Joe Mitchell presented the head narcissist with a cheap ‘Man of the Century‘ award, straight from a Hobby Lobby, price tag still intact in all probability. The Donald showed his Cheshire Cat grin with his best ‘Aw, shucks‘ expression, as Mitchell poured it on to “the greatest president we’ve ever had.” It’s gonna look just great in a fancy new gold frame back in D.C.

A new TMZ documentary describes a conversation between Jeffrey Epstein and William Mersey, fellow inmates at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, regarding an alleged remark made by Trump in an unusual glimpse of his view of himself. Mersey had asked Epstein for a story that was “emblematic of Donald Trump’s essence,” with the sex-trafficker delivering an anecdote involving Trump, a private jet flight from New York to Florida, a French woman, and Atlantic City. At the start of the flight, Trump proposed a stop in Atlantic City to show off his casino, but Epstein said, “I’m not landing in Atlantic City — it’s all white trash down there.” The French woman asked for a translation of ‘white trash,’ with Trump responding, “It’s me without money.”

In a campaign swing for Florida gubernatorial candidate David Jolly, former President Bill Clinton lobbed some pointed digs at Trump, hitting him for his overhaul of the White House Rose Garden. “I think Congress made a mistake not protesting turning the Rose Garden into what looks like the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom,” Clinton said to an amused crowd. ‘Fox & Friends Weekend‘ sniped at the comment, providing ammo to spread in even further online. One X user posted, “99 mph fastball on the outside corner,” with another posting, “Old Bubba got bangers,” but some questioned whether it was “wrong to smear the entertainer’s memory this way,” especially in light of his own controversial term in office — the Lewinsky cheating scandal being cited by many.

William Kristol writes on The Bulwark, about early-twentieth-century Marxist thinker and Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926 until his death in 1937, who said, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” After reading about Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff, Kristol updates Gramsci’s formulation to: “Trumpism is dying, and a new liberalism struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” He notes that this famous line ascribed to Gramsci isn’t a literal translation from his Prison Notebook which reads “In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati” which is translated by the late Professor Joseph Buttigieg (Pete’s father) as “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena occur.”

Kristol suggests ‘morbid phenomena’ may describe Trumpists more accurately than ‘monsters.’ “After all, monsters are in a way impressive. They can have a certain grandeur,” he says, very unlike Ramaswamy, Vance, Trump or Witkoff — conclusively, the ‘morbid phenomena’ of our day, “the visible detritus of a failing and flailing movement that’s, sadly, dominated or politics for the last decade — and that, of course, remains powerful today.” He decries Ramaswamy’s disgusting attack on his Ohio gubernatorial opponent, Amy Acton, by running an ad with Amy’s estranged mother calling her a “liar who lies about her past.” The mother lost custody of Amy and her brother, and fled with the stepfather accused of raping the 12-year-old Amy, staying with him until his death. Ramaswamy has only doubled down on his smear campaign, which is backed by a $4 million war chest.

JD Vance then showed his true colors later when he called Acton’s childhood sexual abuse survival a ‘lie’ and, “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” the vice president said. At a rally with Ramaswamy, he praised his fellow Republican for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is,” expressing his disgust toward “fellow Republicans across the country who are whining” about the ad. Kristol writes, “So there it is, the morbid phenomenon of late Trumpism on full display: smearing a survivor of child sexual abuse; running an ad featuring a primary enabler of the abuse; and complaining that some decent people in his party are offended by this.”

He continues: “But the Trumpists don’t just like enablers of child sexual abuse. They also love brutal and aggressive dictators,” referring to Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and his support for Russia and Vladimir Putin. And indeed, later that very day, Trump told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” Kristol says, “Even Neville Chamberlain didn’t claim that Nazi Germany had been fine on Czechoslovakia. And Trump’s befuddled appeasement of Putin has continued full bore all week.” Andrew Egger, Kristol’s partner on The Bulwark, reported that U.S. special envoy, Steven Witkoff, joined the chorus, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” on releasing a 74-year-old American who was unjustly imprisoned for four years. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again, ” which evoked a fox-in-the-henhouse smile from the Russian dictator.

“Yet another morbid phenomena of Trumpism: sucking up to a murderous aggressor and brutal dictator. It’s all repulsive. And dangerous. But let me close by returning, across the aisle as it were, to Antonio Gramsci. I don’t endorse Gramsci’s politics, or much of his analysis, insofar as I understand it — though my sense is that some of it is quite brilliant. But I think Gramsci understood this: You can’t just wait for the morbid phenomenon bedeviling the world to collapse on its own. Yes, fascism has weaknesses. And yes, fascism in its various manifestations needs to be understood and argued against. But above all, fascism has to be confronted. And then defeated. That was true in the last century. It’s true today,” Kristol concludes.