Politico: “Donald Trump has never had a week like the week he just had. On the heels of the Supreme Court’s knock-back and the Electoral College’s knockout, some of his most reliable supporters – Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Newsmax – all acknowledged and affirmed the fact of the matter. Trump is a loser. This is new territory for Trump, who over the course of a lifetime of professional and personal transgressions and failures has assembled a record of remarkable resilience, emerging all but unscathed from every one of his brushes with ruin.”
“‘He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,’ Mary Trump, his niece and the author of the fiercely critical and hugely bestselling book about him and their family, told me the other day. Consequently, he is manifestly out of sorts, say former close associates, longtime Trump watchers and mental health experts. It’s not just his odd behavior – the testy, tiny-desk session with the press, the stilted Medal of Freedom ceremony, the cut-short trip to the Army-Navy football game. In the month and a half since Election Day he has been seen and heard from relatively sparingly and sporadically. No-showing unexpectedly at a Christmas party and speaking mainly through his increasingly manic Twitter feed. The combination of this unprecedented rebuke meeting an uncommonly vulnerable ego has people wondering if there is a chance that Trump’s unusual actions are evidence of something potentially more dire. Could he be on his way to a mental breakdown? ‘His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,’ Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, told me. ‘As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.'”