Trump is 'sleepwalking into a bruising wakeup call': columnist

There's a peculiar dialect spoken only at Donald Trump rallies, one where "winning" and being "loved" mean roughly the same thing, observed a new column.

The Bulwark's Andrew Eggers pointed out how the 80-year-old president, greeting supporters this week at a factory in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, declared “I won this place so much," attacked "Dumocrats" and murmured "there’s so much love in the room." His followers lapped it all up – and the president's spirits got a much-needed boost, according to the analyst.

"Trump hasn’t been doing so much winning lately," Eggers wrote. "Islamist regimes abroad and single-celled organisms at home keep disobeying his extremely clear instructions, no matter how many bombs or gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide he sends their way. Rogue judges keep ordering his name off of buildings, no matter how much he deserves to put it up and how nice it looks once it’s up there."

"Even his most reliable whipping boys, the Republicans of the United States Congress, have begun to flash a sudden and alarming new modicum of self-respect, with a small but significant number of them voting against his wars and scuttling his slush funds," he added. "Yeah, D.C. sort of sucks lately."

His claims were, true to form, loose. Trump boasted that a record 19 million barrels of oil flowed through the Strait of Hormuz, even though that figure actually falls short of last year's daily average of 20 million. He claimed an unprecedented factory-building boom — including "AI factories" — driven by companies dodging tariffs, when in reality, data centers get built domestically for reasons having nothing to do with trade policy and they don't bring with them the blue-collar jobs he keeps promising.

"The problem is that it’s growing clearer — even to increasingly panicky Republican strategists outside the building — that all this is an illusion," Eggers wrote. "Trump might find these rallies both soothing and invigorating, but the people who show up in that room have never been further from a durable political majority."

Polling averages show him roughly 19 points underwater, with strong disapproval more than double strong approval, and the rallygoing strong approvers are drowned out 22.6 percent to 48 percent by the strong disapprovers.

"Trump might think that the vast majority of Real Americans approve of him," Eggers wrote. "He might think, when he heads out for one of those rallies, that that’s who’s showing up.'

"But if he does, he’s sleepwalking into a bruising wakeup call," the columnist added.