Trump finally addressed the nation to let us all know he thinks he’s lost

This was Trump, but not like we’ve ever seen him before

Well, he’s finally emerged from his bunker to address the nation: Donald J Trump, the madman of the hour. But the person who stood at the podium in the White House tonight was a mere shadow of his screaming, chanting, rallying self. We hadn’t seen him since he prematurely and baselessly declared victory on Tuesday night, and he didn’t exactly bring the energy. I won’t say, like Anderson Cooper did, that he looked like “an obese turtle on his back in the sun”, but I will say that I’ve seen less desperation on the faces of 21-year-old men at closing time in the club wearing T-shirts that say “Female Body Inspector”.

"If you count the legal votes I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” rambled The Donald, eyes down at his notes, pale pink ears peeking out from behind the permatanned face. “It’s historic election interference from big media, big money and big tech.” Poor, beleaguered president of the United States. It really is, as he might say himself, SAD.

“They thought there was gonna be a big blue wave, that was false, that was done for suppression purposes,” Trump continued, almost mumbling into his sleeve. They were “phony polls, fake polls created in order to keep Republicans at home… suppression polls, everyone knows that now.” They were “weird polls that were so ridiculous”. And by the way, this was “the year of the Republican woman”.

It was low-energy and nobody was there to cheer and chant. Where was the man who had promised to “make liberals cry again”? Where was the confident leader who told his fans at a rally last week that he would probably fire Dr Fauci “a little after the election”? Where was the dancing, smiling Donald Trump of the Spanish-language ad Republicans put out recently urging Latino voters to sing along all the way to the polls? He was gone, replaced by a cliché of his own making: a bunker-hiding, scared-looking, sleepy old man reading off a piece of paper clearly written by somebody else. 

At one point during his speech, the president stopped merely to say: “Suppression,” as if someone had pressed the wrong button on the back of the suit and he’d started up again like a Furby in the back of the closet who just won’t go to sleep. “Quinnipiac was wrong on, er, every occasion that I know of,” he added later, before trailing off. By the end of his speech, most news networks had already cut away. This was unheard-of for Donald Trump, a man who may not be everyone’s favorite president but who can usually be relied upon to bring the entertainment factor. For the first time since reporting on his addresses to the nation, I started to feel a little, well, bored.

“It’s a corrupt system and it makes people corrupt even if they aren’t by nature,” Trump rambled as he came to the end of the presser. “But they become corrupt, it’s too easy.” It’s unclear which system he was philosophically musing about at that point. The electoral system currently in place in the United States? The secret underground suppression poll-making system? I suppose working that out would involve knowing who “they” are, the nefarious background people who Trump can never name but who are definitely, absolutely going to steal the election from him unless his supporters can all run down to the polls right this second and burn the ballots of their fellow citizens so democracy can be fully enacted.

Trump’s team are still claiming he could win tonight or tomorrow, predicting an ambitious flip of Arizona and wins in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. They might yet achieve victory in this tightly contested election. But to look at Donald — and to listen to what he’s saying, which is all about “corruption”, “lawsuits”, and “suppression”, and not about second terms, victory parties or “sore loser” liberals — it doesn’t look like he’s staying on-message. It looks like he thinks he’s lost, and he feels it in his bones.