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and analysis of the writer:

It was bound to happen. The aspiring autocrat runs into a rough patch that threatens to disrupt his base. When his media playbook proves incapable of changing the subject, he launches into a whole new level of strategies that put the nation at risk. The big story last week was not the Epstein scandal, but Trump’s reaction to it.

Trump’s unending edicts have left both supporters and opponents numbed to their sound. He has taken his machete to 150,000 government jobs, and yet this is rarely mentioned in my conversations with Washingtonians. Regulations that have guarded the economy for decades are swept aside in the rush to turn the Federal government into a private enterprise. Trump and his friends shop influence for cold cash in plain view, and thumb their noses at opponents because they can. He sends the incompetent Robert Kennedy Jr. to the Health and Human Services Department, where he experiments with his anti-vax theories like a kid with a chemistry set reversing decades of progress in America’s public health. Yet readers of most major dailies wouldn’t know this menace is at work.

We are beginning to learn just how far the President is willing to go to bury the Epstein scandal when he engages with the Russians in nuclear threats. In doing so, Trump broke decades of strategic silence by announcing the repositioning of two nuclear submarines near Russia in a thinly veiled threat that shocked the world’s defense leaders.

Not to be bullied, Putin immediately withdrew from a longstanding treaty that limits deployment of short-and medium-range nuclear missiles. Every response from this point only increases the possibility of conflict while doing nothing to bring the Epstein story to heel.

Following the Russia story, the President was surprised by weak job numbers as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 73,000, as the economy begins to cool. Trump’s response was to fire the messenger, Erika McEntarfer, the government’s highly respected top statistician.

BLS statistics are the gold standard of the world economy. Trust in them backs the legitimacy of the dollar and encourages the investment by public and private banks in the trillions. The politicization of these trusted measures threatens the future of the dollar and the US economy. Even this possible calamity has failed to overtake Mr. Epstein.

In recent interviews, it has become increasingly clear that President Trump lives in a world of his own where information is spoon-fed to him by loyalists who fear telling the truth. He recently bragged to the media that his popularity is at seventy percent when it is closer to forty. He justifies his attempt to gerrymander five additional MAGA House seats in Texas by saying he carried the state by the greatest margin in history and is owed his due. The truth is he carried Texas in 2024 by fifty-six percent, far behind both Bushes, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon.

Facing scandal and a souring economy, MAGA strategists are fully prepared to tear down the House of Representatives in order to control it. Their move to further gerrymander Texas based on Trump’s false claim threatens not only the politics of the Lone Star State but the stability of the United States.

Democrats will be forced to respond in blue states, and the nation will find itself in a state of perpetual political chaos. That will, of course, give Donald Trump what he has always wanted: an excuse to declare a state of emergency and cancel the elections. What those who have bent a knee to the MAGA demands fail to understand is that authoritarians will always take the next step.