Former president Donald Trump is having a meltdown over a New York Magazine story that his 2024 run for the White House was all but moribund.
The New York Magazine story, called “The Final Campaign,” said Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination was basically a pretend third shot at the presidency.
Written by Olivia Nuzzi, the article ran under a pointed subtitle: “Inside Donald Trump’s sad, lonely, thirsty, broken, basically pretend run for re-election. (Which isn’t to say he can’t win).”
Trump did not appreciate the article. He subjected the writer to misogynistic abuse, calling Nuzzi a “shaky and unattractive wack job.”
He also called Nuzzi’s story “fake news,” and insisted “her ‘anonymous sources’ don’t exist (true with many writers)” and said, “I’m happily fighting hard for our GREAT USA!”
But messages have been seen by journalists in which veteran Trump campaign insiders say there is “some accurate stuff” in Nuzzi’s piece.
In one response to the text messages, someone said “time catches up with all of us.” To which the campaign insider said, “True.”
The New York Magazine piece quoted numerous anonymous advisers to Trump. One said “It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone.”
Another Trump loyalist and a former White House official said “It seems like a joke.”
“It feels like he’s going through the motions because he said he would.”
One advisor said Trump’s world has only gotten much smaller. “His world is so, so small.”
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said he agreed to an interview with “a once very good, but now on its ‘last legs’ and failing, New York Magazine.
“The reporter was a shaky and unattractive wack job, known as ‘tough’ but dumb as a rock, who actually wrote a decent story about me a long time ago. Her name, Olivia Nuzzi.”
Nuzzi responded with a written rejoinder. She tweeted two pictures of Trump at the White House in August 2017, during a solar eclipse, during which Trump stared directly at the sun.
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