Trump’s humiliation on the world stage triggers acts of desperation at home

This is an adapted excerpt from the July 8 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”

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It’s already been a rough week for President Donald Trump, who has been facing humiliation after humiliation.

On Wednesday, a federal court officially ordered that $5 million of the president’s money be released to E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued him for defamation. In a , the judge wrote that Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”

“A jury unanimously concluded that he sexually abused and defamed plaintiff and awarded her damages accordingly,” he continued. “It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment.”

Also on Wednesday, another federal judge rejected Trump’s efforts to put his name back on the Kennedy Center — a loss we know has humiliated Trump because his administration has left a tarp over the place where his name used to be, as if that tarp means his name is actually still there.  

On top of all of that, Trump faced even more humiliation when his so-called peace negotiations with Iran fell completely apart. (Who could have seen that one coming?) The U.S. has already launched multiple new rounds of airstrikes against Iran, including one on Wednesday evening. 

Trump has now declared his ceasefire over, claiming he doesn’t even want a deal anymore. Oil prices spiked and gas prices are expected to rise again soon.

So it’s safe to say the president is not having a great week. But perhaps the most humiliating thing that happened to the president in recent days — the thing you know gets under his skin more than anything else — was his doddering performance on the world stage.

It started as soon as he got off the plane for the annual NATO summit in Turkey, where he meandered down the tarmac until Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took him by the arm and told him where to stand. 

Then Trump held a series of bilateral meetings and press conferences where he seemed even more confused. At one point he even invented an entirely new country for America to bomb: the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

Trump followed that up with one of his signature rants about former President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, known as the JCPOA, but he somehow bungled that as well, referring to it as the “JCPOC” deal. 

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Speaking of getting names wrong, the president also had an embarrassing slip while meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling the leader “President Putin.”

The man is getting laughed at every day, by judges, by world leaders, by European soccer players. Most of the world is responding to him with a collective eye roll. But that does not mean we can dismiss him entirely, because when this president gets embarrassed, when he feels cornered, that is when he’s most likely to try to cling to power.

This week, we learned the Trump administration is now threatening to withhold $1 billion in counterterrorism funds from states unless those states completely change the way they run their elections. 

The more desperate he gets, the more desperate his plans for the next election get, too. The Trump administration has reportedly demanded states transition to using paper ballots, verify the citizenship of every voter and hand over their voter rolls to the administration.

As The New York Times points out, “Those policies align closely with some of the goals pushed by right-wing activists that are rooted in false conspiracy theories about election machines and voting by noncitizens during the 2020 election.”

In other words, Trump wants to force states to completely upend the way they conduct elections just months before the midterms or risk losing critical security funding.

Miles Taylor, a former top security official in Trump’s first administration, wrote about what this new policy would mean for those states. 

“I can tell you, firsthand, that those are the funds used to protect you against terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, mass shootings, weaponized drones, and more,” he wrote. “I will say it again. If you live in a Blue State, Donald Trump and his team are threatening to put your life in danger if your state doesn’t give him control over elections.”

Right now, Trump has reached the most desperate and unpredictable moment of his presidency so far. And that means he is also at his most dangerous.

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Allison Detzel contributed.