It has occurred to me that the hype around Donald Trump has diminished exponentially here in Nebraska. I am still pretty certain that if the election were to be held today there would still be a majority of those who would vote for him. When the alternative is a Democrat, Trump will still get their vote. He really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and that would not impact many a devout Republican.

What has changed since 2016 and 2020 is evidenced in the lack of visible evidence that Trump is running. As I drove up here from Omaha on Sunday I didn’t see even one Trump 2024 sign. Not one. The fields and small towns once littered with MAGA signage were empty. It was incredibly different 8 and 4 years ago.

The promotional political focus here seems to have shifted to the local mayoral election here in my home town, state legislative candidates and the US Senate race. Really, if I didn’t know it, I wouldn’t think we were actually voting for POTUS this year. And what else has occurred to me is that as we have eaten out in restaurants, I have seen just one Trump 2024 hat and heard virtually NO ONE talking about him or Joe Biden. This is not the Nebraska I grew up in during an election year.

This reality is not good for Trump. And sadly, this reality is also not good for Nebraska OR America either. It’s as though the average Nebraska Republican is shell shocked and numb. I don’t think the former POTUS being on trial has all that much to do with this reality. It seems to me that hitching the wagon to Trump has simply exhausted the Republican Party. Add to that the theatrics in Congress this last year and the lack of cohesion with no official platform to support and it’s as if no one cares anymore.

The strong Republicans who knew what it would take to govern and those that understood our Constitution remain but perhaps they are in mourning as a result of the takeover by the theatrical and substance-less. Still strong in their beliefs, Mitt Romney, Lynne Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continue to speak out and attempt to re-educate the party but they too have realized that the party has been swallowed whole by the greatest fish in the sea.

Like in the biblical story of Jonah, the GOP is stuck in its pathological narcissist’s belly. Unlike Jonah, who repented and promised God he would do what he needed to, the GOP continues to be consumed by the reality of life in relationship with a pathological narcissist. Ask any person in a marriage with someone as ill as this man is and, if they are still alive, they will tell you that it is first crazy making and then if you escape before you are nearly killed, you will spend the rest of your life recovering from the damage done to your soul.

Trump is going to always be connected to millions but as is typical for someone like him, the connections are hairlike and easily broken. In the same way his wives and children have disappeared from his presence on the campaign trail and now in court, the rest of his people are slowly doing the same. The real and lived world of the narcissist is a very lonely one.

It is very likely that as Trump’s MAGA people busy themselves with their own lives and ignore his, we can sincerely expect that the man’s behavior is going to take on entirely new dimensions of rage induced sleaze. The judge’s gag order is going to get him banned from the room and in a jail cell. I don’t see any other path in front of him because he is so ill. He cannot submit to anyone but his own self. I am in full expectation that this will get really ugly. I mean really ugly. It’s a certainty when confronting a narcissist with proof of his bad behavior in a public setting.

I will be happy to be proven wrong. Sort of.