GRUMPY TRUMPY

Trump Insiders Privately Confess Truth About His Aging

White House operatives have noted wild mood swings.

President Donald Trump is rapidly turning into a cranky old man, according to White House insiders.

Issues are mounting for the 80-year-old. His hand-picked Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, raised the benchmark interest rate, despite Trump’s demands for rates of 1 percent or lower, while the Supreme Court blocked the president’s attempt to impose new restrictions on mail-in ballots, and a federal judge again barred the Kennedy Center from putting his name on the building.

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Meanwhile, Florida Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar turned on him and warned that Trump’s immigration enforcement has gone “too far,” saying Hispanic voters who helped elect him “feel betrayed,” while gasoline has climbed to about $4.48 a gallon, roughly $1.24 higher than a year ago, and diesel has hit a record high amid the energy squeeze.

All of this comes as the midterms are less than 43 days away.

Some advisers say Trump can still be in a good mood, according to Axios. However, others describe a tendency to grow irate quickly. They also say that Trump is beginning to look and act like an octogenarian.

In July, Trump’s aides described him as even more “erratic” than usual, according to The New York Times.

His struggle to find a “face-saving” exit from the Iran conflict has reportedly left him increasingly frustrated and, in turn, more prone to abruptly switching up his positions.

In August, aides admitted that their boss had little interest in traveling across the country to prop up weak GOP candidates for the midterms, according to CNN. In early September, Trump hosted an unprecedented midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, expecting candidates to come to him.

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At the end of the last month, White House insiders told The Wall Street Journal that Trump is more interested in his own legacy than in improving the economy or ending his war with Iran.

A senior administration official told the paper that Trump has entered “legacy mode” and is “fixated on how he will be remembered by future generations.” Aides say Trump fears his presidency will be remembered similarly to “past occupants of the White House he views as weak, such as Jimmy Carter.”

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a confidant of the president, told the Journal that Trump is “one of the handful of presidents who thinks on an entirely historic scale.”

He noted that Trump is obsessed with how he is perceived.

“He wants to be consequential. He wants this to matter,” Gingrich said. “He wants to be the kind of president who people say, you know, it mattered that he was president.”

Trump’s fixation on vanity projects is a problem for other Republicans who want him to spend his time and the $400 million war chest his super-PAC has accumulated, helping the party hold onto slim majorities in the House and Senate this fall.

But kitchen table issues matter to voters who will head to the voting booths in November.

Multiple polls put Trump’s approval rating well below 40 percent, with some dropping as low as 32 percent. Support for his economy is fading, coupled with disdain for the war in Iran.

“We’re in a bad political environment,” Michigan GOP strategist Jason Roe told Politico. “These elections are a referendum on our government. [Trump] is the head of the government.”

The White House was contacted for comment, and spokesman Davis Ingle came back with a lengthy rant about sleepy Trump’s apparent “sharpness” and “unmatched energy.”

“Only the glue-sniffing degenerates at the failing Daily Beast would obsessively push baseless conspiracy theories about President Trump, and that’s because they suffer from a severe, crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has completely rotted their peanut-sized brains,” he added.

Ingle, 32, is a communications graduate of Florida’s Southeastern University, where his father, Kent Ingle, is president. SEU boasts that more than two-thirds of its students attend online or through extension courses at 200 “partner sites,” which do not have to be accredited.

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