snip ...

And last night, as I'll discuss below, was the best rally he'll have on this effort to spin terrible economic news into fool's gold.

There's a story every White House tells itself when the numbers go bad, the headlines go worse, and the boss is hellbent on pretending that pain at the kitchen table is just something made up by the haters on cable news.

"We'll do an issue tour," some bright young comms staffer says. "We'll reset the narrative." The political shop likes it. The Chief of Staff, desperate to breathe, knows that if POTUS is on the road, she can do the real work. The boss, ever convinced of his special bond with the public, wants a little of that road magic; the crowds, the arena, the cheers.

It rarely works for Presidents of either party.

snip ...

It definitely doesn't work if you're the worst President in American history, sporting cripplingly bad poll numbers, the wretched stink of political failure rolling off you like the stink of the town dump on an August afternoon, and a diminished capacity to perform the old whamma-jamma narrative reset that once upon a time was your stock-in-trade.

snip ...

What you actually saw was a freshly botoxed and be-Spanxed Trump, his greasy umber makeup applied with the subtlety of a 1970s hooker, his shellacked, lemur-pelt wig swooping back from his porcine eyes like an Art Deco-era car's fenders stalking on stage and leaning on the podium for 90 minutes of madness.

Indeed!