Is Donald Trump getting worse?

He just might be.

(Donald Trump)\

My working theory on Donald Trump over the past 7 years has been, generally, this: He has always been like he is right now.

Throughout his life as a private citizen — prior to 2015 — he boasted and bullied his way through the New York social scene. He exaggerated his wealth. He made up a character — John Barron — to brag about his exploits to the New York tabloids. He spun his various bankruptcies as victories.

His time in the White House then was simply an extension of that personality. He behaved exactly as he had in the rest of his adult life — entirely unchanged and unaffected by the fact that he was now the president of the United States. (“Modern day presidential!”)

This explanation isn’t meant to absolve Trump of the many excesses he visited upon the campaign trail and the White House. Rather it’s meant to suggest that he really has never changed in his life.

Of late — and especially over the last 72 hours — I have begun to rethink that notion, however. Because, at least to me, it appears as though Trump is sinking deeper and deeper into wild conspiracy theories and just plain nonsense — even as he looks more and more likely to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Consider:

• Trump said that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley had committed treason and could have been punished by death for reaching out to the Chinese after January 6 to reassure them that the president was not planning to attack them.

• Trump suggested that NBC and MSNBC should be investigated for “treason” — and said he would do so once he was back in the White House

• Trump said that Pennsylvania’s move to automatic voter registration would be “a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!”

• Trump told Congressional Republicans that “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” — in regards the looming government shutdown

And then there was this, um, riff during an appearance in South Carolina on Monday:

“You have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat. There has only been one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years. But on the other hand their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up on shore. I saw this weekend three of them came up. You wouldn’t see it once a year. Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”

Like, what? (You will be stunned to learn that, in, fact, there is no evidence that windmills are making whales “crazy.”)

Now, it’s always difficult to assess, exactly and in any way scientifically, whether Trump’s recent rants, claims and conspiracy theories are fundamentally more, well, out there, than stuff he has said in the past.

After all, this is a man who claimed that Ted Cruz’s father may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And who said that the 2020 election was fraudulent. And that there were millions of illegal votes cast in the 2016 election.

So…..

What I am suggesting here is not that Trump is “losing it” or mentally slipping. I am no doctor and won’t try to diagnose him. (Plus, he took that cognition test!)

Instead what I would suggest is happening is that Trump is increasingly a) detached from any semblance of reality and b) surrounded now by ONLY people who affirm his worst instincts.

Trump has always lived in a bubble of his own making but the presidency — and his frontrunning status in the current GOP primary — has only heightened his isolation.

He now only interacts with people who adore him — and affirm him. He has heavily limited his appearances on the campaign trail and cut down significantly on the number of interviews he gives to mainstream media outlets.

This is, at least in part, strategic. Trump is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination and is running what amounts to a Rose Garden strategy to win. But it has the added effect of isolating him even further, allowing him to go deeper and deeper down conspiracy rabbit holes and extreme rhetoric.

For me, all of this is rightly understood as a preview of what a Trump second term would look like. Remember that Trump spent at least part of his first term trying to appease the establishment forces within the GOP. He appointed Reince Priebus, a former RNC chair, as his chief of staff. He named Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. He chose Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense. And so on.

There would be none of that in a second Trump term. He would choose ONLY loyalists for key roles — whether or not they were fully qualified for those jobs. He would use his power to appoint acting Cabinet secretaries (who don’t require Senate approval). He would, in short, pick up where he left off at the end of his first term.

Which bring us back to the question I posed at the top: Is Donald Trump getting worse?

I would say that he is more and more willing to push limits, to, rhetorically at least, go beyond even where he went in 2016 and 2020. What’s scarier is that I think, more so now than ever, Trump has convinced himself that he is right about, well, everything. Which empowers him to say whatever he thinks on any subject at any time.

Make no mistake: If Trump wins the White House in 2024, his term will be even more radical than what we saw from 2017 to 2021. There will be no strictures on his conduct and no one around him to restrain his worst impulses and instincts. Which, when you consider that he already tried to overturn a free and fair election in 2020, is saying something.