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Trump demanded that Republicans shut down the government unless the continuing resolution contained a measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and the measure was widely seen as an attempt to suppress voting. Trump was unable to command Republican loyalty on this issue as he did earlier this year when he insisted Republicans kill the bipartisan border bill.

That recognition of his slipping power might have been behind his hastily announced press conference this afternoon at Trump Tower in New York, a press conference best described as the September 10 presidential debate 2.0.

Trump reiterated his vision of the United States as a hellscape. He insisted that the nation’s booming economy is actually hemorrhaging jobs, that the FBI statistics showing crime falling are all lies, and that inflation, which has fallen close enough to the target of 2% that the Fed recently began to lower interest rates, is at an all-time high.

Trump reserved his greatest rage for the ABC debate moderators who, he complained, fact-checked him after agreeing not to—“I want an apology,” he said—and for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. To her he attributed what he insists is a flood of undocumented immigrants drowning states in a welter of crime, although we know immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans. He recounted in some detail a number of horrific rapes he claimed were committed by immigrants. He did so apparently with no self-consciousness about his own liability for sexual assault that the presiding judge said would commonly be understood as rape, although his focus on rape could have been an attempt to push back on the the recent spate of ads by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC featuring woman who claim Trump sexually assaulted them.

Are these signs of obvious desperation the beginning of the end for trump?