The plaster keeps flaking off

Trump has been staying home lately.

He spoke at a friendly think tank conference held at Mar-a-Lago and a for-profit gala, also at Mar-a-Lago. He had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with two prominent antisemites, drawing widespread criticism, including from top Republicans.

Conference at Mar-a-Lago, gala at Mar-a-Lago, dinner with anti-semites at Mar-a-Lago. Festive but samey.

He’s done some video appearances and some fundraising and some dropping in, but it was all still at Mar-a-Lago. No heads of state to push out of the way, no royalty to bore, no rallies in half-empty arenas.

The early announcement [that he’s running again] — which advisers said was planned in part to clear the field of potential rivals and help Trump get ahead of a potential indictment — appears to have failed or backfired on both fronts. Rather than declining to run against Trump, a crowd of other Republicans have become more vocal about their possible moves to challenge him for the nomination. And Trump’s formal declaration of his candidacy prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to oversee the federal criminal probes circling the former president into his campaign’s efforts to submit phony electors in 2020 and into the mishandling of sensitive government secrets at Mar-a-Lago.

Maybe we finally get to watch him taken apart bit by bit over the next few months.

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