For all his bombast, Trump is plummeting – financially, legally and politically

‘Substitute Stormy Daniels for Dorothy and the only things missing from this tableau are Toto, the little dog, ruby slippers and Kansas.’ Photograph: Robin Rayne/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Donald Trump is doing his best Wizard of Oz imitation. These days, Trump is not looking like the “winner” he needs voters to believe him to be. Like the title character in L Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy and the 1939 movie, there is less there than meets the eye. The 45th president’s lead in the polls evaporates while his cash stash shrinks.

His upcoming felony fraud trial in Manhattan looms. For the record, he is zero for three in his bids to adjourn the trial, and lawyers are expensive.

At the same time, the stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group – his eponymous meme stock, DJT – has plummeted this week. “DJT stock is down again,” announced Barron’s on Thursday. “Trump’s stake in Truth Social parent has taken a hit.”

Elsewhere a headline blared: “Trump’s ‘DJT’ stock dives to lowest close since Ron DeSantis dropped out”. Reminder, Trump is a guy whose businesses are no stranger to bankruptcy or allegations of fraud. He leaves wreckage in his wake.

The spirit of Trump University remains alive. Like life in Oz, so much in Trump World is illusory.

Meanwhile, Trump’s attempts to bond New York state’s $454m judgment have run into a legal roadblock. The purported bond posted to avoid enforcement pending appeal may be legally insufficient. Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, demands clarification. Whether the paperwork will be sustained will be decided at a court hearing later this month.

If the court finds the bond to be insufficient or invalid, James may be able to immediately seek to collect what the state is owed. Financial humiliation set against the backdrop of the campaign is something that Trump can ill afford.

For the record, he has already posted a $91m bond to stave off enforcement in the second E Jean Carroll defamation case. His assets are getting tied up, his liquidity ebbs. To him, image is almost everything.

At the same time, abortion has re-emerged as a campaign issue, to the horror of the presumptive Republican nominee and his minions. The death of Roe v Wade cost the Republican party its “red wave” in the 2022 midterms. This time, it may lead to another Trump loss and Hakeem Jeffries of Queens wielding the speaker’s gavel in the US House of Representatives.

Hell hath no fury like suburban moms and their daughters. The last thing they need is a thrice-married libertine seventysomething with a penchant for adult film stars and Playboy models telling them how to raise their kids or meddling in their personal lives.

When a guy who hawks Bibles for a side-hustle refuses to say whether any of his partners ever had an abortion, it’s time to roll your eyes and guard your wallet.

“Such an interesting question,” he replied to Maureen Dowd in 2016, when asked about his days as a swinging single. “So what’s your next question?”

For the moment anyway, the party faithful ignore Trump’s pleas to rectify the decision of Arizona’s highest court to allow the criminalization of all abortions except when the life of the mother is endangered. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature refused to revoke the 1864 law in the middle of this latest controversy.

In case anyone forgot, once upon a time Trump himself had called for the criminalization of abortion. There had to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions, Trump said at a 2016 town hall.

Likewise, Kari Lake – a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Trump acolyte and frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago – had demanded that her state enact an abortion regime that copied Texas’s draconian law.

Not any more. Live by Dobbs, die by Dobbs. Arizona is the new ground zero of this election. This is what states’ rights looks like.

Having feasted on Hunter Biden’s depredations, it is once again time for the Republican party to stare into the mirror and cringe. Trump is more Caligula and Commodus than Cyrus, the biblical paradigm of a virtuous heathen king.

For all of Joe Biden’s missteps and mistakes, his candidacy is demonstrating unexpected vitality. Then again, he is running against a defeated former president who lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton and again four years later.

Trump’s lead is now a matter of fractions. According to Real Clear Politics, he is now ahead by a microscopic two-10ths of 1%. Indeed, Reuters’s latest poll shows the 46th president with a four-point lead up from a single percentage point a month ago. Said differently, Trump’s campaign is in retrograde.

Joe Biden is in the hunt and Donald Trump is looking like the old man behind the curtain. Substitute Stormy Daniels for Dorothy and the only things missing from this tableau are Toto, the little dog, ruby slippers and Kansas.

Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992