"The Big Idea cannot fail, it can only be failed."

“The staffers tried to sort out how, with fewer than 100 days until the election, they had unknowingly advertised official campaign events that didn’t exist to potential campaign volunteers in the most important swing state in the country” https://t.co/ocDz3tXNtL

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) August 16, 2020

The president recently asked a second senior White House official to review Biden’s performance after watching him speak. “I said, ‘I think if we lose to this guy, we’re really pathetic,’ ” the official told me. “The president said to me, ‘I’m not losing to Joe Biden.’ I said, ‘You’re losing to Joe Biden.’ ”

Trump thinks he's the "Big Idea."

This article, BTW, is mostly gossip, campaign gossip, but it's not entirely without interest:

Looking back, Parscale wished he’d been able to stop the Tulsa rally, widely understood to have been his project — to tell the president it was a fucking terrible idea. But getting through to Trump was not easy. The president’s wings had been clipped by the pandemic, and no regular rallies meant no regular contact with crowds, which meant no way for him to know for sure that he had a feel of things. More than numbers, internal or external, he relied on his intuition, a sixth sense of sorts — a short finger not only on the pulse but on the beating heart itself — that made him an entertainer before it made him president. In 2016, one campaign official told me that this was how decisions were made, with orders that started with the words, “I feel like this is where we should go. I’m hearing this out there. Let’s do it that way.” Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign, said that he is in almost constant contact with Trump as Election Day nears, and that one of the things Trump most reliably asks about is “what the supporters are doing, what the activity is around the country, what the on-the-ground feel is for how the race is going — in particular, juxtaposed by the public perception of how the race is going.” Parscale felt pressured to give him what he wanted, so he did.

That doesn't explain why Trump insists all is well and the economy is back and coronavirus is no big deal.  But it does explain that he's never been connected to reality, and why reality is now eating his shorts.