Is Trump trying to lose?

I don’t have hard evidence, but I keep thinking Donald Trump must be a mole, that he must be an undercover agent working for the other side. I don’t mean Putin and the Kremlin. I mean Biden and the Democrats.

This uneasy suspicion about our former president has become a reoccurring thing with me. In this space in 2022 I wrote about how Donald Trump was the best friend the Democrats ever had, no matter what nasty things they say about him in public.

At the time, I wrote: “I wondered whose side he was on when during his chaotic presidency he managed to rile up enough voters and get them so fed up with his combative style that they turned on him and turned the House, the Senate and the White House over to the Democrats.”

And now, here we go again. Donald Trump is back at it, doing things no candidate would do if he really wants to win a general election.

Take his victory speech in New Hampshire. He won by 11 points. But instead of being happy about it, instead of trying to unify the party and win over undecided voters, he threatened to exile anyone who wouldn’t kiss his ring.

“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful,’” Trump told his supporters. “Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She [Nikki Haley] did very poorly, actually.”

And then, sounding a little like Richard Nixon when the walls started closing in, he added, “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”

In Iowa, he had said, “We’re going to make this country so successful again, I’m not going to have time for retribution.” Really? Then what does “I get even” mean?

And why go after Nikki Haley if she did “very poorly, actually”? Why not ignore her and move on? Why needlessly alienate her voters? Trump explained his thinking. With a straight face, he said, “I felt I should do this because I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t do that.”

This is rich, funny actually — the part about how “in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit.” Getting away with bullshit — or at least trying to — is what Donald Trump has been doing ever since he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower (and actually, long before that). But that’s a subject for another time.

And then, at the victory speech, he said, “And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.”

Mistake, Donald. Big mistake. You don’t make fun of the way women dress. They take it personally. No one likes being humiliated, especially by a famous guy on national TV. When a woman I know (my wife) heard him take that shot at Nikki Haley’s dress, this usually calm, easygoing, under-control woman let loose with a four-letter expletive aimed right at Donald Trump’s image on television — followed by the word “you.” I’m guessing she wasn’t the only woman offended by Trump’s cheap shot at Haley’s dress.

And on his social media site, Trump announced that, “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our country.” Birdbrain? Not the best way to convince women, especially college-educated suburban women, that they should vote for you. And without them, the road to the White House is filled with potholes.

Then he added, “Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”

This raises a question: Is he trying to lose — or what? I mean, throwing a temper tantrum isn’t the best way to win over Republicans who still aren’t sure which way they’ll go in November. Joe Biden needs all the help he can get if he’s got a shot at winning this time around — and Donald Trump is providing more help than a Republican should.

Just between us, do I really think Trump is a mole? Do I really believe he’s a secret agent intentionally trying to help Joe Biden win in November? Let’s put it this way: Even if he isn’t actually working for the Biden campaign, he’s doing a pretty good job pretending he is.

I think they call that a distinction without a difference.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.