Retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig on Monday warned that Donald Trump is becoming increasingly “desperate” and likely feels the “walls are closing in.”

During an appearance on Nicolle Wallace’s MS NOW show, the George H.W. Bush-appointed jurist, who has become a prominent critic of Trump, likened the president to a trapped wild animal and suggested it should concern both the United States and the wider world.

Pointing to what he sees as growing pushback against the president, amid a cost-of-living crisis, no end in sight to the Iran war, and more, Luttig said: “We all knew that this day would come. We’ve known it for six years, and then we’ve known it for the past 19 or 20 months. Right now, today, the walls are closing in on Donald Trump, the president of the United States.”

Trump “is feeling trapped,” Luttig continued.

“It’s like a wild animal that’s trapped,” who is “desperate today, this week” and “will be desperate between now and the midterm elections and then the certification of the new Congress in January,” he said.

“Desperate like a trapped animal,” Luttig added.

Luttig, who in 2021 advised then-Vice President Mike Pence amid Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, argued that Trump’s current problem “is that he’s being entrapped by America itself and all that America has always been.”

He added, “America has been the envy of the world and the beacon of freedom and liberty to the world for 250 years, until Donald Trump assumed the presidency and America is no longer that at all.” Then he noted that Trump has “attacked all that is America.”

But “now America is slowly fighting back,” he said. “The walls are closing in on him, and he is desperate at this point. That should worry all of us. And it should worry the world.”

Wallace then punctured the ominous tone, joking: “It’s the image of a wild animal I picture more of, like a manatee, than a cheetah.”

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