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The campaign to re-elect Donald Trump president has gone all-in on a remarkable strategy: they're going to double down on the stupid. Call it the greatest attempt at gaslighting ever, we suppose. The idea is to just pretend the coronavirus pandemic doesn't exist and continue to ignore any evidence to the contrary. And they actually expect this to be a big winner for them with the voters.
You can call it many things. Shooting one's self in the foot. Being hoist on your own petard. A European might call it an "own goal." But whatever metaphor you choose, it seems Donald Trump is actively sabotaging his own chances of re-election. Trump, in classic Trumpian style, has chosen to make a political statement about an issue that really has nothing to do with politics at all. And it's beginning to work among his most fervent followers. The only problem for Trump is that this means it is also working against his chances of re-election.
Even though both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have been casting their ballots by mail for the past few elections, Trump decided it would be a dandy idea to demonize voting by mail. But due to the overwhelming likelihood that this November's elections are going to be radically different in nature than previous elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, this means that the Republican Party is being hamstrung in its efforts to get its voters to safely vote by mail. Trump may not just be killing his own chances of being re-elected, but he may also bring a whole bunch of other Republicans down with him as well.
The Trump campaign is setting itself up for a rather large tactical failure. Whether the campaign fails overall in November is a bigger question, of course, but they seem to already be failing in one crucial aspect of any successful presidential campaign, and that is to define your opponent early. This worked wonders for Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and it also did the trick for George W. Bush against John Kerry. Throughout the spring and summer, the incumbent president successfully defined their challenger in a very negative way with the public.
The more time goes on, the more evidence stacks up that Donald Trump is simply incapable of performing the basic duties of a United States president. What is the president's job, boiled down? To process incoming problems and information, make policy decisions, and then implement those decisions. Trump fails spectacularly on all three legs of this stool on a regular basis. But this week has been really notable, due to Trump's utter failure to defend the Constitution of the United States (and the country at large, of course) against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.
As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?
In the midst of what can only be called a non-traditional presidential campaign, Joe Biden might want to consider breaking another political tradition, by releasing a very early shortlist of possible nominees to his cabinet. Such a move is not without risks, of course, which is one of the reasons why traditionally it just isn't done. But the benefits may outweigh such risks in this particular campaign.
President Donald Trump seems to have settled on a theme for his campaign, as he doubles down on blatant racism. Think that's too strongly put? We don't. Consider the following, from just the past week:
Is anyone else out there ready for some cheerful and perhaps even downright rosy-tinted optimism? I for one certainly think it's time to write a column filled with positive vibes, and I've got just the subject. While triple crises rage throughout America (medical, economic, and injustice-based) and while Donald Trump's poll numbers continue to sink like a stone, there have been some interesting developments in another important political arena. The Senate is now not only "in play" for Democrats in November, the possibility now exists that they won't just win back the chamber, but win it back in a big blue wave that puts them firmly in control.
This week, an American president ordered the violent removal of peaceful protesters -- who were doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble, speak, and petition the government for redress -- from a public park so that he could then walk across the park and hold up a borrowed Bible for a photo opportunity with both the Secretary of Defense and (clad in battle fatigues) the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Afterward, the Trump White House immediately issued a propaganda video of the event. Later that evening, a military helicopter clearly marked with a red cross took offensive action against the protesters (which is banned by the Geneva Conventions, and is now under investigation). Later still, the president and all his enablers in the White House lied through their teeth about the entire incident, repeatedly. At week's end, we learned of another affront to the Constitution by the Trump administration, when it was revealed that federal law enforcement had unconstitutionally seized a shipment of cloth face masks created by a Black Lives Matter affiliate, and the only possible reason they did so was that the Department of Justice apparently didn't like the messages displayed on the masks (which read: "Stop killing black people," and: "Defund police").