"And he's going to get re-elected."
Not a day goes by without several friends - Republicans as well as Democrats - saying that to me. It's the blunt coda to a bloated recitation of Donald Trump's failures during this pandemic. It's a whimper of surrender following a scream of disbelief.
Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he's going to get re-elected.
Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, but it's at least as possible that he's self-destructing before our eyes.
Maybe a toasty beam of sunlight is all that we need to wipe out the coronavirus? What if we just injected disinfectant into our veins? He floated both of those fantasies Thursday, when he might as well have stepped up to the lectern in a tin foil hat. They're the ramblings of a dejected, disoriented and increasingly desperate man.
Is he following some gut instinct or just flailing? I vote for the latter. Lately he has contradicted himself at a whole new pace and to a whole new degree, and he has undercut his own party's talking points.
As Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reported in The New York Times, Republicans have developed a strategy to evade any responsibility for Trump's response to the pandemic by blaming and demonizing China. "But there is a potential impediment to the GOP plan - the leader of the party himself," Martin and Haberman wrote, noting that Trump has "muddied Republican efforts to fault China" by continuing to curry favor with President Xi Jinping. That tack certainly complicates Republicans' efforts to paint Biden as a stooge of the Chinese. They can't succeed with their new nickname for him, Beijing Biden, if Tiananmen Trump rings truer.
I know, I know: He's Trump. He carries the secret weapon of his spectacular shamelessness, which means that he'll resort to ploys and lies that even the most unscrupulous of his opponents wouldn't attempt. He'll destroy what he must so long as he gets to rule over the wreckage.
And the usual laws of nature don't apply to him. He was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the crotch. Didn't matter. He got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Still he won. If he wasn't exactly found guilty of elaborate coordination with the Russians, he was certainly shown to be open to it. Onward he rolled, and he kept rolling past his gross abuse of power in dealing with Ukraine and his richly deserved impeachment for it.
He's Houdini; he's Scheherazade; he's all the escape artists of history and fiction rolled into one and swirled with golden-orange topping. He's lucky beyond all imagining. But here's the thing about luck: It runs out.
There's incessant talk of how fervent his base is, but the many Americans appalled by him have a commensurate zeal. For every Sean Hannity, there's a Rachel Maddow. For every Kellyanne Conway, a George Conway. She and her ilk may be wily in their defense of the president. He and his tribe are even better in their evisceration of him.
And what of the diaspora of refugees from the Trump administration: people like Rick Bright, the government scientist who says he was just stripped of his leading role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine because he wouldn't parrot Trump's cockamamie talking points? I predict that as November nears, more and more exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president's hall of mirrors.
Don't tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder to stomach. Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.
The New York Times