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The whole world is watching America’s failure
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Trump likes to say that after he was elected, respect for the United States was restored, but the truth is precisely the opposite. Even before the pandemic, Trump couldn’t have done more to degrade America’s standing than if that was his explicit goal. Not even George W. Bush, whose disastrous invasion of Iraq drew condemnation across the globe, did as much to undermine our image abroad.
Just the fact that the United States would elect such a vulgar, ignorant, corrupt buffoon was bad enough. But now our government’s incompetence is helping cause the bodies to pile up — and, it would be reasonable for other countries to worry, potentially affecting their own efforts to contain the virus. While international travel has been drastically reduced, it won’t be shut down forever. If you were watching what’s happening in the U.S. — where we have 2.2 million cases of covid-19 and almost 120,000 deaths, more than twice as much as any other country on both counts — would you be eager to welcome U.S. visitors?
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We figured out when the MAGA crowd thought America was great
I have always wondered when the MAGA crowd and its Great Leader thought America was great. We know their appeal to disgruntled white voters is an exercise in phony nostalgia and wish fulfillment. Implicit in their slogan is a desire to go back to a time when whites — white men, to be specific — were numerically, politically, economically and culturally unchallenged. But when was this, exactly? 1950? 1920? We might have to go back to the 19th century.
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I am getting the sense that Trump and his followers look back favorably on the Confederacy, the memory of which swells them with pride. (Does Trump know that, in addition to being racists and traitors, they were losers?)
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In the current crisis, every health expert tells us that mask-wearing and social isolation save lives since the disease spreads by aerosols (tiny droplets in the air). Blocking that means of transmission can drive the infection rate down. We can test who still has the virus, trace others a person testing positive has come into contact with and then isolate those people. Pretty basic, right?
Nah, the science-denier in chief says testing is “overrated.” (Don’t people in the White House get tested regularly so they don’t infect him?) Masks are for suckers, or, in Trump’s mind, simply show you disapprove of him. The notion that people would follow medical advice and try to prevent becoming infected or infecting others seems foreign to him.
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The stage is being set for the repudiation of Donald Trump in November
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This is not merely because he has faced dual crises — the pandemic and the protests — that would have tested any president. It is because his reactions to those crises have been among the worst performances by any president. Trump’s eventual rejection by the electorate (if it comes) will be due to his own conscious choices in the face of challenge.
Without the pandemic and protests, Trump had a serious chance of reelection, which is a disturbing commentary on American politics. But this is now like saying that Herbert Hoover would have been a spiffing president without the Great Depression. Trump has been similarly and permanently marked by failure.
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None of Trump’s flailing and dereliction guarantees reelection defeat. It is not possible to reliably predict presidential weather patterns five months in advance. But on the health of our country, and on the unity of our country, Trump has been a peerless failure. If he loses, it will be because he already belongs on the Mount Rushmore of presidential losers.
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S.E. Cupp: Trump’s salvation can only come from his playing on fear
There are endless reasons to believe President Donald Trump will be unceremoniously kicked out of the White House in November after a four-year experiment in utter lunacy.
The most compelling is this administration’s flagrant incompetence in the hands of one of the worst managers in political history. From bumbling a global pandemic to exploiting and stoking racial divisions, destroying foreign alliances and getting played by foreign enemies, failing to deliver on basic campaign promises and losing the House to Democrats, Trump has failed presidenting at nearly every level.
There’s also, of course, the corruption, abuses of power, law breaking and lies; the cronyism, nepotism, racism, narcissism and nihilism; the unhinged and erratic behavior, the late-night rage-tweeting, uncontrolled name-calling, pathological insecurity and self-destructive foot-shooting. Trump’s obviously deteriorating mental health is reason enough to keep him far away from our nuclear arsenal.
Indeed, Democrats and their nominee, Joe Biden, should feel very good about their chances in November, and a slew of recent polls put Trump behind Biden by double digits nationally.
But he’s still got one advantage, the same one that helped propel him to the White House in 2016, and one that could get him reelected if the left keeps steamrolling over it:
Resentment.
Don’t underestimate the unmitigated power of this raw and ugly emotion — at the very least, it breeds unneighborly contempt. At its worst it breeds racism, class warfare, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and every other kind of corrosive hatred that tears communities apart. And Trump has thrived on it.
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He tweeted, “The Far Left Fake News Media, which had no Covid problem with the Rioters & Looters destroying Democrat run cities, is trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies. Won’t work!”
He’s right — not only won’t it work to shame his supporters, it will likely just embolden them, both now and in November.
But it’s not Trump supporters the left need worry about. It’s the folks on the sidelines of politics, whose real lives don’t revolve around Trump or his opponents, Twitter or cable news fights. For voters who are more worried about their jobs, their schools reopening, getting sick, protecting their families’ health and safety, they’re watching the politicization of public health with whiplash, suspicion, and maybe even a building resentment.
Trump doesn’t deserve a second term. This country quite simply can’t afford one. The majority of Americans agree. But he only needs enough of a minority to believe they have been picked on, ignored, tricked and dismissed to give him one. And if we’re not more careful with our framing of these important issues, we’ll do just that.
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John Bolton is a weasel in a party of weasels
John Bolton is a weasel for not telling the truth about President Trump when it might have mattered — at least, theoretically. In practice, however, Bolton’s coming clean wouldn’t have mattered at all, since Bolton’s fellow weasels — Republican senators — were never going to remove the Head Weasel from office. That was always going to be our job.
I’m using the word “weasel” in the dictionary sense of “a deceitful or treacherous person.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is excepted because he, alone, put duty above party loyalty in voting to convict Trump during his impeachment trial. The rest of the GOP Senate caucus chose to maintain the tragic fiction that Trump is fit to exercise the vast powers of the presidency, even as these cravens know that to be untrue. Imagine how different things might be today if all senators, and not just Democrats and Romney, had upheld the oath they took to judge Trump impartially in his impeachment trial.
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The biggest headline from Bolton’s book seems to be that Trump begged Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win reelection and, in doing so, put his own political interests ahead of the national interest. That would be a shocking revelation about any other U.S. president but not about Trump: He was impeached precisely because he had tried to coerce the president of Ukraine into trying to help him beat former vice president Joe Biden in November.
So what else is new in Bolton’s book? That Trump is “erratic” in his decision-making? Big surprise there. That the president is “stunningly uninformed,” to the point of once asking whether Finland was part of Russia? The president displays his vast ignorance, before cameras or on Twitter, virtually every day. That Trump is fond of authoritarian strongmen and eager to do favors for them in hopes they will reciprocate? Russian President Vladimir Putin could have told you that.
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A pox on both Bolton’s and Trump’s houses. But never forget the Republican Party’s shameful refusal to acknowledge who Trump is and what he’s doing to this country. And look at what the GOP’s fecklessness has cost the nation just in the few months since impeachment.
