Injections of Bleach? Beams of Light? Trump Is
Self-Destructing Before Our Eyes
The notion that he is bound for four more years is
pure superstition.
Frank Bruni
By Frank
Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
April 24,
2020
2065
“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.
With that
refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair.
But
somewhere along the way, we started to confuse a coping mechanism with reasoned
analysis. We began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.
It isn’t.
While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, 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 on 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.
As Katie
Rogers and Annie Karni reported in The Times, the president feels isolated and
embattled and is panicked that he’ll lose to Joe Biden in November. That state
of mind, they wrote, prompted his executive order to halt the issuing of green
cards, which is precisely the kind of base-coddling measure that he resorts to
“when things feel out of control.”
He can read
the polls as well as the rest of us can, and they show that while he stands
there nightly in the White House briefing room and blows kisses at himself,
Americans aren’t blowing kisses back.
A month ago
there was much ado about a slight uptick in Trump’s job-approval numbers. But
the real story was the slightness: Past presidents had experienced greater
bumps during crises, when Americans tend to rally around their leader. For
Trump there was no such rallying — just a grudging, incremental benefit of the
doubt.
A fleeting
one, too. His uptick quickly took a downturn, reuniting him with his anemic
norm. According to the polling average at FiveThirtyEight as of late Friday
afternoon, 52.5 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance. Only
43.4 percent approve.
True, his
favorability ratings weren’t any better in 2016 — in fact, they were worse —
and he got to the White House regardless. But the dissonance of that victory
could be explained partly by what he represented: a protest against the status
quo. Now he is the status quo, and voters have had a chance to sample the
disruption that he pledged. It tastes a lot like incompetence.
Other
numbers tell an even scarier story for Trump. In all three of the battleground
states that enabled his Electoral College victory three and a half years ago,
he’s currently behind Biden — by 6.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in
Michigan and 2.7 in Wisconsin, according to the averaging of recent polls by
RealClearPolitics. That website also puts him behind by 3.2 points in Florida,
a state he won in 2016 and must win again.
Wisconsin
alone should terrify Trump. In 2018, the Republican governor was ousted by a
Democrat. So were the Republican lieutenant governor and attorney general.
Then, this month, Wisconsin voters replaced a conservative incumbent on the
state’s Supreme Court with a liberal challenger, her victory not just
surprising but resounding. There’s no way to spin that in Trump’s favor.
According
to monthly polling by Gallup, the percentage of Americans who indicated
satisfaction with the way things were going in the country plummeted to 30
percent in mid-April from 42 percent in mid-March. Only twice before in the
past two decades has there been a one-month decline that precipitous.
Maybe this
drop was less a referendum on Trump’s stewardship than a recognition of the
coronavirus’s devastation. But maybe not: Surveys reveal that a significant
majority of Americans believe that he acted too late to stem the virus’s
spread. He’s also out of step with most Americans’ appraisal of what will and
won’t be safe in the immediate future.
Amid
Trump’s dizzyingly mixed messages, he has rooted for a return to some semblance
of normalcy around May 1 and has chided a few governors for overzealous
lockdowns. But in a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research that was released on Wednesday, only 12 percent of Americans said that
the social-distancing and shelter-in-place directives where they live went too
far, while more than double that number — 26 percent — said that the
precautions weren’t stringent enough. Sixty-one percent said that they were on
the mark.
In a
Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, 65 percent of Americans said it
could take until June or later for gatherings of 10 people or more to be safe.
And in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, only 22 percent of Americans supported the
protesters who have been demanding an end to their states’ restrictions, while
60 percent opposed them. President Trump has egged those protesters on.
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 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
G.O.P. 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.
Also,
Trump’s most optimistic pronouncements about imminent deliverance from the
current misery represent a bigger gamble than the many others he has taken. If
he’s wrong, there’s not going to be any hiding it. If he’s reckless, the toll
is Americans’ very lives.
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 three 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. Trump in turn will mutter about the “deep state,” but the
phrase won’t fly when he’s left with such a shallow pool of charlatans around
him — and when he’s making such a repellent fool of himself.
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.
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