SE Cupp rips Trump's 'spectacular collapse' under weight of current chal... / OPINION A Presidency Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

OPINION

A Presidency Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

The president has worsened his position with his profligate tweeting, unpresidential conduct and refusal or inability to step up to the magisterial aspect of his office.

By RICH LOWRY

06/10/2020 08:08 PM EDT

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/10/a-presidency-is-a-terrible-thing-to-waste-312289

President Trump is in the midst of a polling swoon largely of his own making.

Gallup has his approval rating at 39 percent, and his rating in the RealClearPolitics average is down to 42 percent

It’s true that events have taken a hand—a pandemic with a death toll of more than 100,000, a sharp recession, double-digit unemployment and civil unrest would be the horsemen of the apocalypse for any incumbent president.

Experiencing all of these in one term would make for treacherous political weather; experiencing them in the space of about three months is a perfect storm.

And yet the president has worsened his position with his profligate tweeting, unpresidential conduct and refusal or inability to step up to the magisterial aspect of his office.

None of this is new, but it acquires a different significance playing out against a backdrop of crisis, when the stakes and emotions are elevated, rather than a backdrop of peace and prosperity, when nothing much seems to matter.

There is a substantive case to be made against the Trump administration on the coronavirus, but it would have been difficult to keep the pandemic from reaching our shores, and leaders in other hard-hit Western countries got bounces in polling.

The president’s poor ratings on coronavirus have much to do with his overexposure, squabbling with reporters and meandering performances at his news briefings—all of which was avoidable, and indeed was eventually avoided by stopping the briefings.

Quite often, Trump has blown the easy stuff, while his team has performed admirably dealing with the more nettlesome issues of governance.

Sounding sober and factual from the presidential podium at a time of crisis should be easy—any halfway accomplished conventional politician could do a pretty good job at it.

Allocating ventilators, acquiring personal protective equipment and ramping up testing on a rapid basis in the middle of a pandemic when the traditional apparatus of government isn’t up to it, is hard—and the Trump team has managed it over the past couple of months, through clever problem-solving and innovative public-private partnerships.

The press doesn’t tell that story, and regardless, it gets overwhelmed by constant drama emanating from the Oval Office.

In the case of George Floyd, there’s nothing Trump could have done to stop his killing. He’s not the Minnesota governor or the Minneapolis mayor. He has zero say in how the city runs its police department or disciplines its officers. Nor did he have any control over the subsequent protests and riots in any city outside of Washington.

So the disapproval of his performance seems mostly based on how he has conducted himself and what he has tweeted (the conspiracy theory about the 75-year-old Buffalo protester being the latest example), not anything he did substantively to affect the situation one way or the other.

He’s actually said the right things about Floyd's killing, and he was set up to do some triangulating on policing given that he signed a criminal justice reform bill into law.

But his philosophy is always to give better than he gets and never to back down, so he has little appreciation for the occasional need for defensive politics—to play against type, to preempt arguments against him, to couple a hard line with a soft sentiment.

As one of the most compelling showmen of our time, his metric for success is different than that of standard politicians or political operatives. He wants to draw eyeballs. He wants to be discussed. He wants coverage, good, bad, or indifferent.

The St. John’s Church visit might have been poorly thought out and politically counterproductive, but who can doubt that it was a jaw-dropping spectacle? The clip of him holding up the Bible will be replayed for years.

By this standard, the period between mid-March and mid-April was an astonishing success—as Axios has pointed out, Trump dominated Joe Biden on cable news mentions, social media interactions, web traffic and Google search.

But it hasn’t helped his political standing, indeed the opposite.

Trump is never going to change, but in the 2016 campaign, he was able to adjust and modulate at moments of peril just enough to see it through.

This is one of those moments of peril.

Losing to Biden would would mean Trump’s populist-nationalist movement would be saddled with trying to explain why its erstwhile champion was just a one-term president.

It would mean all the changes he pursued through administrative action, whether EPA regulation or the Betsy DeVos change to Title IX rules on campus, would be subject to reversal.

It would mean, assuming Democrats take the Senate, too, that his historic round of judicial appointments would immediately begin to be counteracted.

It would mean that immigration enforcement would be drastically curtailed.

And it would mean that Trump would suffer the highest-profile, most consequential and crushing defeat that it is possible to experience in American national life, one that will become part of the annals of American political history and inevitably color how his presidency is viewed.

Of course, nothing is inevitable.

Trump has kept his base, a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for victory.

It’s only June, not October.

He’s still relatively strong on the economy.

And the radicalism of the Democratic Party is providing him targets.

But he has created his own headwind.

If he loses in November, it won’t because he pursued a big legislative reform that was a bridge too far politically. It won’t be because he adopted a creative and unorthodox policy mix that alienated his own side. It won’t even be because he was overwhelmed by events, challenging though they’ve been.

It will mostly be because he took his presidency and needlessly drove into the ground, 280 characters at a time.