This election is a referendum on Trump. That’s very
bad news for him.
Opinion by
Columnist
September 10, 2020 at 3:41 p.m. CDT
Two
months before the election, this race has become what President Trump most
fears: a referendum on his chaotic, incompetent, dishonest leadership and his
lack of a moral compass. If this is the rubric voters use to choose between the
candidates, Trump and the Republican Party are in serious trouble.
Even
after four numbing years of Trumpism, the revelations in Bob Woodward's
forthcoming book, "Rage," are
shocking. Back in February, when Trump was telling Americans that
covid-19 was no big deal and comparing it to the seasonal flu, he already knew,
as he told Woodward,
that it was "more deadly than even your strenuous flus" and very
easily transmitted. In March, he admitted "playing it down," publicly
and falsely reassuring the nation that the pandemic would somehow magically go
away, counting on confidence to supersede reality.
Trump
cannot claim he was misquoted or taken out of context, since Woodward has him
on tape. And he has a lot of Trump's words to quote: a total of 18 interviews,
including several late-night phone calls from the president. Trump's only defense
so far is that he didn't want to create a panic. But there is an obvious
difference between calmly delivering bad news or rallying the public's will to
fight and deliberately withholding information that could prevent severe
illness and death.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt said "the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself," he was optimistically steeling the
nation to claw its way out of the Great Depression.
When Winston Churchill declared,
"We shall fight on the beaches," he was modeling defiance against a
powerful enemy. When Trump said,
"It's going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month" —
predicting the virus would disappear in April — he was just telling a lie.
Despite
knowing how deadly the virus could be, Trump failed to develop and implement a
national strategy to minimize its toll. He hectored governors to reopen
businesses in their states too soon, and he continues to badger schools to
commence full-time, in-person instruction, ready or not. The result has
been nearly 190,000 deaths,
many of which could have been avoided.
This is
the record that Trump does not want voters to consider. He would rather have us
square off in a race-fueled culture war.
The
bombshells from Woodward's book exploded just days after a stunning article in the
Atlantic by the magazine's editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, describing
Trump's sneering disdain for the war dead who, as Abraham Lincoln said,
"gave the last full measure of devotion" to their country. The
president thinks they were losers.
According
to the unnamed sources Goldberg quotes, Trump seemed unable to comprehend why
anyone would make such a sacrifice. The former Trump administration officials
who were reportedly present when the commander in chief made the disparaging
comments — and who would be in a position to dispute Goldberg's reporting if it
were not accurate — have remained eloquently silent. Other outlets, including Fox News, say they have confirmed
Goldberg's reporting.
This is
the character, or lack thereof, that Trump does not want voters to ponder. He
would rather have us argue about whether Joe Biden, who has been in the public
eye for five decades, is some kind of closet Marxist.
Politically
speaking, Trump is not actually made of Teflon. Mud does stick to him. The
problem is that by now he is covered with so much muck that the latest filth
often blends in with the rest. What we have learned over the past week stands
out, however — and will be difficult to ignore.
Trump's
hardcore base probably will not care, though it is hard for me to understand
how any Gold Star family or anyone who has lost a loved one to covid-19 could
fail to have second thoughts. But supporters who are more loosely attached to
the president — who might like his judicial appointees, or who applaud his tax
cuts — now have more evidence of Trump's gross unfitness that they somehow must
rationalize away.
Trump
is not just unorthodox, impolite or uncouth. He is not an omelet-maker who
necessarily breaks eggs. He is inept, immoral and dangerously dishonest — and
must be defeated for the good of the nation.
The
more that voters see this election as a statement about what kind of person
Trump is, and what kind of leader he has been, the more likely that Biden will
be our next president.