When Trump attacks Biden at the debate, his scam will
hit rock bottom
Opinion by
Columnist
September 29, 2020 at 9:47 a.m. CDT
President
Trump successfully markets a fictional version of himself. For years he has
reaped immense rewards from that effort. But then his hallmark combination of
incompetence and narcissistic overconfidence leads him to squander those
rewards on ill-conceived schemes. Yet he continues milking his fictional image
by peddling a series of increasingly transparent scams.
That
works for a time. But then the bill finally comes due.
That is
the story told in the second installment of the New York Times’s deep dive into
Trump’s tax records, which has just been released.
But
this narrative arc also appears increasingly likely to end up defining the
story of Trump’s first and second presidential campaigns — that is, the story
arc of Trump’s presidency.
We are
likely to see this vividly dramatized when Trump appears at the first
presidential debate on Tuesday night.
Trump
is expected to try to rattle Joe Biden by attacking his son Hunter, and some
Trump aides expect him to reiterate his silly claim that Biden is taking
performance-enhancing drugs, CNN reports.
Indeed,
Trump has privately mused that this will be the moment when voters “finally
realize Biden is just not there,” as one Trump adviser told The Post. Trump has
even called on Biden to “agree to a Drug
Test.”
It’s
hard to see how this will help Trump. The new Post-ABC News poll finds Biden
leading in Pennsylvania by 54 percent to 45 percent, which is driven by serious
erosion in Trump’s support among non-college-educated White voters, and by
Biden’s enormous advantage among college-educated Whites.
The
Post poll also finds that 57 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the
coronavirus pandemic, and they trust Biden more to handle it by 54 percent to
40 percent. Biden also has a lopsided advantage on the central issue in the
campaign nationally, where Biden leads by seven points.
Trump
will likely try to offset this by lying about his handling of the virus while
casting Biden as weak on China, its origin country. But we already know from
Trump’s ABC News town hall that he’s utterly incapable of answering basic questions about
his handling of the pandemic, at least when he’s outside the Fox News bubble
and is therefore not permitted to lie with abandon.
And why
would voters Trump has lost over the virus be drawn back to him by half-cocked
rants about Biden’s supposed dementia? Similarly, attacks over the fake Hunter
Biden scandal, which has also crashed and burned, will either be white noise
to swing voters or will likely further alienate them from Trump.
Yet
attacks like the one over dementia have been a mainstay on Fox News for
months, as Matt Gertz shows. Trump hears this echoed
back to him on Fox and likely grows persuaded it’s fearsomely effective, that
he can make things into potent attack lines simply through force of his
withering reality-bending powers.
The
parallels with the narrative arc outlined in the latest Times exposé are eerie.
Trump’s
‘fictional alter ego’
As the
Times reports, Trump’s launch of “The Apprentice” in 2004 was only yet another
example of him creating a “fictional alter ego” that extended him a “financial
lifeline to reinvent himself yet again.”
Even as
Trump claimed on that show that his “negotiating skills” had made his company
“bigger” and “stronger” than ever, he privately recorded losses in his tax
returns for the previous year of nearly $90 million.
Yet
Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” helped Trump spin the
“illusion” of a successful Trump benevolently unlocking the secrets of business
success for the masses, the Times reports, offering this perfect summary:
Mr. Trump’s genius, it
turned out, wasn’t running a company. It was making himself famous —
Trump-scale famous — and monetizing that fame.
Trump’s
“fictional alter ego” did hit the jackpot. But he then dumped hundreds of
millions of dollars into ventures that slid deep into the red, the report
details, such as golf courses and resorts. And he kept drawing money out of
loans of uncertain origin — loans that are set to come due.
Yet
Trump continued squeezing his image as a successful businessman for all he
could. The Times recounts that this led him deeper into schemes that crossed
over into “flogging things that could hurt people economically” and “actively
capitalized” on “desperate” people’s “economic anxiety” amid the Great
Recession.
This
culminated in Trump paying out $25 million in 2016 to settle a class-action
lawsuit over his Trump University, which was supposed to school people in his
business secrets but was accused of “systematically defrauding economically
marginalized people.”
The
scam goes full circle
Now
assign Stephen K. Bannon to the role of Burnett in the 2016 political marketing
of another fictional Trump, whose economic prowess and outsider status would be
employed to avenge “forgotten” working-class
Whites sold out by financial and globalist elites.
In
numerous ways, Bannon and Trump rapidly abandoned that promise in tandem,
as journalist Joshua Green chronicles, leaving the
original pitch largely gone from his case for reelection. Trump’s supposed
managerial acumen has helped lead to more than 200,000 U.S. deaths from
covid-19 and has earned him the distinction of being the
first post-World War II president to preside over a net job loss.
It is
perfect that two producers of “The Apprentice” also helped produce Trump’s convention, which
peddled the immensely fraudulent claims that his stupendous, benevolent
leadership largely vanquished coronavirus and
that the biggest threat to the rule of law is organized, violent leftist
terrorism.
At the
debate, when Trump peddles his various lies about the virus and Biden with the
same zeal that he made a couple million bucks by “selling hope in a vitamin bottle,” the scam
will hit rock bottom. But the bill is coming due.