REPORT:
TEAM TRUMP KNOWS IT’S GOING TO HAVE ITS ASS HANDED TO IT NOVEMBER 3
Even the president’s own campaign is resigned
to its fate.
BY BESS LEVIN
OCTOBER
19, 2020
If you’d ignored every single poll that’s come out over the last
several months predicting the outcome of the 2020 election, and only listened
to Donald Trump, you might think the president had a
snowball’s chance in hell of beating Joe Biden on November 3.
In reality, the outlook for Trump is grim: The latest polls show Biden ahead by
double digits and leading in battleground states. What’s more, Trump is down
with white voters, who he won by a whopping 20 points in 2016. And while the
president talks a big, delusional game at rallies, even his campaign staffers apparently
know that come November 3, they’re all going to be unemployed.
The New York Times reports that “away
from their candidate and the television cameras, some of Mr. Trump’s aides are
quietly conceding just how dire his political predicament appears to be.”
Midlevel aides are reportedly asking around about postelection jobs on Capitol
Hill, aware that there is unlikely to be a second Trump administration for them
to work in. In what may be the saddest internal reflection of the president’s prospects,
some of his lieutenants are said to be resigned to lose and believe that the
best thing they can do in the final two weeks is to “keep the president
occupied, happy, and off Twitter as much as possible,” like he’s a dog they’re
trying to keep comfortable in the final days of his life. But of course,
staying off of Twitter and on message is something Trump is constitutionally
incapable of, even if it would be to his benefit:
Instead
of delivering a focused closing message aimed at changing people’s perceptions
about his handling of the coronavirus, or making a case for why he can revive
the economy better than Mr. Biden can, Mr. Trump is spending the remaining days
on a familiar mix of personal grievances, attacks on his opponents and
obfuscations. He has portrayed himself as a victim, dodged questions about his
own coronavirus testing, attacked his attorney general and the F.B.I. director,
and equivocated on the benefits of mask-wearing.
Rather
than drawing a consistent contrast with Mr. Biden on the economy, strategists
say, the president’s preference is to attack Mr. Biden’s son Hunter over
his business dealings and to hurl personal insults like “Sleepy Joe” against a
candidate whose favorability ratings are much higher than Mr. Trump’s.
“A lot of Republican consultants are
frustrated because we want the president’s campaign to be laser-focused on the
economy,” David Kochel, a Republican strategist in Iowa told
the Times. “Their best message is: Trump built a great
economy” and that the coronavirus damaged it, and Trump will do a better job
restoring it than Biden. Instead, the president apparently thinks he’s going to
win over voters by refusing to denounce
a conspiracy theory that claims Democrats are running a Satanic, child
sex-trafficking cult and another that accuses Biden of having
Seal Team Six killed to cover up the fact that Osama Bin Laden is alive and the
Obama administration took out his body double. Or blathering on at length about
his opponent’s son and claiming, without a hint
of irony, that Biden’s family is a “criminal enterprise.” The base “loves the
stuff about Hunter Biden, laptops and Mayor Giuliani,” Kochel said. “But they’re
already voting for Trump.”
The problem with having an unhinged, disturbed
candidate like Trump running for office is that he’s not just the candidate,
he’s also basically running the campaign—and he’s really bad at it!
From
the start, the campaign has never had a dominant strategist—that role has
always been played by a president with a dim view of the political professional
class. In an interview in July with the New York Times, Jared
Kushner, a White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law, was candid
about who was in charge of the 2020 race: Mr. Trump, he said, was “really the
campaign manager at the end of the day.”
Mr.
Trump’s first campaign manager, Brad Parscale, focused heavily
on building online infrastructure and using it to raise money, while Mr.
Kushner oversaw his work. [Bill] Stepien, who replaced Mr.
Parscale in July, is regarded in Washington as a capable nuts-and-bolts
tactician. But with a small window of time left before the election, he has not
attempted to redraw Mr. Trump’s playbook.
While Stepien and campaign adviser Jason Miller insist
that their internal polls show the race is a lot closer than those conducted by
news organizations, a number of Republicans aren‘t buying it. Senator Lindsey
Graham, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said last week at the Amy
Coney Barrett hearings that Democrats have “a good chance of winning
the White House,” while Senator Ben Sasse predicted that
Trump isn’t going to just lose the White House, he’s going to take down the
party in a November 3 “blood bath.”
“The reality is they are probably out of
time,” said Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican
strategist. “They desperately needed the [second] debate to have a larger
audience and to have an opportunity to provide some kind of contrast that would
change the race trajectory, meaning a different Trump or an opportunity for a
Biden gaffe. That was their best hope for a Hail Mary.”
