Trump admits it: The intervention he desperately needs
isn’t going to come
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 13, 2020 at 9:36 a.m. CDT
President
Trump has been reliving the glory days of 2016 a lot lately.
At a
rally in Florida on Monday night, Trump waxed nostalgic:
“Did we win Florida last time? Was that beautiful?” He railed about
“globalists” bleeding the country dry, robotically mimicking that year’s closing argument as if playacting his way through 2016’s
final surge. And he reminisced about
the wrongness of the polls, predicting another major upset.
But
there’s a crucial difference this time around, which is taking shape in a
variety of ways: The sort of 11th-hour intervention that drove that glorious
2016 upset — something like those newly discovered Hillary Clinton emails —
does not seem to be materializing.
And
Trump appears to know it.
In a
little-noticed aside in Florida, Trump again railed about the fake
“Obamagate” scandal, which holds that the previous administration
supposedly spied on his campaign and that Clinton invented the widely
documented fact that
Russia sabotaged the election on his behalf.
But
notably, Trump said Clinton and Barack Obama and Joe Biden would get their
comeuppance only at some future date.
"We'll
take care of it all after the election,” Trump said.
“We caught 'em cold. Bad people. Crooked Hillary. And by the way, Obama and
Biden knew everything that was happening. We'll take care of it after the
election.”
After the
election, you say?
A
striking concession
That’s
surprising, because Trump has spent months promising his base major revelations
about those senior Democrats, which were supposed to be generated by the
“review” of the origins of the Russia investigation launched by Attorney
General William P. Barr.
Trump
has even explicitly called on Barr to “indict”
those Democrats before the election. But in recent days, Barr has told
Republicans that this “review” won’t arrive in time. Trump is “at odds”
with Barr over the delay, which Trump has flatly
described as a “disgrace” and a “terrible thing.”
Now
Trump has been reduced to telling his voters that, yes, all those bad things
happened, but we’ll deal with them later. No, really, we will.
Efforts
to corrupt the election are failing
One of
the big stories of this election has been that in just about
every conceivable way, Trump has corruptly placed the levers of
government and the official duties of Cabinet-level officials at the disposal
of his reelection needs. But many of these efforts are falling apart.
Trump
has attacked vote-by-mail as fraudulent to lay the groundwork to invalidate
millions of late-counted ballots against him. But this has spurred many
millions to vote early, which will make that harder to pull off. Trump has
corruptly pushed for a vaccine before Election Day. But this has only resulted
in stakeholders loudly demanding an uncorrupted approval process, making that
less likely. And so on.
These
are properly understood as interventions that Trump has been hoping for, just
as in 2016 the newly surfaced Clinton emails possibly helped
cost her the election. But they are increasingly unlikely to
materialize.
Now the
same looks to be happening with Trump’s hope for something from Barr: Trump
appears to grasp that it, too, is unlikely to materialize.
This
isn’t 2016
In
a useful
appearance on CNN, polling analyst Harry Enten laid out many reasons
this election differs from 2016. Clinton was up in the national polls in 2016,
but Biden is up by far more (10.4 points).
While Clinton was stuck in the mid-40s, Biden is polling at over 50 percent.
As
Enten notes, this time polls are less likely to show 2016-like errors, because
many pollsters now weight to avoid underrepresenting non-college-educated
voters. But even if the polls are as wrong this time as in 2016, Biden would still win the
electoral college — comfortably.
The
latest state polls — from the New York
Times and Siena College — underscore the point. They put Biden
up by 51 percent to 41 percent in Wisconsin, and by 48 percent to 40 percent in
Michigan. In the six Northern battlegrounds, Biden leads by 6 points, and this
is driven in part by a small but non-trivial percentage who backed Trump last
time but now back Biden.
Which
underscores another crucial difference between now and 2016: Trump is the
incumbent and he’s got a record to defend. Hence the switching. It isn’t just
that majorities have judged him a failure on the election’s central issue — the
coronavirus — though that has happened. It’s also that Trump has failed on other
fronts.
Trump
railed about “globalists” in Florida, regurgitating his 2016 closing argument.
But in practice, his economic nationalism has proved calamitous: The Times reports that
the White House is literally funneling enormous gobs of money to farmers —
subsidies may amount to $46 billion — to induce them into overlooking the
disastrous impact of his trade wars.
The fact
that Trump’s record is getting judged so harshly likely means a smaller pool of
swing voters and late-breaking undecideds, such as those who took a chance in
2016 on the outsider with an untested agenda. That makes an 11th-hour
intervention less likely to succeed in effecting a broad last-minute shift.
None of
this is to say Trump can’t still win, or that he can’t get within cheating
distance of another electoral college miracle. But that’s looking less likely
by the day. And a deus ex machina almost certainly won’t be
forthcoming to do the job for him.