Trump will end his presidency as he began it: Whining
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 21, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT
As the
Donald Trump parenthesis in the republic’s history closes, he is opening the
sluices on his reservoir of invectives and self-pity. A practitioner of crybaby
conservatism — no one, he thinks, has suffered so much since Job lost his camels and
acquired boils — and ever a weakling, Trump will end his
presidency as he began it: whining.
His
first day cloaked in presidential dignity he spent disputing photographic proof
that his inauguration crowd was
substantially smaller than his immediate predecessor’s. Trump’s day of
complaining continued at the CIA headquarters,
at the wall commemorating those who died serving the agency. His presidency
that began with a wallow in self-pity probably will end in ignominy when he
slinks away pouting, trailing clouds of recriminations, without a trace
of John McCain’s graciousness on
election night 2008:
“Sen.
[Barack] Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I
applaud him for it, and offer my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother
did not live to see this day — though our faith assures us she is at rest in
the presence of her Creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise.
. . . And my heart is filled
with nothing but gratitude . . . to the American people
for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Sen. Obama and my old friend,
Sen. Joe Biden, should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.”
Just 12
years separate the nation from this tradition of political competition bounded
by banisters of good manners. Subsequently, the Republican Party has eagerly
surrendered its self-respect. And having hitched its wagon to a plummeting
cinder, the party is about to have a rendezvous with a surly electorate
wielding a truncheon. The party picked a bad year to invite a mugging, a year
ending in zero: Approximately 80 percent of
state legislative seats will be filled this year, and next year the occupants,
many of them Democrats wafted into office by a wave election, will redraw
congressional districts based on the 2020 Census.
After
Democrats controlled the House for 40 years (1954-1994),
control of it changed under four presidents (Bill Clinton in 1994, George W.
Bush in 2006, Obama in 2010, Trump in 2018). Trump’s legacy might include a
decade of Democratic control of the House.
Political
prophecy is an optional folly, but occasionally, as now, it might be useful by
encouraging eligible voters to take the trouble to participate in a historic
correction. It is not yet probable, but is not highly improbable, that Joe
Biden can become the first candidate in 32 years to capture more than 400
electoral votes (George H.W. Bush, 426 in 1988).
He can do this by carrying some Trump 2016 states where Biden is either leading or within the
margin of polling error — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio
and Texas.
Texas
is the most important red state: Without its electoral votes (38 today; probably 41 in 2024),
the Republican path to 270 is dauntingly narrow. Trump’s 52 percent in Texas in
2016 was the lowest Republican total in 24 years (when
Bob Dole split the anti-Clinton vote with Ross Perot). With seven of the
nation’s 15 fastest-growing cities (El Paso is
almost the size of Boston; San Antonio is
twice the size of Seattle), Texas
illustrates the Republican Party’s understandable antipathy toward that which
it exists to persuade: the electorate. Texas’s Republican governor, with the
elastic scruples of his party, has ordered (this is being litigated)
that each of the state’s 254 counties shall
have only one drop-off site for absentee ballots — one for Loving County (population
169), one for Harris County (Houston,
population 4.7 million, 70 percent non-White), one for Brewster County, whose
size (6,192.3 square miles)
could hold Connecticut with
room remaining for more than half of Rhode Island.
The
GOP’s desire — demonstrated in myriad measures in many states — for low voter
turnout is prudent: As the nation becomes more urban, suburban, diverse and
secular, the Republican Party becomes more fixated on rural and small-town
White voters. Thirty-six percent of
Americans lived in rural areas in 1950; in 1990, 25
percent did; today, 17.5 percent do. Now, the rural population, 60 million, is
about what it was in 1945. Since then,
the urban population has almost tripled.
Analyst
Charlie Cook asks: “In 2016,
87 percent of Trump’s vote came from whites. For congressional Republicans in
the 2018 midterms, it was 86 percent. Is this sustainable?” You have to admire
Republicans’ jaunty, if suicidal, wager that it is.
