Voters know Trump isn’t just a bad president. He’s a
bad person.
Opinion by
Contributing columnist
Oct. 9, 2020 at 2:31 p.m. CDT
A group
calling itself Republican Voters Against Trump released a powerful video this week featuring an endorsement
of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden by Michael Hayden, the retired
Air Force general who headed the National Security Agency and the CIA under
President George W. Bush.
The
most bracing part of Hayden’s message comes at the end. “I absolutely disagree
with some of Biden’s policies, but that’s not important,” he says. “Biden is a
good man. Donald Trump is not.”
That
one, jolting line gets to the bedrock issue of the 2020 campaign — and why the
electorate now seems poised to reject an incumbent president for the first time
in 28 years.
It’s
not that Trump and Biden don’t have ideological differences that matter; they
do. Biden’s embrace of tolerance, of climate science, of federally guaranteed
health care and American engagement in the world — all of that contrasts
sharply with Trumpism.
It’s
not that there isn’t an argument to be had about basic competence, either —
especially after the gross mishandling of a pandemic that Trump once
grimly predicted might
claim 60,000 American lives, and that is well on its way to taking four times
that many.
But the
candidates’ specific policy differences don’t seem as defining as they might
have in past elections. Because underlying all of it is the disconcerting
sense, at least among a majority of the electorate, that Trump isn’t simply a
bad president.
He’s
just bad, period.
The
numbers are pretty sobering, if you really need them. Trump’s favorability
rating in the recent WSJ/NBC News poll was a stunning 39
percent. Fully 55 percent of the electorate judges him unfavorably as a person,
before they even get to the job performance.
By
contrast, at this point in 2012, when he was running for reelection, Barack
Obama was judged positively by a majority of voters in most polls — and in
virtually all of them, his favorability rating outpaced
his unfavorable number by several points. Biden’s numbers are just fine; he’s
viewed favorably by 43 percent of the public and unfavorably by 41 percent.
We’re
really not accustomed to asking basic questions about a president’s essential
decency. The United States has had presidents whom history judges as deficient
in character, for one reason or another — Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Bill
Clinton.
But
these were statesmen whose obvious failings as people had to be judged against
their equally obvious devotion to country and desire to do good in the world.
That’s
how they’re remembered even now — as well-intentioned and tragically flawed.
Recent biographies of Nixon, the most reviled president of the 20th century,
portray him as haunted and pathetic, but not inhumane.
Trump
is singular in this way. In 2016, a majority of voters surmised he might not
have the right temperament for the job. But some critical segment of voters distrusted his
opponent even more, and they might have thought that Trump would at least grow
in office. It was the same delusion that beguiled many of those who went to
work for him — that somehow Trump could be improved and transformed.
But you
know, to put this in dating terms, you don’t marry the person you hope your
partner might become. You marry who you marry, and you deal with the
consequences.
And so
here we are, nearly four years later, and the electorate seems to have reached
a consensus that Trump is the first truly bad person to have occupied the
office in memory.
Time
and again, almost inexplicably, he fails to summon a modicum of evident decency
or compassion — a curious trait that was sharply underscored last week by his
apparent willingness to expose everyone who serves him to a potentially lethal
virus.
Four years
of Trump’s Caligula act have made this much painfully clear: If you were
drowning alone in a lake, this president is pretty much the last guy you’d want
on the dock.
To
their credit, Biden and his advisers have understood all along that this was
the only issue that really mattered. They’ve never allowed the campaign to veer
off into standard arguments over left and right.
Biden
has premised his campaign on a restoration of American goodness — an idea he
nicely embodies, and one for which Trump, a channeler of fear of rage, has no
answer.
Jimmy
Carter and George H.W. Bush were turned out of office after one term for
mismanaging crises. We talk about them now as worthy public servants who failed
to meet the moment.
It’s an
admiration that Trump will never be afforded. History, like the voters, will
judge him graceless and unfeeling.
We
might have guessed it four years ago. We know it now.