Not a day goes by
without several friends — Republicans as well as Democrats — saying that to me.
It’s the blunt coda to a bloated recitation of Donald Trump’s failures during
this pandemic. It’s a whimper of surrender following a scream of disbelief.
Tens
of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad
information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles
on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom
and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership,
grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. And he’s going to get
re-elected.
With
that refrain we perform a spiritual prophylaxis. We prepare for despair.
But somewhere along
the way, we started to confuse a coping mechanism with reasoned analysis. We
began to treat a verbal tic as inevitable truth.
It
isn’t. While Trump may indeed be careening toward four more years, it’s at
least as possible that he’s self-destructing before our eyes.
Maybe
a toasty beam of sunlight is all that we need to wipe out the coronavirus? What if we just injected disinfectant into our
veins? He floated both of those fantasies on
Thursday, when he might as well have stepped up to the lectern in a tin foil
hat. They’re the ramblings of a dejected, disoriented and increasingly
desperate man.
As
Katie Rogers and Annie Karni reported in The
Times, the president feels isolated and embattled and is panicked that he’ll
lose to Joe Biden in November. That state of mind, they wrote, prompted his
executive order to halt the issuing of green cards,
which is precisely the kind of base-coddling measure that he resorts to “when
things feel out of control.”
He can read the polls as
well as the rest of us can, and they show that while he stands there nightly in
the White House briefing room and blows kisses at himself, Americans aren’t
blowing kisses back.
A month ago there was much
ado about a slight uptick in
Trump’s job-approval numbers. But the real story was the slightness: Past
presidents had experienced greater bumps during crises, when Americans tend to
rally around their leader. For Trump there was no such rallying — just a
grudging, incremental benefit of the doubt.
A
fleeting one, too. His uptick quickly took a downturn, reuniting him with his
anemic norm. According to the polling average at FiveThirtyEight as of early
Friday afternoon, 52.5 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance.
Only 43.4 percent approve.
True,
his favorability ratings weren’t any better in 2016 — in fact, they were worse
— and he got to the White House regardless. But the dissonance of that victory
could be explained partly by what he represented: a protest against the status
quo. Now he is the status quo, and voters have had a chance to sample the
disruption that he pledged. It tastes a lot like incompetence.
Other
numbers tell an even scarier story for Trump. In all three of the battleground
states that enabled
his Electoral College victory three and a half years ago, he’s
currently behind Biden — by 6.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in
Michigan and 2.7 in Wisconsin, according to the averaging of recent polls by
RealClearPolitics. That website also puts him behind by 3.2 points in Florida,
a state he won in 2016 and must win again.
Wisconsin
alone should terrify Trump. In 2018, the Republican governor was ousted by a Democrat.
So were the Republican lieutenant governor and attorney general. Then, this month,
Wisconsin voters replaced a conservative incumbent on the state’s Supreme Court
with a liberal challenger, her victory not just surprising but resounding.
There’s no way to spin that in Trump’s favor.
According to monthly polling by Gallup, the percentage
of Americans who indicated satisfaction with the way things were going in the
country plummeted to 30 percent in mid-April from 42 percent in mid-March. Only
twice before in the past two decades has there been a one-month decline that
precipitous.
Maybe
this drop was less a referendum on Trump’s stewardship than a recognition of
the coronavirus’s devastation. But maybe not: Surveys reveal that a significant
majority of Americans believe that he acted
too late to stem the virus’s spread. He’s also out of step with
most Americans’ appraisal of what will and won’t be safe in the immediate
future.
Amid
Trump’s dizzyingly mixed messages, he has rooted for a return to some semblance
of normalcy around
May 1 and has chided a few governors for overzealous lockdowns.
But in a
poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research that was released on Wednesday, only 12 percent of Americans said that
the social-distancing and shelter-in-place directives where they live went too
far, while more than double that number — 26 percent — said that the
precautions weren’t stringent enough. Sixty-one percent said that they were on
the mark.
In
a Washington
Post-University of Maryland poll, 65 percent of Americans said it
could take until June or later for gatherings of 10 people or more to be safe.
And in a Yahoo
News/YouGov poll, only 22 percent of Americans supported the
protesters who have been demanding an end to their states’ restrictions, while
60 percent opposed them. President Trump has egged those protesters on.
Is
he following some gut instinct or just flailing? I vote for the latter. Lately
he has contradicted himself at
a whole new pace and to a whole new degree, and he has undercut his own party’s
talking points.
As
Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reported in The
Times, Republicans have developed a strategy to evade any responsibility for
Trump’s response to the pandemic by blaming and demonizing China. “But there is
a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan — the leader of the party himself,”
Martin and Haberman wrote, noting that Trump has “muddied Republican efforts to
fault China” by continuing to curry favor with President Xi Jinping. That tack
certainly complicates Republicans’ efforts to paint Biden as a stooge of the
Chinese. They can’t succeed with their new nickname for him, Beijing Biden, if
Tiananmen Trump rings truer.
Also,
Trump’s most optimistic
pronouncements about imminent deliverance from the current
misery represent a bigger gamble than the many others he has taken. If he’s wrong,
there’s not going to be any hiding it. If he’s reckless, the toll is Americans’
very lives.
I
know, I know: He’s Trump. He carries the secret weapon of his spectacular
shamelessness, which means that he’ll resort to ploys and lies that even the
most unscrupulous of his opponents wouldn’t attempt. He’ll destroy what he must
so long as he gets to rule over the wreckage.
And
the usual laws of nature don’t apply to him. He was caught on tape bragging
about grabbing women by the crotch. Didn’t matter. He got nearly three million
fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Still he won. If he wasn’t exactly found
guilty of elaborate coordination with the Russians, he was certainly shown to
be open to it. Onward he rolled, and he kept rolling past his gross abuse of power
in dealing with Ukraine and his richly deserved impeachment for it.
He’s
Houdini, he’s Scheherazade, he’s all the escape artists of history and fiction
rolled into one and swirled with golden-orange topping. He’s lucky beyond all
imagining. But here’s the thing about luck: It runs out.
There’s
incessant talk of how fervent his base is, but the many Americans appalled by
him have a commensurate zeal. For every Sean Hannity, there’s a Rachel Maddow.
For every Kellyanne Conway, a George Conway. She and her ilk may be wily in
their defense of the president. He and his tribe are even better in their
evisceration of him.
And
what of the diaspora of refugees from the Trump administration: people like
Rick Bright, the government scientist who says he was just stripped of his leading role in
the search for a coronavirus vaccine because he wouldn’t parrot Trump’s
cockamamie talking points? I predict that as November nears, more and more
exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president’s
hall of mirrors. Trump in turn will mutter about the “deep state,” but the
phrase won’t fly when he’s left with such a shallow pool of charlatans around
him — and when he’s making such a repellent fool of himself.
Don’t
tell me that his nightly briefings are just a new version of the old stadium
rallies; their backdrop of profound suffering makes them exponentially harder
to stomach.
Americans who take any comfort from them were Trump-drunk long
ago. The unbesotted see and hear the president for what he is: a tone-deaf
showman who regards everything, even a mountain of corpses, as a stage.
