Trump Has Lost the Plot
The
president is talking about things most Americans can’t comprehend, let alone
care about.
MAY 12, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
A couple
of years ago, BuzzFeed asked a former White House official to
explain the logic behind some bizarre Trump action. The official responded with
one of the master quotes of the Trump era.
President
Trump, the official said, is not playing “the sort of three-dimensional chess
people ascribe to decisions like this. More often than not he’s just eating the
pieces.”
Over
Mother’s Day and then through Monday—and who knows, perhaps continuing
today—Trump has fired off hundreds of rounds of weapons-grade lunacy on
Twitter. When Trump does this kind of thing, many are ready with an
explanation: He’s rallying his base; he’s distracting his
critics; he’s challenging the existence of reality itself.
But these
explanations miss the point. Trump horribly and uniquely bungled the
coronavirus crisis. The human result is mass death and Great Depression–scale
unemployment. The political result is that while leaders in Britain and almost
everywhere else in the democratic world have been boosted by a surge in public support
and approval, Trump has not. The governors who have clashed with Trump have
seen their poll numbers rise; New York Governor Andrew Cuomo may now be the most popular politician in the country.
Governors who support Trump, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp, have seen their numbers tumble.
Trump trails
Joe Biden in national polls by at least five points, as he has done all year.
Trump is even lagging behind in swing-state polls. He is down by three points in Florida,
five in North Carolina, and seven in Pennsylvania and Michigan. An internal
Republican National Committee poll of the 16 least-decided states shows Trump
behind in virtually all of them—so much so that he seems likely to drag the
Republican Senate majority down with him, The Washington
Post reported.
Trump’s
psychology is defined by his terror of rejection. The most stinging insult in
his vast vocabulary of disdain is loser. And yet every poll, every
powerful Biden TV ad, forces Trump to contemplate that he is headed toward a
historic humiliation. He’ll stand with Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover, the
incumbents rejected because they failed to manage economic crises.
Trump
failed to prevent the crisis. Out of envy and spite, he dismantled the
pandemic-warning apparatus his predecessors had bequeathed him.
Trump
failed to manage the crisis. At every turn, he gave priority to the short-term
management of the stock market instead.
Trump
failed to message the crisis. He not only lacks empathy; he despises empathy.
Angry,
scared, and aggrieved by the lack of praise for his efforts, Trump turns for
safety to television, where his two-dimensional friends explain how everything
is everybody else’s fault. They tell him that he is right and all his critics
are wrong. They promise that miracle drugs will—poof!—make all his troubles
vanish without effort. Sean and Tucker and Laura and Jeanine and the Fox
& Friends romper room tell him stories that hold the terror at
bay.
But those
stories have drawn Trump into a twisting ghetto of craziness that is
impenetrable to outsiders.
The
“Obamagate” that Trump tweets about—like the comic-book universes on which it
seems to be modeled—is a tangle of backstories. The main characters do things
for reasons that make no objective sense, things that can be decoded only by
obsessive superfans on long Reddit threads.
So you’re
saying that the deep state set up this whole elaborate plot to entrap Trump,
but instead of using any of that material, it instead sabotaged Hillary Clinton
10 days before the election?
No, no,
you don’t get it. You’ve gotta go back to the Benghazi episode four seasons
back. Well, really to Troopergate, but that’s only available on DVD …
Biden’s
proliferating internet ads hit two themes over and over: the pandemic and jobs,
jobs and the pandemic. Those themes are easy to understand. They carry the
power of truth. Above all, they are about the viewer: You are sick or
scared, you have lost your job or your business—all because Trump failed to do
his job.
Trump’s messages, by
contrast, are all about him. You are sick or scared, you have lost your
job or your business—but let’s remember who the real victim is. Me. Me and
Michael Flynn. But mostly me.
The more
Trump talks about his crackpot theories, the more he reveals why he plunged the
country into such a catastrophe. He never cared about anybody else. He ignored
unwelcome realities, because only fantasy flattered his ego as it required to
be flattered.
You can
try to assemble the Trump-Fox victimhood stories into something resembling a
coherent whole. Tim Miller of The Bulwark has made valiant efforts to do so. You can test those
stories against reality and expose them as delusional and delusive, as I
have tried to do.
But the
most important thing to notice about the Trump-Fox blizzard of mania is how
remote it is from anything that real-world voters care about. In 2015, Trump
apprehended that most Republicans were talking about things that Republican
voters did not then care about: deficits, taxes, productivity, and trade. In
2015, Trump apprehended that nobody was talking about things that Republican
voters did care about: immigration, drugs, the declining status of less
educated white men.
That
Trump is gone. Today’s Trump has lost the plot. He’s talking about things most
voters could not even understand, let alone care about. Yes, Flynn lied
to the FBI. But you have to see, the FBI’s interview was not properly
predicated …
Meanwhile,
the country is on track to lose more people to the coronavirus than the
Union lost in battle in the Civil War. Meanwhile,
33 million Americans have filed unemployment claims.
In her
White House memoir, former President George W. Bush’s
communications director Karen Hughes tells a useful anecdote. Walking on the
beach, she looked up from to see a small plane flying an advertising
banner: marilyn
ive poured my ♥ out nothin left luv wes. Hughes contemplated the banner
and thought, “I could have given him some message advice: the banner is clearly
some sort of appeal to Marilyn, but the words are about Wes—what he has done,
how he feels. He should have made the message about her.”
Trump is
all about Trump. That’s always been true. For three years, though, Trump was
protected from himself by the prosperity he inherited from others. Trump has
squandered that prosperity, as he previously squandered the fortune bequeathed
by his father. The consequences are here. The fairy tales Trump tells on
Twitter will not conceal those consequences from the voters Trump needs.
They
weren’t listening before. Now they are. And what they hear is not: Obama
was mean to me. What they hear is: I cannot do this job.
DAVID FRUM is
a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American
Democracy (2020). In 2001 and
2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.