Rump
Vincibility Watch: The Postal Service Strikes Back
AUG 21, 20205:17 PM
Trump Vincibility Watch is a
subjective and speculative estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump
actually loses the 2020 election or, in other words, suffers the consequences
of his actions for the first time in his life rather than wriggling out of yet
another jam (see: the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine scandal, the 2016
popular vote, his six bankruptcies, and everything else).
Well:
• A bipartisan (!) Senate committee released a report
that concluded, among other things, that Trump’s 2016
campaign chairman (Paul Manafort) passed internal campaign information to “a
Russian intelligence officer,” that Trump’s factually impossible claim about Ukraine
framing Russia for the hack of Democratic emails originated at least in part
with the same Russian intelligence officer, and that Trump told special counsel
Robert Mueller he had no memory of a specific conversation about hacked emails
that did, in fact, occur.
• The chief executive of Trump’s 2016 campaign (Steve
Bannon) was arrested at sea on a megayacht by postal police (really!) and charged with embezzling money that had been
raised from Trump supporters for the ostensible purpose of building a privately
funded wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—a fundraising effort that Trump’s son Don
Jr. was involved with as well. (Don Jr. has not been charged with any crime
related to his work with the group.)
• A federal judge ruled that a New York City district attorney
has the right to access Trump’s tax returns while investigating him for
potential campaign finance, bank, and tax fraud crimes.
These events all took place in the same three-day span; one
can picture any one of them (or, in the case of the tax returns, the eventual
fallout) fatally wounding Trump’s campaign and/or presidency if they’d happened
in 2016 or early 2017. Things being what they are at the present time, however,
they barely even registered as campaign- or White House–related news.
(Likewise, there’s no expectation that it will hurt the
president in the polls to have given a quasi-endorsement this week to the “QAnon”
conspiracy theorists who believe he’s been engaged for years in a secret,
cataclysmic war against satanist pedophiles.) The fact is that somewhere around
60 percent of the American public has been convinced for some time that Trump
is dishonest and criminally corrupt, and, as they say, it’s not a
news story when a dog bites a man. The pandemic and its associated economic
fallout are more pressing matters for most voters; the top political story is
that a Trump donor has intentionally crippled the post office.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, continues to lead Trump by more than 8
points in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average. On Thursday, Biden—whom
the Trump campaign has been attempting to portray as a completely senile
vegetable person whom “antifa” will easily manipulate into implementing full
communism—delivered a tight, fired-up acceptance speech to
conclude a virtual Democratic National Convention that presented his election
as an imperative that transcends ideology. We have no doubt that the Trump
campaign is cooking up some absolutely insane stuff for the home stretch—the
Republican convention is next week, and it’s going to be weird—but it begins that home stretch
several lengths behind the horse from Scranton. We characterize Trump as STILL
PRETTY VINCIBLE.
