Why Trump’s Losing
August 6, 2020 9:40
AM
Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru
How COVID magnifies his flaws
Trump is thin-skinned, self-obsessed, small-minded, intellectually lazy, and ill-disciplined. These never seemed to be great qualities in a chief executive, but they have caught up with Trump over the last six months in particular. They have played into his poor handling of the coronavirus crisis and the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. When times became more serious, he remained as unserious as ever.
President Trump pulled an inside straight to win in 2016, and now
he needs another one.
The good news for Trump is that
his approval rating has stopped falling recently. The bad news is that it has
stabilized in the low 40s. Election-watcher Harry Enten points out that no
president since Harry Truman has won with anything like Trump’s negative net
approval rating. Truman won at –6, while incumbents who lost (Gerald Ford,
Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush) averaged out at about –13, roughly where
Trump’s number is. The presidents who won reelection averaged an approval
rating of +23.
Trump doesn’t lead in the
polling on any major issues — even his lead on the economy has slipped away.
He is losing in Florida, a must-win
state for Republican presidential candidates for roughly 100 years. He is
behind in North Carolina, which successful Republicans have won for the last
half century. Arizona and Georgia are battlegrounds, and maybe Texas, too.
Biden has been reliably ahead in all the Blue Wall states, in large part by
eating into Trump’s lead with whites or reversing it.
So far the polling in the race
looks more like Bob Dole against Bill Clinton in 1996, when Dole persistently
and substantially trailed, than like Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in
2016, when Trump was behind but by smaller margins than today (and briefly even
ahead).
The standard restrictions
apply: There are around three months to go, state-level polling was off in
2016, and Trump doesn’t have to make up much ground to be within plausible
range of another Electoral College victory.
Still, his situation is dire by
any measure. Underlying conditions have turned against him, yet even when the
economy was thriving, Trump was in a notably perilous position for a president
presiding over peace and prosperity. The fault is not in his stars but in his
tweets, erratic behavior, scattershot belligerence, and denials of reality,
which had already made him radioactive before what he sometimes calls the “Wuhan
flu” ever emerged.
Trump is thin-skinned,
self-obsessed, small-minded, intellectually lazy, and ill-disciplined. These
never seemed to be great qualities in a chief executive, but they have caught
up with Trump over the last six months in particular. They have played into his
poor handling of the coronavirus crisis and the aftermath of the killing of
George Floyd. When times became more serious, he remained as unserious as ever.
COVID has been the main factor
worsening his political condition. The damage didn’t register in the polls at
first. At the end of March and beginning of April, polling had his handling of
the crisis in positive territory, a kind of rally-around-the-flag effect. But
the effect was smaller and shorter-lived for him than it was for other
officials, in the states and abroad. As of early August, the average of the
polling at the website FiveThirtyEight has his rating on the
crisis at 58 percent disapprove and 38 percent approve. This is a flashing red
light given that COVID is the most important issue to voters at the moment, a
rare instance when the economy isn’t the top issue in a presidential election.
Of course, none of Trump’s
critics predicted that a deadly and economy-flattening contagion would kneecap
him in an election year. But his inability to respond adequately to the crisis
is the kind of thing that they had in mind when they warned that his character
traits were unsuited to the presidency.
Particularly in the
circumstances of a novel pandemic, the president needs a process that brings
him relevant information, structures his deliberation, allows him to adapt to
new developments and correct mistakes, and guides the rest of the government in
executing his decisions. And he must act in concert with Congress, governors,
public-health experts, business leaders, and others, all of whom have their own
roles to play. Nobody could perform this job perfectly.
What we have under Trump is
very nearly the mirror image of this ideal. He relies on gut instinct and gets
his information from what he happens to see on television or hears from
friends. He is extremely disinclined to acknowledge mistakes, process bad news,
or think beyond the news cycle. The structure his staff has built around him is
designed more to manage his ego and shield him from bad news than to yield wise
decisions. His understanding of the relationship between the president and
other political actors is rudimentary, causing him to alternate between
passivity and assertions of total control.
Even where his administration
has acted adroitly — it did work assiduously to bootstrap the initially anemic
testing effort to a different level — Trump hasn’t been willing or able to
explain it convincingly. He has even complained, in varying tones, that testing
should be slowed down because it makes the infection rate look higher.
Trump hasn’t conveyed
steadiness, resolve, empathy, and seriousness of purpose to the public — the
sort of thing that other political figures, whatever their ideologies and even
competence levels, have done to their own benefit — because he does not possess
them. He does not give much sign of even recognizing that the public would
appreciate them. Reassurance is not his brand. “Fighting” is, and Trump
especially enjoys taking public shots at people who, by virtue of their
position, cannot fight back. His most successful recent such campaign has
targeted Dr. Anthony Fauci — if it counts as success for Trump to persuade many
of his supporters to distrust one of his own advisers.
Presidential incumbency is a
powerful political asset, especially during a crisis, because a president can
speak and act for the country rather than just for his party. But Trump rarely
attempts to conform to expectations of presidential behavior, even when it
would be useful to him. He often seems interested in the presidency chiefly as
a platform to express himself. Although most Americans dislike the personality
he puts on display, this tendency was more tolerable when times were good, as
they were during the first three years of his presidency.
Trump has always had an ability
to direct attention where he wants in a way that other political figures can
only covet. These days, he uses that power to elevate issues that obsess him
but are well down the list of Americans’ concerns, from the injustice allegedly
done to Roger Stone to the unfairness of specific cable-news hosts to him.
Some well-wishers urge Trump to
talk about a second-term agenda, but he cannot do it credibly when he has done
so little to advance a first-term one. Immigration and health-care plans are
always just about to be unveiled, but never are. “Infrastructure week” has been
deferred so often as to become a running gag. What he is really offering is
four more years of enraging liberals. That promise, at least, is something he
can deliver on.
Trump won last time in large
part because he was blessed by an equally unpopular opponent in Hillary
Clinton. Biden has entered this campaign with a better public image. Trump’s
efforts to change it have not been working, in part because he has been
attacking Biden from every direction. The Trump campaign would have you believe
that Biden was racially insensitive when he talked about “superpredators” in
the 1990s, and now wants to abolish the police. Trump’s most consistent
argument against Biden has been that the Democrat is declining mentally — which
has the disadvantage of lowering expectations for Biden that he can then
exceed.
More recently, Trump has been
emphasizing the idea that Biden would be a tool of a rising Democratic Left.
That’s probably his best line of attack, but it also indicates his challenge.
If his campaign has to warn about Biden and Ilhan Omar in its email pitches,
it’s because talking about Biden alone isn’t scary enough. And the correct
strategic judgment that Trump can win the race only if he makes it a choice
between him and Biden rather than just a referendum on his own performance
constantly runs into the candidate’s desire to make himself the sun and the
moon.
While policy hasn’t been his
focus, Trump has done some good and important things with his presidency. He
has been much better than conservatives initially expected on abortion and
religious liberty, judges, and deregulation. If nothing else, he has
represented a reprieve from Hillary Clinton, who, even if she had been a weak
president checked by a Republican Congress, inevitably would have scored some
progressive victories difficult or impossible to reverse, especially on the
Supreme Court.
But a president is more than a
collection of policy positions. The office has had, since the beginning,
quasi-monarchical trappings, and the president is the American head of state.
How the holder of the office conducts himself matters. Peggy Noonan once wrote
that no personality is ever perfect enough for the presidency: It exposes the
flaws of even the best men. Trump has more flaws than most, and has been less
concerned with trying to hide them than any previous occupant, indeed has
affirmatively advertised them.
His vices have taken a toll.
There are periodic hopes that he will reset and adopt a more disciplined
approach, always dashed. In 2016, he did show he could tone it down for brief
periods, but he can’t help himself for long. So it is probably only events that
can save him now: a waning of the pandemic, a clear economic rebound, a Biden
stumble, some other exogenous event. None of this is unimaginable, but
obviously none of it is certain — and none of it is in his control, or in the
control of the many other Republicans whose political fates are tied to his.
Trump won an upset as the de facto challenger four years ago and will have to
win a bigger one as the incumbent.
— Rich Lowry is the editor in
chief of National Review and Ramesh Ponnuru is a
senior editor for National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, a visiting fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute, and a senior fellow at the National Review
Institute.