"This Is So Unfair to Me": Trump Whines About His COVID-19 Victimhood as Campaign Flails

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Raging at campaign manager Brad Parscale and Joe Scarborough, Trump attempts a campaign reset. But “Trump can’t pivot to a different strategy,” says an adviser. Because he’s the problem.

By Gabriel Sherman

May 26, 2020

As he headed into Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “He was just in a fucking rage,” said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. “He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Even as the death toll neared 100,000 and unemployment ranks swelled to over 38 million, Trump couldn’t see the pandemic as anything other than something that had happened to him. “The problem is he has no empathy,” the adviser said. Trump complained that he should have been warned about the virus sooner. “The intelligence community let me down!” he said.

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Even those closest to Trump have been privately worried the election is slipping away. According to a source, Melania Trump warned the president during their trip to India in February to take the virus response seriously. “He totally blew her off,” the source said. Melania later told people that Trump “only hears what he wants to hear and surrounds himself with yes-people and family,” the source added.

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The problem for Stepien, though, is that no amount of messaging or get-out-the-vote efforts can shade the reality that Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic has plunged the country into a once-in-a-century economic crisis. It’s a point Stepien tacitly made when I interviewed him before the 2018 midterms. “Bottom line is Americans want security. They want to feel safe in the realm of national security, and they want to feel economically secure,” Stepien said at the time.

But the biggest obstacle standing in the way of a Trump-campaign reset is the candidate. “Trump is doing it to himself by tweeting idiotic conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough. Women are tired of this shit,” said another former West Wing official. An outside adviser agreed. “Trump can’t pivot to a different strategy,” the adviser told me. “He only knows one strategy—which is attack. It worked in 2016. But now it’s not what people are looking for.” The adviser told me that Trump’s New York friends are planning an intervention to get him to stop tweeting about the Morning Joe cohost.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-whines-about-his-covid-19-victimhood-as-campaign-flails

[LakeVermilion]

1. Life was unfair to George Floyd

Trump has had more than his share of fairness in life. In fact, he has taken fairness away from a lot of people.

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2. This Sums It Up

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