Ezra Klein: Trump's reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21303547/donald-trump-2020-polls-coronavirus-biden-reelection-losing


Trump’s reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality
Trump is falling in the polls because he’s failing the country.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Jun 26, 2020, 8:00am EDT

snip//

Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president.

Every insider account of Trump’s presidency — from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to Bob Woodward’s Fear to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s A Very Stable Genius to Anonymous’s A Warning to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged to John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened — has painted fundamentally the same picture: a chaotic, lawless administration orbiting around a reckless, distractible, corrupt, overmatched, and disinterested chief executive.

snip//

Both Trump and congressional Republicans are treating the condition of the country as something that has been done to them. In part, this is simply an extension of a strategy that showed some chance of working six months ago: Ride the economic expansion that began under Obama to victory in 2020. It wasn’t clear it would be enough — Trump trailed Biden then, too — but it was plausible.

Then, however, the tide turned, and so the posture of taking credit became a reality of absorbing blame. That a serious, determined approach to governance could have won public support — as has proven true for Republican and Democratic governors alike — seems not to have dawned on Trump. For all his strongman pretensions, he and his national allies are afflicted by a passivity that’s proving lethal, for both their constituents and their careers.

“How can you be a governing party if one of your principles is being against government?” asks Stevens. “It’s that line of Ronald Reagan’s: The most dangerous words are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ This was a time we needed the federal government to save people’s lives, and it just imploded.”

This is the problem Trump faces in 2020, and it will not be solved by tweets or Facebook strategy. He is falling in the polls because he is failing the country.

[kimbutgar]

1. Terrible leader, terrible person and terrifying cult followers.

[Newest Reality]

2. Excellent synopsis and on spot.

[malaise]

3. I find that line so ridiculous - they are governing

they are governing for themselves and their billionaire friends - they don't give a flying fuck about anyone else.

[Wounded Bear]

7. Democrats govern, Repubs try to rule...

[hatrack]

4. "UNINTERESTED", not "disinterested". Jesus, Ezra, you get paid to write . . . .

[July]

6. Thank you!

That jumped out at me.

[leftieNanner]

5. Very good article

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.