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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/16/1961027/-Donald-Trump-isn-t-serious-about-being-reelectedDonald Trump isn't serious about being reelected
kos
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday July 16, 2020 · 11:28 AM EDT
Donald Trump wants to win reelection.
Hes not serious about winning reelection.
How do you square those two statements? You look at what vestiges of a campaign hes running and you realize that theres nothing in what he says or does to suggest hes actually doing what is necessary to get to 50% of electoral college votes.
Fundamentally, Trump is in deep electoral trouble. His map is quite impossible at this point with states like Alaska, Montana, and Texas competitive, and new states like South Carolina creeping into unexpected contention. His campaign is bleeding money on nonsensical expenses like advertising in places like Ohio, which will not decide the election, and insanely high legal expenses as he tries to sue his critics (and reality, at times) into silence. His attempts at generating a white backlash against the movement for Black Lives is going nowhere. His campaign is incompetent, and yet the same people who delivered Trumps Tulsa humiliation (speaking in front of 6,000 when he had promised 1 million) are still in charge of the joint.
The Trump campaign truly is a disaster. But, we are warned, dont be complacent! He can still turn things around!
There are reasons not to be complacent: We have a second historic opportunity (after 2018) to utterly annihilate the GOP and reshape American politics for a generation. No one took it easy in 2018 despite polling predicting big Democratic gains. No one is relaxing this year.
But its not being complacent to simply realize that absent some impossible-to-imagine event, Trump isnt turning anything around. And the reason is because hes not trying to turn things around. He is in the mess that he is now because of the very things he cant stop doing. And it starts with the words that come out of his mouth.
All campaigns have a message. Its literally the bedrock of any electoral effort: You should vote for me because _______. But what is Trumps?
He had that whole Hunter Biden in the Ukraine thing that went nowhere except for the history books as a rare presidential impeachment. There was an aborted attempt to create a thing called Obamagate.
Then he was really into protecting Confederate statues, but that has seemingly been set aside as Salvadoran MS-13 gangs make a cameo after their abject failure to deliver Republican victories in 2018. And dont forget that we were supposed to vote for him because presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden was sleepy and hiding in his basement. Except, of course, that it was Trump himself who was literally hiding in his basement.
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Theres a lot of whining about poor him and presidential harassment mixed in with whatever loony Q-inspired theories emerge from the Twitterverse or Fox and Friends. Theres calling the Black Lives Matter movement a symbol of hate while blaming Dr. Anthony Fauci for his continued indifference to actually doing something about a national mass death event that has killed 140,000 and counting.
What else? Theres attacking Joe Biden for wearing a mask because that was somehow a thing, as well as repeated unsupported attempts to tie Biden to the Chinese Communist Party. Why he, in the pocket of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, would want to bring attention to the issue of foreign involvement in the election is beyond any rational attempt to explain.
And this weeks masterstroke of political communication?
Obviously Trump and the GOP were never going to win core Democratic constituencies: youth, voters of color, single women, and urban whites. But the Republican Party finds itself in dire straits because of defections among college-educated suburban white women.
And tell me, what, of that list above, is going to win a single college-educated suburban white woman? Quite the opposite, in factevery single one of those items merely reinforces the very reasons those women fled from Trump and his party in the first place: his idiocy, his inability to handle a national crisis (much less several of them), his refusal to listen to science and the experts, the racism, the sexism, and his boorish bullying behavior.
And as that tweet from Ivanka shows, their unserious and shallow base impulses. Quite clearly, the tweet was designed to own the libs who have been organizing a boycott of Goya products after the companys CEO publicly lavished praise on Trump. Im sure their cheering section of deplorable dead-enders cheered along with it. But thats not winning them any elections! And at this late stage of the campaign, everything they say or do should be laser-focused on winning votes.
But they cant do it! They cant run a disciplined, focused, and appeal-building campaign because the person at the top, Donald Trump, has zero interest in broadening his appeal, much less being disciplined and focused.
In 2016, Trump lucked into the but her emails bullshit narrative the GOP had spent years building. It was simple enough and stupid enough for him to repeat ad nauseam. But he doesnt have the benefit of any pre-laid right-wing narratives this year, and hes made it impossible for the Republican machine to singularly focus on or even create any of their typical manufactured outrages. Huntergate? Obamagate? Yeah, nice try, a--holes.
So thats where we are.
Donald Trump wants COVID-19 to go away, but he wont do anything to make that happen. He certainly cant sic his lawyers on the virus to either threaten it into oblivion or pay it off for its silence.
In that same way, Trump wants to be president for four more years, but he wont do what he needs to do to make that happen.
Hes failed upwards too many times in his unjustly charmed life. But too many people now know how dangerously incompetent he is. His luck has finally run out.
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)He's only staying in office, so he can keep collecting Pay For Slay checks from Putin, as he murders hundreds of thousands of Americans.
AwakeAtLast
(14,124 posts)Grifters gonna grift.
uponit7771
(90,335 posts)Bleacher Creature
(11,256 posts)It was truly about chaos for him, not wealth. Trump is trying to use the chaos to enrich himself.
Which I think means that he's actually worse than the Joker???
C_U_L8R
(45,001 posts)Could be he knows he's going to be bailed out... by Russia.
Y'know, what's the point of even keeping up appearances when the fix is in.
May as well go golf.
Response to C_U_L8R (Reply #3)
marie999 This message was self-deleted by its author.
fleur-de-lisa
(14,624 posts)He was as surprised as the rest of us on election night in 2016 after Putin installed him. You could see it on his grotesque orange face.
All Dump wanted was a national tv platform from which to spew hate against Hillary Clinton and the means to con the rubes out of money. Putin had other ideas.
Baitball Blogger
(46,703 posts)Sugarcoated
(7,722 posts)malaise
(268,968 posts)Can't wait
Thomas Hurt
(13,903 posts)when you have no conscience, what is a little incompetence.