Friday Talking Points -- Is Trump Actually Trying To Lose?

[ChrisWeigant]

At this point, one has to wonder: is President Donald Trump intentionally trying to commit political suicide?

This would certainly make a lot of sense, given his recent actions. Perhaps he's tired of attempting to do a job he is so obviously underqualified for, and perhaps he just wants to return to private life. To do so, Joe Biden has to win, meaning Trump has to guarantee this outcome. So he goes about actively destroying any possibility that he'll win re-election.

If Trump actually is interested in beating Biden, he's certainly going about it in the wrong way. Trump had a golden opportunity when the pandemic began, because if he had shown even a modicum of leadership and even a shred of human decency and empathy, the race would right now be a lot closer. If Trump had addressed the nation, admitted the facts, rallied people to fight the pandemic in every way possible, trusted the scientists, urged people to wear masks, developed a national plan to deal with the crisis, and repeatedly helped the nation mourn those we've lost (now at 140,000 and climbing), then Donald Trump would be seen in a radically different light right now. He wouldn't have even had to have been particularly good at any of these efforts -- he could have just mouthed the words off the TelePrompTer, and that likely would have been enough. But he is absolutely incapable of doing so, it seems.

Instead, Trump keeps choosing the worst possible course. He ignored the initial outbreak. He ignored the testing crisis. He ignored the states being crushed under the outbreak. He ignored his own scientists -- or, even worse, contradicted them and actively undermined them. And worst of all, he has almost completely ignored all the suffering and death out there.

Instead, he concentrated on what he felt was important: the stock market, the economy, and, now, forcing children back to school even if it is not safe for this to happen. It's like the story of the boy who sees a hole in the dike -- except instead of plugging it, he decides to grab a sledgehammer and flail away at the dike to make the hole bigger. That's Trump's version of leadership, and it is why he is now in such political trouble that the entire Republican Party is now getting very worried about how much of a drag on the rest of the ticket Trump will be. Trump doesn't just pick the wrong side of the fight, he actively picks the stupidest fights to even have in the first place (such as making mask-wearing a political statement). And the rest of the Republicans are now beginning to notice what this is going to mean for their own chances of winning in November.

Need proof? Here's the former majority leader of the Minnesota senate, Republican Amy Koch:

The whole world has changed in the past six months, and I don't know if the president has caught up. His messaging is landing on deaf ears. He just doesn't seem to fully understand what people are talking about or worrying about.

Or this, from former GOP House member Charlie Dent:

Most members in swing districts understand that they need to expand on their base, and you would think that this president, who won his election by 80,000 votes [in key swing states], would be of the same mentality but he's not, and that's where the conflict is. There's a total disconnect there between the president and those members in swing districts who need the president to be more measured and balanced -- and, of course, he's totally incapable of that.... It's all these other erratic and bizarre comments and behaviors that are causing the most heartburn for a lot of Republicans, by far. I don't think any Republican member of Congress wants to stand up there and defend the Confederacy, which makes absolutely no sense, or go to war with Tony Fauci.

Or how about this, from Trump's former White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who apparently only found out the emperor was stark naked when his own family's health was in question:

I know it isn't popular to talk about in some Republican circles, but we still have a testing problem in this country. My son was tested recently; we had to wait 5 to 7 days for results. My daughter wanted to get tested before visiting her grandparents, but was told she didn't qualify. That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic.

Other Republicans are also finally admitting the non-Trump reality too:

Arkansas' entire congressional delegation -- all Republicans -- wrote Vice President Mike Pence this week asking the federal government to address shortages of chemical reagents needed to analyze coronavirus tests.

Trump's power to distract and deflect attention is just not working anymore. Up until this point, he's mostly been master of the media narrative, "winning" the news cycle each day and forcing the conversation onto his own terms. This no longer works, because the coronavirus just can't be intimidated by mean tweets. It just keeps right on proliferating, whether Trump insults it or not. And the public can now see in stark detail the difference between Trump's rampant denialism and the hard, cold reality around them. The more Trump lies and denies, the more pathetically out of touch he appears. Making it less likely that people are going to vote for him.

The graveyard that Trump keeps whistling past is growing larger by the day, too. America saw the highest number of new cases in a single day yesterday -- north of 75,000 cases. Over ten states saw their highest daily death totals this week as well. Trump's last-straw talking point (to convince everyone that there is no crisis) for the past few weeks has been that the death rate has remained low -- but even that is not true anymore, as the curve bends in the wrong direction once again. We haven't hit the grim milestone of 1,000 deaths per day again -- yet -- but we likely will in the next few days (several days in the past week have been over 900), which will leave Trump with nothing to point to in his own defense, once again.

The White House has shown a dangerous new propensity to hide the real data from the public, as well. A secret internal White House document was leaked this week which showed 18 states in a coronavirus "red zone," which suggests these states should "revert to more stringent protective measures" like closing bars and gyms and mandating masks. And in sudden and unexpected move, the Centers for Disease Control was stripped of their responsibility for the most crucial data this week, which had been reported to it from hospitals across the country. Now this data is going to go straight to the executive branch instead -- which is an ominous move indeed. Who do you trust more at this point to tell the truth about the crisis -- the C.D.C. or Donald Trump? Earlier in the week, the Trump White House launched a multipronged attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci, which also reinforced the fact that Fauci is one heck of a lot more trustworthy than all the president's men (and women). And we still have no national strategy whatsoever for anything, because of the absolute void that Trump's surrender from the field has left us all in. An advisor to the Democratic governor of Washington state expressed his frustration: "Every governor is out there on his or her own working to build the same programs that are being built next door. The federal government's efforts range from a little bit of backup to not even being present." Andrew Cuomo was equally exasperated: "The White House doesn't get it. Until we control this virus as a nation, the economy can't fully recover. Where is the national plan?"

So let's check in with all those red state politicians who fawningly follow Trump's lead, to see how they're doing, shall we? Let's see, the first governor to test positive for the coronavirus was Oklahoma's -- the state where Trump held his mostly-empty rally. Alabama has seen 26 state legislators test positive as well -- roughly one in seven of them. This led to one of the most extraordinary public health statements ever issued: "If you have been in contact with anyone in the Legislature, or if you have been in contact with any staff person that works at the Legislature, you need to get tested." That was from Alabama's Republican governor, mind you.

But the blue-ribbon prize for idiocy this week goes to Georgia's governor, who is actually personally suing the mayor of Atlanta because she dared institute a mandatory mask order. Previously, Brian Kemp had resisted a statewide mandatory mask order by using the logic: "one size fits all will not work." Now, however, "no sizes will fit anyone" seems to be what he's saying. This is beyond astonishing, it is (as Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms put it): "very bizarre, quite frankly." Two of her family members have tested positive, by the way.

So is all this sacrifice achieving Trump's real goal? Well, no. The economic recovery is now in danger of fizzling, and we're about to get numbers for the second quarter of the year which prove it. The early prediction was that the gross domestic product was going to shrink by a jaw-dropping 38 percent.

Add all of this up and you get a president bent on self-destruction. Which is bearing fruit already. Only 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the pandemic. Sixty percent disapprove. In March, those numbers were 51 percent approval to 45 percent disapproval. Right now 52 percent "strongly disapprove" of his handling of the crisis, up from 36 percent in March. More than 6 in 10 people now don't trust what Trump says on the outbreak, which includes almost 3 in 10 Republicans. On what should be the focus, 63 percent say it is more important to control the spread of the outbreak even if it hurts the economy. Almost 8 in 10 people are wearing masks most of the time in public.

Trump has shifted his campaign's core message several times now, and has seemingly abandoned the last one, which was running as the "law and order" president. After Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone this week, however, this isn't exactly operative any more. As Mitt Romney put it in a tweet: "Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." Robert Mueller even weighed in with his own opinion, in the pages of the Washington Post.

[Roger] Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.... The jury ultimately convicted Stone of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands.... We made every decision in Stone's case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law. The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false.

The Trump campaign this week focused on two new messages, both of which are just as self-destructive. The first was a nakedly racist attempt to appeal to white suburban voters by threatening that Joe Biden wanted to "abolish the suburbs." Many late-night hosts made fun of this statement (in the same disjointed speech Trump also accused Biden of wanting to somehow "abolish windows" ), but when you take the time to understand what he was really talking about, it gets even worse. Here's Trump's actual words:

Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.... What will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it.... People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they're going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I'm here.

And here is what he's really talking about:

Trump reiterated a reference he first made on Twitter at the end of last month: He'd be revisiting an administrative rule known as AFFH, which stands for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. His administration has already begun the process of overhauling the rule, in fact, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development publishing a proposed change in January.

What is AFFH? HUD describes it as a rule which "provides an effective planning approach to aid program participants in taking meaningful actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination." In short, it's aimed at encouraging the diversification of housing as stipulated in the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In other words, the federal government has been trying to see to it that black and brown people are able to move into the suburbs, which (according to Trump) will "destroy the beautiful suburbs" and send them to "hell." Not exactly subtle. It's not a dog whistle, it's a locomotive whistle. Allow us to translate: "White people in the suburbs should be very afraid and vote for me, to keep your suburbs nice and white."

Trump's second new campaign idea is even worse: forcing all schools to fully reopen this fall, or Trump will withhold federal funding to them. We wrote about this at length yesterday, but here's the takeaway statistic from recent polling:

While Trump has said relatively little of substance lately on the coronavirus outbreak, he has focused like a laser on school reopening. But a new Quinnipiac University poll shows Americans actually oppose his approach on this by a 2-to-1 margin, with 61 percent disapproving of his plans to reopen schools and only 29 percent approving. Women disapproved, 69-23.

Further, as The Post's Philip Bump detailed Wednesday, polling from Yahoo News and YouGov this week showed 77 percent of people say the country's priority should be to limit the spread of the virus even if students can't go back to school, while just 23 percent said reopening schools should be the bigger priority.

As we said, it's almost as if Trump is actively trying to lose the election by choosing the most unpopular stances possible on all the important issues of the day. So how's that going for him? Well, this week he demoted his campaign manager (who took the fall for the Tulsa rally fiasco), and the Republican Party announced that it was going to have to severely shrink the size of the crowds for the national convention (which, you'll recall, Trump moved to Florida in a hissy fit because North Carolina wouldn't ignore safety protocols) because the pandemic is now raging out of control in Florida.

And just to top off the week where Trump reached the dubious distinction of having told 20,000 lies while in office, he lied about golf, just for good measure. According to the tireless folks at the Washington Post who have been keeping track:

It took President Trump 827 days to top 10,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker's database, an average of 12 claims a day.

But on July 9, just 440 days later, the president crossed the 20,000 mark -- an average of 23 claims a day over a 14-month period.

So Trump tweeted, as icing on the cake:

I know many in business and politics that work out endlessly, in some cases to a point of exhaustion. It is their number one passion in life, but nobody complains. My "exercise" is playing, almost never during the week, a quick round of golf. Obama played more and much longer rounds, no problem. When I play, Fake News CNN, and others, park themselves anywhere they can to get a picture, then scream "President Trump is playing golf." Actually, I play VERY fast, get a lot of work done on the golf course, and also get a "tiny" bit of exercise. Not bad!

A CNN reporter tweeted in response: "Trump's 'very fast' round of golf yesterday lasted about four hours, amounting to his 276th visit to one of his golf clubs during his presidency." At this point in Obama's first term, he had played 102 rounds. In his entire first term, Obama only played golf 113 times. Because of course Trump is lying about this, just like he lies about everything.





We have a few candidates for the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award this week, all of whom deserve at least an Honorable Mention for their efforts.

First up is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who gleefully pointed out that Mitch McConnell is finally admitting the reality that another round of pandemic relief is going to be necessary:

When we first passed our bill, they said: "nothing, never, no, we need a pause." Now they know that we -- we don't need a pause. We need to act. Then they said: "Well, we're not going to spend any more money." Now they're saying a trillion dollars.... That's not enough. But we will have to find common ground to pass legislation.

Pelosi already seems to have the upper hand in this negotiation, as she should.

Joe Biden released his economic plan this week to very little fanfare, but it deserves some attention. If you're pressed for time, the Washington Post edited the speech's video down to the best four minutes, which is well worth watching. For all of the complaints about Biden not vigorously campaigning, a new poll was released this week that showed him up a whopping 15 points over Trump, so he must be doing something right!

Sara Gideon won her Democratic primary in Maine and will now try to chuck Susan Collins out of her Senate seat. This also means that she is now eligible for just under four million dollars that was collected in a rather unique effort (which won the MIDOTW award back in FTP [500]) launched during the bitter confirmation battle over Justice Fratboy.

But our MIDOTW winner this week actually won it a few weeks back, because that is how long it took for New York to count their ballots (warning to everyone: Election Night this November will likely have a whole bunch of states still not called come the next morning... or the next week, even). We promised back then to give the award to him if he won, which we're now happy to make good on.

Progressive candidate Jamaal Bowman has now officially defeated 16-term incumbent Democrat Eliot Engel, which will almost certainly mean he'll win in November as well. Bowman ran the A.O.C. playbook, and it worked like a charm. As of this writing, Bowman was leading Engel by 16 points. Here's the whole story, from Politico:

[Jamaal] Bowman, a middle-school principal who was endorsed by most national progressives, challenged [Representative Eliot] Engel from the left and argued that the incumbent had lost touch with his solidly Democratic district, which extends from the Bronx into Westchester County. He campaigned on liberal priorities, like Medicare for All, the single-payer health care plan, and the Green New Deal.

"The world has changed. Congress needs to change, too," Bowman said in a statement sent to reporters minutes after he was declared the winner. "But if we can take on entrenched power and wealthy interests here in Westchester and the Bronx, then we can do it all across this country."

Progressives latched onto Bowman's candidacy in the closing weeks of the race. He earned late endorsements from prominent liberals, like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) -- along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose district borders Engel's in the Bronx.

Bowman's campaign gained more steam amid the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in late May. Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the progressive group Justice Democrats, which supported Ocasio-Cortez's successful campaign against an incumbent in 2018, directly tied Bowman's victory to the demonstrations against racial injustice and police brutality.

"Jamaal is the fourth challenger backed by Justice Democrats to unseat an out-of-touch incumbent," Rojas said. "He's one of the first candidates being swept into Congress by the movement in the streets right now, and he won't be the last."

Engel is the second House Democrat successfully primaried this year (Dan Lipinski was the first). Not exactly the Tea Party wave, but progress nonetheless. For his impressive victory, Jamaal Bowman is the winner of this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award, hands down.

[Jamaal Bowman is still technically a private citizen, and we do not link to candidates' websites as a rule, so you'll have to seek his contact information out yourself if you'd like to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]





We didn't have anyone else who disappointed us this week, so we had to rub some salt in this particular wound and hand the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week to Eliot Engel. Not for losing his primary to a progressive challenger, but for the hot mic moment that virtually guaranteed his loss. From the same article:

Engel, who was first elected in 1988, came under fire for riding out the initial weeks of the pandemic at his home in Potomac, Md., a tony suburb just outside Washington. When he did return home, he was caught in an embarrassing, "hot mic" moment, asking the Bronx borough president to speak at a news conference. "If I didn't have a primary, I wouldn't care" about not speaking, Engel said.

He conceded in a statement after the race was called. "The numbers are clear, and I will not be the Democratic nominee for the 16th Congressional District seat in the fall election," said Engel.

At least he had the graciousness to politely bow out.

[Contact Representative Eliot Engel on his House contact page, to let him know what you think of his actions.]




Volume 582 (7/17/20)

We considered going with our normal format this week, but in the end we decided it would just be too vicious, at this point.

Jennifer Rubin, a conservative (but Never-Trumper) writer for the Washington Post bluntly summed up what our talking points would have covered, in response to Donald Trump's insistence on opening all of America's schools with no regard whatsoever for anyone's safety or health:

Perhaps Democrats need to be more blunt. I am certain that if roles were reversed, Republicans would be accusing Democrats of killing thousands and endangering the lives of schoolchildren, their teachers and their families.

. . .

Democrats should be forthright: Trump and Republican governors' reckless actions have caused avoidable illness and death and could result in horrifying scenes of triage like those we saw in Italy. In continuing to interfere with and disregard medical experts, they jeopardize thousands more. Never have we seen a political party so irresponsibly endanger so many lives.

It's pretty easy to come up with slogans to capture this outrage:

"Republicans are the party of death!"

"Donald Trump doesn't care about your child's life!"

"Stop hiding the truth from the people, and let the scientists speak!"

"How many dead kids is Trump's re-election worth to you?"

As we said, pretty brutal. But also pretty accurate. Because, as Rubin pointed out, just imagine what Republicans would be saying if the roles were reversed.

Instead, we're not going to imagine what Republicans are saying, we are instead going to excerpt a rather extraordinary opinion piece in the Post this week from the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan. Up until now, Hogan has stood out among GOP governors by largely ignoring Trump's instructions and doing what he thought his state needed to be as safe as possible. Trump didn't exactly like this, but up until now Hogan has very gracefully refused to criticize Trump directly for any of it. He's in a touchy position because he is also the head of the National Governors Association, which represents both Democratic and Republican governors across the country. He also leads a state that is solid blue.

This week, though, he finally had had enough and lit into the Trump administration's inaction in great detail. And for the first time, he directly called out Trump. We've cut the parts of the story he tells which deal with his efforts to secure a whole planeload of test kits from South Korea (which you can read in the full version of his article) to focus on what he had to say about the pathetic response from Trump instead:

This should not have been necessary. I'd watched as the president downplayed the outbreak's severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals. Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation's response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we'd be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response. I did the best I could for Maryland. Here's what we saw and heard from Washington along the way.

Trump's first public utterance about the coronavirus set the tone for everything that followed. He was in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, after the first American diagnosis. "Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?" asked CNBC anchor Joe Kernen.

"We have it totally under control," Trump responded unhesitatingly. "It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine." And off the president went for the next eight weeks. The rest of January and February were peppered with cheerful or sarcastic comments and tweets, minimizing the outbreak's severity and the need for Americans to do much of anything.

. . .

So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren't. While other countries were racing ahead with well-coordinated testing regimes, the Trump administration bungled the effort. The test used by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention early on was fraught with inaccuracies, and onerous regulations hindered the nation's private labs. The resulting disorganization would delay mass testing for almost two months and leave the nation largely in the dark as the epidemic spread.

Meanwhile, instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans.

America's governors took a different approach. In early February, we descended on Washington for the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association. As chairman, I had worked closely with the staff for months assembling the agenda, including a private, governors-only briefing at our hotel, the Marriott Marquis, to address the growing viral threat. We brought in Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was already widely admired but whose awesome knowledge and straight-talking style hadn't yet made him a national rock star; CDC head Robert Redfield; Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security; Jay Butler, the CDC's deputy director for infectious diseases; and Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services.

They hit us with detailed presentations and the unfiltered truth, as well as it was known then. I remember hearing many dire claims: "This could be catastrophic.... The death toll could be significant.... Much more contagious than SARS.... Testing will be crucial.... You have to follow the science -- that's where the answers lie."

It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts' warnings and the president's public dismissals. Weren't these the people the White House was consulting about the virus? What made the briefing even more chilling was its clear, factual tone. It was a harrowing warning of an imminent national threat, and we took it seriously -- at least most of us did. It was enough to convince almost all the governors that this epidemic was going to be worse than most people realized.

. . .

But the president was all over the place. He avowed, falsely, that "anybody" could get a test, even as my fellow governors were desperately pleading for help on testing. Then he shifted from boasting to blame. "We inherited a very obsolete system" from the Obama administration, he claimed, conveniently ignoring the fact that his own CDC had designed the troubled U.S. testing system and that his own Food and Drug Administration had waited a full month before allowing U.S. hospital labs to develop their own tests. On March 25, the president was back to bragging again. "We now are doing more testing than anybody by far," including South Korea, whose widespread testing program was being praised around the world. This was true in absolute numbers, since we are a much bigger country, but we'd tested far fewer per capita than the Koreans had -- 1,048 tests per million people vs. South Korea's 6,764 per million -- and of course that was the only figure that mattered. During one White House briefing in late March, Trump said the issue had been dealt with. "I haven't heard about testing for weeks," the president insisted.

Really?

As Trump was making these comments, I was requesting his approval to conduct joint testing at the National Institutes of Health. I even called Francis Collins, the head of NIH, to make this request, but he stopped me before I could. Not to argue but to plead: "Actually, Governor," he said, "I'm glad you called, because I was going to ask you for help." At NIH headquarters, he explained, his people had the capacity to perform only 72 tests a day. "I don't even have enough tests for my immune-compromised patients or for my staff," he said. He wondered if I might prevail upon Johns Hopkins, whose Suburban Hospital is across the street from NIH, to do some testing for him.

I could only shake my head at that. The federal government -- a much bigger and better-funded institution, with tens of thousands of scientists and physicians in the civil service -- wanted my help! Governors always do the hard work, make the tough decisions and take the political heat. But an undertaking as large as a national testing program required Washington's help. We expected something more than constant heckling from the man who was supposed to be our leader.

Trump soon disabused us of that expectation. On April 6, he declared that testing wasn't Washington's responsibility after all. "States can do their own testing," he said. "We're the federal government. We're not supposed to stand on street corners doing testing."

It was hopeless, waiting around for him. Governors were being told that we were on our own. It was sink or swim. And if I didn't do something dramatic, we simply would not come close to having enough tests in Maryland.

. . .

I thought we might get a congratulatory word from the president. Trump always had a taste for bold gestures -- but, apparently, only for bold gestures he could claim. The president spent much of the following Monday's White House briefing criticizing me and dismissing what we had done. "The governor from Maryland didn't really understand" about testing, Trump grumbled. "The governor of Maryland could've called Mike Pence, could've saved a lot of money.... I don't think he needed to go to South Korea. I think he needed to get a little knowledge."

The president's comments that day seemed to confuse test kits with testing labs, but whatever. It was a great day for Maryland.

Pence called me a few days later. We had a friendly and productive conversation on a range of topics related to Maryland and the National Governors Association. At the end of the call, I jokingly said: "By the way, the president said that instead of working with South Korea, I should have just called you to get tests. If I had known it was that easy, I could have saved a heck of a lot of effort!" He chuckled, but there wasn't much else to say.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
Follow Chris on Twitter: ChrisWeigant
Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com
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[SWBTATTReg]

1. Thanks for posting this very true and sad commentary on the PINO's efforts to stifle and ...

address the CV epidemic. He didn't. He failed totally. He's guilty of crimes against the American people. He failed to protect us. And now we're dying and getting sick by the boatloads while he goes plays golf still.

[smirkymonkey]

2. K&R

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. I very seriously doubt that.

He's far too much a narcissist who lives entirely in a delusional bubble. He really believes whatever it is that he's saying at the moment.

[Generic Brad]

4. If Trump and the GOP can't have it all, then no one gets a thing

They would rather destroy our country than share the wealth or power with people of color and others they feel are beneath them.

I think they are intentionally trying to sabotage everything since they have realized their long grip on power is slipping away.

[lettucebe]

5. tRump does not plan, strategize, think, listen, learn. He's incapable of complex thought

He is not doing anything except what his impulses tell him to do.

Any sane person could see how easily this could be turned around -- not necessarily going to win, but would make a huge difference if he'd simply start doing something about the pandemic but no. He cannot. He simply cannot move past his impulses. This is a simple man, a deeply flawed man.

[flying rabbit]

6. K&R nt