Trump flails as audience dwindles and ratings plummet [View all]
Less than four months before the presidential election, Team Trump seems dazed and confused. Held despite warnings from public health officials, the big rally in Tulsa was poorly attended. Concerns over turnout factored into canceling a rally in New Hampshire. Revelations that White House staff, Secret Service personnel, and members of the president’s entourage who attended recent events tested positive for COVID-19 embarrassed the administration. Most important, Team Trump’s response to this summer’s surge in Coronavirus cases and the protests following the killing of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks by police officers has been inconsistent and incoherent.
On July 5, Trump bit Fox News, the hand that has fed him, for reporting on polls showing that Joe Biden has a substantial lead in battleground states. “We are leading in the real polls,” the president tweeted, without evidence. Declaring that Fox was “getting into CNN and MSDNC territory,” Trump recommended that his supporters switch to OANN, a far-right platform that has promoted false claims that Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa, California legislators want to ban sales of the Bible and that the Coronavirus was created by the Deep State in North Carolina (citing a “citizen investigator” who believes Dr. Anthony Fauci personally funded the creation of the virus).
Team Trump fought a belated — and futile — fight to suppress publication of John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened,” alerting potential readers to the former National Security Advisor’s claims that the president always put his own personal interests ahead of national security. And, apparently, Team Trump did’t learn. An ill-considered effort to block the release of a memoir by Mary Trump, the president’s niece, has helped propel her book to the top of the bestseller list. In “Too Much and Never Enough,” Ms. Trump, a clinical psychologist, describes her uncle as “much as he was when he was three years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information”; a man who values human beings “only in monetary terms,” subscribes to “cheating as a way of life,” and now “threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.”
The administration’s apparent plan to urge Americans to “learn to live” with the Coronavirus, complemented by the president’s false claim that 99 percent of cases are “completely harmless,” has not played well, especially with older voters, who provided the margin of victory for Trump in many states in 2016. According to recent polls, many Americans over 65 now find Trump coarse, disrespectful, and divisive. Feeling at risk from COVID-19, they believe his administration has not prioritized public health over reopening the economy.
more at
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/506935-trump-flails-as-audience-dwindles-and-ratings-plummet
= new reply since forum marked as read