Trump Hates Losers, So Why Is He Refighting the Civil War--on the Losing Side? [View all]

[Rhiannon12866]

A week of protest, pandemic, and political unrest in the capital.

It was a small moment in a week of craziness, but there is nothing like the rage of Donald Trump when a media outlet publishes a poll proclaiming him an almost-certain loser. There is, after all, no bigger insult in his vocabulary. The “fake news” are “sick losers,” Trump said the other day. Mitt Romney is a “loser.” The protesters calling for racial justice in the streets are “lowlifes and losers.” Not him. When CNN released a national survey showing Trump trailing Joe Biden in the general election, by a hard-to-surmount fourteen points, Trump ordered his campaign to respond. It did, on Wednesday, with almost comical bluster: a letter in which the campaign’s lawyers demanded that CNN not only retract the poll but also apologize for running it. This is petty-tyrant stuff. In response, CNN’s general counsel, David Vigilante, mocked the President. “To my knowledge, this is the first time in its forty-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results,” Vigilante wrote. (What a name for a lawyer guarding the First Amendment in these times.) “To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.”


Trump cannot change the numbers by sending in his lawyers, of course. The CNN poll merely found what the other national surveys have documented in recent weeks: a persistent decline in the President’s standing as crises proliferate and his leadership is called further into question. A Gallup Poll, released on Wednesday, found that Trump’s approval rating had plunged ten points in a single month. The veteran election analyst Charlie Cook told me that he could not remember a bigger fall. “It just put an exclamation point on what we were seeing elsewhere: he’s dropping,” Cook said. The combined impact of Trump’s botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the concurrent economic crisis, and now his divisive, inflammatory response to national protests over police brutality and racial injustice have sent the President tumbling back to his “bedrock,” as Cook put it: a political base of somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent of Americans who seem willing to back Trump no matter what. If the President stays on this course, he will lose.


The polls are hardly the week’s only unpleasant reality for the President. Several striking comments by his advisers in recent days portray a country, not just a political campaign, in big trouble. On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease specialist—for Trump and for all Presidents going back to Ronald Reagan—warned that the coronavirus pandemic, which has now claimed nearly a hundred and fifteen thousand Americans, is still rampaging. “It isn’t over yet,” Fauci said, and, indeed, in twenty-one states, from Arizona to Oregon, cases are still rising. On Wednesday, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, warned that high unemployment and economic fallout stemming from pandemic shutdowns would persist for years to come. “This is the biggest economic shock, in the U.S. and the world, really, in living memory,” Powell said. On Thursday, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, warned of the dangerous politicization of the U.S. military and apologized for appearing in his combat fatigues alongside Trump last week, during a Bible-wielding photo op, minutes before which National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police violently cleared the square of peaceful protesters—beating some and firing flash grenades, chemical spray, and smoke. “I should not have been there,” Milley said. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” he added. “It was a mistake.” As with the CNN poll he did not like, Trump’s response to his own government’s warnings was to deny or dismiss them—to create his own reality when confronted with the unpleasant fact that the country he leads is lurching from crisis to crisis.

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I know it is hard to remember all the crazy things that happen in the course of a week in Trump’s America, but I will try hard to remember this one: a week when I saw troops in the streets and worried about a years-long economic crisis; a week when an untamed pandemic killed up to a thousand Americans a day; a week when massive nationwide protests suggested that our dysfunctional, gridlocked political system might finally actually do something about the plague of police brutality and systemic racism. And then there was the President, who chose to spend the week refighting the Civil War—on the losing side. This, too, I will remember, and so, dear reader, should you.


Much more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-hates-losers-so-why-is-he-refighting-the-civil-war-on-the-losing-side