Dancing To A Madman's Tune

Donald Trump just skipped the second Republican debate. He figures the nomination is in the bag. E.J. Dionne explains what is happening:

Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.

Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.

All of this was not inevitable:

It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.

Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.

But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take on Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.

As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.

The sad news for the country is that Republicans let a real chance to end Trump’s career slip away. The opportunity might not come around again. Critics of the GOP enjoy observing that the more Trump is indicted, the more Republican voters flock to him. The timelines of his growing lead and his expanding list of felony counts do overlap, but there are better explanations for his comeback.

Republicans have simply not shown the courage to take Trump on. They're cowards. And, as a result, they're dancing to a madman's tune.

Image: Pinterest 

Lurid Fantasies

Donald Trump can't claim that he defeated the coronavirus. He can't claim that he built a gung-ho economy. So what's left to run on? Paul Krugman writes that all he's got left are lurid fantasies:

It’s not just the fact that premature reopening led to a huge second wave of infections and deaths. Equally important, from a political point of view, has been Covid-19’s geographical spread.

Early in the pandemic it was possible to portray Covid-19 as a big-city, blue-state problem; voters in rural areas and red states found it easier to dismiss the threat in part because they were relatively unlikely to know people who had gotten sick. But the second surge of infections and deaths was concentrated in the Sunbelt.

And while the Sunbelt surge appears to be slowly subsiding now that state and local governments have done what Trump didn’t want them to do — close bars, ban large gatherings and require masks — there now appears to be a surge in the Midwest.

And, as for Trump's claim that the economy would come roaring back,

all indications are that the rapid snapback of May and June has leveled off, with unemployment still very high. Friday’s employment report is likely to show an economy still adding jobs, but nothing like the “super V” recovery Trump is still claiming. And there will be only one more labor market report before the election.

Furthermore, the politics of the economy depend less on what official numbers say than on how people are feeling. Consumer confidence remains low. Assessments by businesses surveyed by the Federal Reserve range from unenthusiastic to glum. And there just isn’t enough time for this to change much: Trump isn’t going to be able to ride an economic boom into the election.

So Donald is threatening the nation with invisible anarchists:

There has been some looting, property damage and violence associated with Black Lives Matter demonstrations. But the property damage has been minor compared with urban riots of the past — no, Portland is not “ablaze all the time” — and much of the violence is coming not from the left but from right-wing extremists.

It’s also true that there has been a recent rise in homicides, and nobody is sure why. But murders were very low last year, and even if the rate so far this year continues, New York City will have substantially fewer homicides in 2020 than it did when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.

In short, there isn’t a wave of anarchy and violence other than that unleashed by Trump himself.

However, it might work:

For whatever reason, there’s a long history of disconnect between the realities of crime and public perceptions. As Pew has pointed out, between 1993 and 2018 violent crime in America plunged; murders in New York fell more than 80 percent. Yet over that period Americans consistently told pollsters that crime was rising.

It worked for Richard Nixon fifty years ago. But Nixon was the challenger. Trump is the president. It all depends on how many Americans are as demented -- and vile -- as Trump himself is.

Image: twitter.com

White Hot Crazy

 

A couple of weeks ago, the former Republican strategist Rick Wilson -- now with the Lincoln Project -- predicted there would be a lot of "white-hot crazy" coming from the Trump campaign.  On Monday, things really did get white-hot. Jennifer Rubin writes:

During an interview on Monday with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, a spin artist for the president and a purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment, [Trump] claimed that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is controlled by mysterious people. 

In concocting his tale, Trump fantasized of “people that you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows.” Ingraham, as though trying her best to stop his self-immolation, responded, “That sounds like conspiracy theory.” No luck. Trump continued: “They are people that are on the streets, they’re people that are controlling the streets. We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that.” This is simply bonkers.

Ingraham tried to stop Trump before he went completely off the rails. But, these days, Trump thinks he's winning when he's spouting madness. He continued, suggesting that police who kill people are like a golfer missing a three-foot putt:

But they choke, just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot [putt],” Trump said. Ingraham leaped in: “You’re not comparing it to golf, because that’s what the media [would say].” In other words, actual reporters would recognize what he was saying was morally offensive and so lacking in self-awareness as to suggest Trump cannot even fake normal behavior.

It's painfully obvious that the president is seriously sick. These should be grounds for exercising the 25th Amendment. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is as sick as Trump is:

In a normal time, with a functioning Republican Party and a patriotic vice president, this might be the end of Trump’s campaign and an invitation to invoke the 25th Amendment. We, unfortunately, have spineless sycophants in the GOP and a zombie-like vice president who feels compelled to show allegiance to a president plainly unfit to hold office. Likewise, in most families, there would be a family meeting to stop him from embarrassing himself. (Perhaps not in families where its members stand to inherit millions of dollars.) No chance of that, but the thesis from the president’s niece, Mary Trump, that there is something seriously wrong with him looks pretty unassailable.

And, so, madness marches on.

Image: nymag.com