Trump Is Giving Up

[Zorro]

Against both the coronavirus and Joe Biden, the president’s strategy increasingly accepts defeat.

By Ross Douthat

Donald Trump can still win the 2020 presidential election; something that has a 10 percent or 15 percent chance of happening can certainly transpire. But even more than in 2016, if the president wins this time, we will have to attribute his victory to the workings of divine providence (don’t worry, I have that column pre-written), because what we’re watching is an incumbent doing everything in his power to run up his own margin of defeat.

Start with his re-election messaging, to the extent that you can discern such a thing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was shambolic and punctuated by self-inflicted disasters, but his message against Hillary Clinton, like his message against the Republican establishment in the primaries, had a simplicity and consistency: She supported bad trade deals; she supported stupid wars; she sold the country out to special interests and foreign governments; vote for her and you get more closed factories, more soldiers dead or crippled, more illegal immigration, more power to Wall Street and Washington, D.C.

In 2020, on the other hand, the Trump campaign has been stuck toggling back and forth between two very different narratives. One seeks to replay the last campaign, portraying Joe Biden as the embodiment of a failed establishment (hence all the references to his 47 years in Washington) who will sell out American interests to China as soon as he’s back in power (hence the attempts to elevate Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling).

But the other narrative goes after Biden as though the Democrats had actually nominated Bernie Sanders, insisting that his advancing age makes him a decrepit vessel for the radical left, a stalking horse not just for Kamala Harris but also for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and antifa.

A truly brilliant campaigner might be able to weave these two narratives together, but on the lips of Donald Trump their contradictions are evident. The resulting incoherence just feeds his tendency to return to old grudges and very online grievances, as though he’s running for the presidency of talk radio or his own Twitter feed. Without Steve Bannon to keep him grounded or Clinton to keep him focused, he’s making a closing “argument” that’s indistinguishable from a sales pitch for a TV show or a newsletter — suggesting that even more than four years ago, the president assumes he’ll be in the media business as soon as the election returns come in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/trump-campaign-.html

Trump may be giving up, but he's going to burn down as much as he can on the way out.

[ZZenith]

1. Holy shit.

Imagine needing Steve Bannon to keep you “grounded.”

[MFM008]

2. Hes done

Toast
Baked cake.
Not like 2016...
We know who he is.

[pwb]

3. That opinion got a lot out there ha?

Not sure the meaning of it all.

[Iliyah]

4. Shithole will do 4-5 rallies per day until election . . .

What's the odds that he will peter out.

[brush]

5. He's a known quantity now. He has a record, and it's horrible.

Last edited Tue Oct 20, 2020, 08:10 PM - Edit history (1)

He knows it's over. I'm betting he's put out feelers to Putin to take him in. He's already said he'll leave if he loses. No other nation wants him. Hell, Putin probably doesn't want him after having gotten his money's worth out of him—America's economy in a shambles and the nation riddled with a deadly virus with no plan to control it.

[jb5150]

6. "but he's going to burn down as much as he can on the way out." ..

Same strategy as Hitler ....