Any belief that teflon Trump has a deep-seated carefully thought out plan on how to hang onto power is profoundly misplaced. That doesn’t of course mean that he is working on his concession speech either! Rather every action he takes is for the purpose of hanging onto power and is made as the mood takes him.
Trump grows more and more desperate each day as the polls remain firm that he and his Republican Party are about to be badly beaten in the 2020 election. His management of the pandemic has hit a record low approval rate, thirty percent. Reflexly he presents nightly streams of consciousness supposedly on the Covid crisis. These unsurprisingly have no impact on his numbers. His survival efforts are becoming more and more ill thought out and on their face dangerous to the nation and ironically counterproductive to his own re election chances.
One fact is for sure in the week that was, Trump did not spend much time on his vision for a second term. Rather he indulged in wishful thinking, and concentrated on diversionary narratives as the coronavirus pandemic smoldered on.
WHERE TRUMP IS NOW
The POTUS is still reliant on the GOP legislators to back him as well as his new fixer, Head of the Justice Department, Bill Barr. Trump has not the power of a Putin, a Kim Jong Un or Xi Jinping to declare himself President for life. If his enablers were to finally fulfill their oaths and cry “no mas” it would be game over but for the moment they are still singing the refrain, “Yes, we will all go down together”.
But to repeat, there is no grand plan. He has lashed out with naked racism focussing on Biden’s Vice President pick Kamala Harris. He reintroduced his “birther” strategy. In the teeth of nation wide “Black Lives Matter” protests he abused his office to show that he is the Law and Order President, He has withheld resources to the States and individuals who are victim of the coronavirus pandemic. His most recent gambit is to castrate the United States Post Office thereby warning those who wish to vote by mail that their votes won’t count. All the aforementioned together with his preferred tactic character assassination - smear Biden off the face of the earth and blame him and Obama for the “Russian Hoax” is what he is focussing on. For good measure he throws in Hillary’s e mails - “Russia are you listening. Wikilealks I love Wikileaks”.
All his strategies and whether they will help him or not will be dealt with below. But first his public image.
TRUMP: WHEN BAD PUBLICITY IS JUST THAT - BAD.
As his character becomes more and more exposed through devastating best selling books like his niece’s inside look into his racist, amoral, dysfunctional family life and John Bolton’s detailed description of his self serving decision making, “The Room Where It Happened”, he attempts to persuade the nation that all is normal. In the teeth of gross mismanagement of an ongoing pandemic he proclaims that all children should go back to school, that sport should resume and that with nearly a hundred and seventy thousand dead and over five million confirmed cases he has, on behalf of America, managed the pandemic better than anyone else.
The court rulings are becoming nearer and nearer to breaking through his thick skin and penetrating his inner naked souless workings. There are two more best sellers in the immediate offing. One by his former fixer Michael Cohen who will detail how Trump ran his world like a mob boss and the other by Bob Woodward, who has impeccable credentials and inside sources second to none. Apparently Woodward has copies of twenty - five letters to Kim Jong Un. These exposes will add to the litany of revelations that have followed his candidacy and his Presidency, not he least of which was the best seller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” which included the assessments of thirty - eight psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts.
Needless to say the more psychotic his behavior veers the more he smears Biden for being not quite all there……..
RACISM NOW, RACISM THEN AND RACISM TOMORROW
To Trump’s and America’s shame the call of racism still has a significant following. Besides his usual staple slants on the subject Trump injected three new variations of the theme that has divided the country since its inception. In so doing he hit rock bottom in a manner that would have shamed George Wallace and made Robert E, Lee fall of his horse, Firstly, he took a tour back to the Wallace playbook by issuing an executive order in effect allowing segregation in suburban housing. What was even more telling was the accompanying tweet. Trump escalated his earlier prophecies about a “suburban invasion that would undermine the safety of the suburban housewife”. He informed that the “invasion” would be led by Cory Booker, the Black Senator from New Jersey.
Then it was a trip down memory lane to “birtherism”. In answer to a question as to what he thought of the argument that because Harris was the daughter of immigrants she was ineligible to run for the Vice Presidency, Trump, whose mother was also an immigrant, hunkered back to the obscenity that started him off on his Presidential run. He claimed that, “He had heard that she doesn’t meet the requirements. I have no idea if that is right…. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that out…”. He then added that the lawyer that had made this preposterous allegation, in the teeth of the Fourteenth Amendment, “was brilliant”.
The third new call out to racism was on its face even more ludicrous. He endorsed the victory of Majorie Taylor Greene in a Republican Primary hailing the latter as, “A future Republican star”. Ms Greene is a card carrying member of the openly racist and anti semitic cult known as QAnon. The latter hero worship Trump and designate all Democrats as evil child abusers. They have condoned violence and the FBI have labelled their adherents as a domestic terrorism threat.
So in this and other ways Trump has nailed his theses to the Confederate Flag and tripled down on racism to make America Great Again.
“LOCK THEM UP”
Another pillar to “Making America Great Again” is to criminally charge Biden and Obama and debunk the work of Mueller, the whole Intelligence Establishment, the Inspector General of The Justice Department, all of whom detailed the Russian assistance to Trump in the 2016 election. Historians will reflect on the energy and effort Trump pumped into creating revisionist history.
No issue has totally dominated the attention of the current POTUS more than the “Russian Hoax”. This topic with eighty days to go still is central pillar in what he is offering his cult to help them get through rough times. In this endeavor he has been assisted by William G. Barr his Attorney General. The latter has not flinched from reinterpreting the Mueller report and was not at all stopped in his tracks when a Bush appointee, Federal Judge Walton, bald faced told him he had used his office to distort the special counsel’s findings to politically favor Trump.
Barr also made it his central mission to confirm the Trump narrative by arguing that rather than Russia intervening on Trump’s behalf in 2016, the cause celebre in that year was that Obama and Biden spied on the POTUS. Barr dropped charges on those found guilty in the Russian scandal. Initially he intervened on Michael Cohen’s behalf but when the latter ratted on the President he had him locked up again because he was writing a book describing Trump as a mob boss. Barr appointed a special prosecutor to investigate those who dared probe the Russian interference. He was even mentioned with Giuliani as the man the Ukrainian President should contact with the dirt on Biden.
For all the Consiglieri did for Trump he was praised. But that was then and this is now. With eighty days to do to the election, Barr has not delivered indictments against Obama and Biden, in spite of utilizing a ton of tax payer money on the effort. Donald as is his wont is furious. This lead to Trump pouring his heart out to Fox News Anchor Maria Bartiromo. He confided to the Fox faithful that he hoped that Barr and his special prosecutor would not play this by the book. “Bill Barr”, he maintained, “has the chance to be the greatest of all time, but if he wants to be politically correct, he’ll just be another guy, because he has all the answers, he knows what they have, and it goes straight to Obama, and it goes straight to Biden”
Even Barr knows he can’t continue to go into court and talk utter garbage. Not that he hasn’t tried. Trump hasn’t even thanked him for arguing in the Supreme Court that he is above the law and he was entitled to shoot someone in Fifth Avenue. Sixty - five Faculty Members of his alma mater, George Washington Law School, have called for his resignation because he has betrayed his oath. That is the last fact that one would want to put on a resume.
Well Trump has also been reliant on the Republican controlled Senate to deliver Obama’s and Biden’s heads on a plate. The two Committee Chairman thus fair have shied from doing his bidding. Senator Johnson, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, says he still will send out subpoenas in spite of pushback from Republicans while Senator Lindsey Graham, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the POTUS’S strongest ally, has not as yet produced the goods. Graham has to be reflecting why he is tied in the polls against an African American, in a red state that Trump won by fifteen percent.
So for whatever reason Trump believes he should make locking up Obama and Biden a central issue in 2020. Even his Consiglieri has given up and the Republican Senate do not believe it is a winning strategy to retain the Senate.
A CORONAVIRUS FINANCIAL PACKAGE AND VOTER SUPPRESSION VIA THE POST OFFICE
Trump has hung tough on compromising on a financial package to redress the economic damage evinced by the Coronavirus pandemic. Negotiating from the position of a one million dollar package versus the three million dollar Democratic offer he refused the latter’s compromise to meet him halfway.
Trump’s belief that making the electorate suffer will hurt the Democrats led him to reinforce his other recent voter suppression thrusts. He neutered the Post Office through the appointment of a major donor as Post Master General and getting him hobble the ability of the United States Post Office to manage the vast mail voter surge that is expected in November with the pandemic still raging. The new appointee literally dumped scores of voter sorting machines, removed post boxes, axed twenty - three top managerial positions and then wrote to forty - six States that the Postal Service couldn’t guarantee delivering the postal votes in time to be counted. The rationale behind this subtlety was that polls showed that seventy percent of Democrats expected to vote by mail while only twenty percent of Republicans did.
Trump smugly proclaimed that the motive for the Post Office decision was “voter fraud” and that the failure of Covid19 package was Pelosi playing games.
WILL ANY OF THIS WORK? - FIRSTLY RACISM?
The race card certainly will mobilize his core but will it win back the 2018 voters that deserted him? His sexist appeals o suburban white “housewives” to return to the fold because of the Cory Booker invasion is mind boggling in 2020. The suburban women switched for a host of reasons which have only worsened. They are hardly likely to think that Trump’s warnings overrides their real problem of whether their children should go to school or not and the failure of leadership to put in place a rational plan to cope with the ravaging pandemic.
Then the “birtherism” strategy in 2020 has to border on political bankruptcy. In case he hasn’t noticed it the country as a whole support Black Lives Matter. The latter from being a fringe movement have gained the centrality of the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. Corporate America are behind it vocally and with money. Sportsmen even in Europe are wearing the slogan. Again it will serve notice to his base that he hasn’t lost the faith but it cannot move the needle. In fact the race talk is damaging Trump. His approval rate for handling of the Black Lives Matter protests was thirty percent.
As for QAnon which has about two hundred thousand adherents and whose importance has been magnified like so many others by the internet he has already had a backlash from Republican legislators, all of whom are going to be asked where they stand on Trump created issues.
THE CHARACTER ASSASSINATION OF OBAMA AND BIDEN - A VOTE GETTER?
This again will make the faithful happy but with eighty days to go and even if it was announced that Biden and Obama were about to be charged it would more likely mobilize the Democrats then the convinced cult. Trump faces bigger legal problems himself with the Supreme Court agreeing to the subpoenaing of his financial records and the myriad of litigations proceeding. Barr will have to cope with an embarrassing defense as to why he must let twice guilty pled Mike Flynn off the hook.
THE VIRUS FINANCIAL PACKAGE AND THE POST OFFICE CRISIS - CAN THEY HELP TRUMP?
Any seasoned politician will tell you that in any governmental hold up regardless of which side is allegedly right or wrong the blame goes to the Administration. So Trump and the chaotic Republicans in the Senate need resolution. Pelosi by offering a pandemic package three months ago and then being prepared to meet Trump halfway placed herself on the side of the angels. Trump idiotically believes that he can spin the blame onto Pelosi. As each day passes and the checks do not arrive from Trump, and remember that he insisted on having his name on them for the first relief package, who is going to get the lion’s share of the blame? Probably not “Nasty Nancy”.
The Post Office shut down is reflective of Trump’s unawareness of the role that the latter plays in the country’s, psyche and day to day life. Trump has made it quite clear that his dismantling of this crucial institution is to diminish the vote against him. America’s expansion has been dependent on this service. The entity is written into the Constitution! The egalitarian nature of its services angered Free Market Milton Friedman, to whom the Republican economists pray each night. The father of American trickle down economics posited that those who lived in the outer reaches of the country where the cost of living was far less should pay far more for postal services as the cost of servicing these areas was astronomical. One of Trump’s last remaining bases, the rural folk, will be hit most by the this folly.They are more dependent than anyone else for their prescription drugs, social security checks and maintaining contact with the world.
Needless to say the POTUS claims it is the Democrats that are to blame. However Nancy included the moneys for the Post Office in May and now is prepared to bring the House out of recess to pass legislation to solidify the Post Office’s role.
NEXT WEEK
One cannot imagine what Trump will dream up next week when the Democrats get four days full Press coverage for their convention. Kamala has exited beyond expectation and Biden has put together a broad coalition including Republicans to address the urgency of exiting Trump. The latter has but eighty days to turn it all around.
If his coronavirus briefings were a Reality show the run would be ended by now.
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