By Rich Lowry
Friday, June 12, 2020
President Donald Trump is in the midst of a polling swoon
largely of his own making.
It’s true that events have taken a hand — a pandemic with
a death toll of more than 100,000, a sharp recession, double-digit unemployment,
and civil unrest would be the horsemen of the apocalypse for any incumbent
president.
Experiencing all of these in one term would make for
treacherous political weather; experiencing them in the space of about three
months is a perfect storm.
And yet the president has worsened his position with his
profligate tweeting, unpresidential conduct, and refusal or inability to step
up to the magisterial aspect of his office.
None of this is new, but it acquires a different
significance playing out against a backdrop of crisis, when the stakes and
emotions are elevated.
The president’s poor ratings on the coronavirus have much
to do with his overexposure, squabbling with reporters, and meandering
performances at his news briefings — all of which was avoidable, and indeed was
eventually avoided by stopping the briefings.
Quite often, Trump has blown the easy stuff while his
team has performed admirably dealing with the more nettlesome issues of
governance.
Sounding sober from the presidential podium at a time of
crisis should be easy — any halfway accomplished conventional politician could
do a pretty good job at it.
Allocating ventilators, acquiring personal protective
equipment, and ramping up testing on a rapid basis in the middle of a pandemic
when the traditional apparatus of government isn’t up to it is hard — and the
Trump team has managed it over the past couple of months.
The press doesn’t tell that story, and regardless, it
gets overwhelmed by the constant drama emanating from the Oval Office.
In the case of George Floyd, there’s nothing Trump could
have done to stop his killing. He’s not the Minnesota governor or the
Minneapolis mayor. But he’s been hurt by his reflexively combative posture.
His philosophy is never to give ground, so he has little
appreciation for the occasional need for defensive politics — to play against
type, to preempt arguments against him, to couple a hard line with a soft
sentiment.
As one of the most compelling showmen of our time, his
metric for success is different from that of standard politicians or political
operatives. He wants coverage, good, bad, or indifferent.
The St. John’s Church visit might have been poorly
thought out and politically counterproductive, but who can doubt that it was a
jaw-dropping spectacle?
By this standard, the period between mid-March and
mid-April was an astonishing success: As the online news outlet Axios has
pointed out, Trump dominated former Vice President Joe Biden on cable-news
mentions, social-media interactions, web traffic, and Google searches.
But it hasn’t helped his political standing. Trump is
never going to change, but in the 2016 campaign, he was able to adjust and
modulate at moments of peril just enough to see it through.
This is one of those moments of peril.
Losing to Biden would mean that all the changes he
pursued through administrative action would be subject to reversal.
It would mean, assuming Democrats take the Senate, too,
that his judicial appointments would immediately begin to be counteracted.
It would mean that immigration enforcement would be
drastically curtailed.
And it would mean that Trump would suffer the
highest-profile and most consequential defeat that it is possible to experience
in American national life.
Of course, nothing is inevitable. It’s only June, and
he’s still relatively strong on the economy. But he has created his own
headwind.
If Trump loses in November, it won’t be because he
pursued a big legislative reform that was a bridge too far politically. It
won’t be because he adopted an unorthodox policy mix that alienated his own
side. It won’t even be because he was overwhelmed by events, challenging though
they’ve been.
It will mostly be because he took his presidency and drove it into the ground, 280 characters at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment