By Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru
Thursday, August 06, 2020
President Trump pulled an inside straight to win in 2016,
and now he needs another one.
The good news for Trump is that his approval rating has
stopped falling recently. The bad news is that it has stabilized in the low
40s. Election-watcher Harry Enten points out that no president since Harry
Truman has won with anything like Trump’s negative net approval rating. Truman
won at –6, while incumbents who lost (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.
W. Bush) averaged out at about –13, roughly where Trump’s number is. The
presidents who won reelection averaged an approval rating of +23.
Trump doesn’t lead in the polling on any major issues —
even his lead on the economy has slipped away.
He is losing in Florida, a must-win state for Republican
presidential candidates for roughly 100 years. He is behind in North Carolina,
which successful Republicans have won for the last half century. Arizona and
Georgia are battlegrounds, and maybe Texas, too. Biden has been reliably ahead
in all the Blue Wall states, in large part by eating into Trump’s lead with
whites or reversing it.
So far the polling in the race looks more like Bob Dole
against Bill Clinton in 1996, when Dole persistently and substantially trailed,
than like Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016, when Trump was behind
but by smaller margins than today (and briefly even ahead).
The standard restrictions apply: There are around three
months to go, state-level polling was off in 2016, and Trump doesn’t have to
make up much ground to be within plausible range of another Electoral College
victory.
Still, his situation is dire by any measure. Underlying
conditions have turned against him, yet even when the economy was thriving,
Trump was in a notably perilous position for a president presiding over peace
and prosperity. The fault is not in his stars but in his tweets, erratic
behavior, scattershot belligerence, and denials of reality, which had already
made him radioactive before what he sometimes calls the “Wuhan flu” ever
emerged.
Trump is thin-skinned, self-obsessed, small-minded,
intellectually lazy, and ill-disciplined. These never seemed to be great
qualities in a chief executive, but they have caught up with Trump over the
last six months in particular. They have played into his poor handling of the
coronavirus crisis and the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. When times
became more serious, he remained as unserious as ever.
COVID has been the main factor worsening his political
condition. The damage didn’t register in the polls at first. At the end of
March and beginning of April, polling had his handling of the crisis in
positive territory, a kind of rally-around-the-flag effect. But the effect was
smaller and shorter-lived for him than it was for other officials, in the
states and abroad. As of early August, the average of the polling at the
website FiveThirtyEight has his rating on the crisis at 58 percent
disapprove and 38 percent approve. This is a flashing red light given that
COVID is the most important issue to voters at the moment, a rare instance when
the economy isn’t the top issue in a presidential election.
Of course, none of Trump’s critics predicted that a
deadly and economy-flattening contagion would kneecap him in an election year.
But his inability to respond adequately to the crisis is the kind of thing that
they had in mind when they warned that his character traits were unsuited to
the presidency.
Particularly in the circumstances of a novel pandemic,
the president needs a process that brings him relevant information, structures
his deliberation, allows him to adapt to new developments and correct mistakes,
and guides the rest of the government in executing his decisions. And he must
act in concert with Congress, governors, public-health experts, business
leaders, and others, all of whom have their own roles to play. Nobody could
perform this job perfectly.
What we have under Trump is very nearly the mirror image
of this ideal. He relies on gut instinct and gets his information from what he
happens to see on television or hears from friends. He is extremely disinclined
to acknowledge mistakes, process bad news, or think beyond the news cycle. The
structure his staff has built around him is designed more to manage his ego and
shield him from bad news than to yield wise decisions. His understanding of the
relationship between the president and other political actors is rudimentary,
causing him to alternate between passivity and assertions of total control.
Even where his administration has acted adroitly — it did
work assiduously to bootstrap the initially anemic testing effort to a
different level — Trump hasn’t been willing or able to explain it convincingly.
He has even complained, in varying tones, that testing should be slowed down
because it makes the infection rate look higher.
Trump hasn’t conveyed steadiness, resolve, empathy, and
seriousness of purpose to the public — the sort of thing that other political
figures, whatever their ideologies and even competence levels, have done to
their own benefit — because he does not possess them. He does not give much
sign of even recognizing that the public would appreciate them. Reassurance is
not his brand. “Fighting” is, and Trump especially enjoys taking public shots
at people who, by virtue of their position, cannot fight back. His most
successful recent such campaign has targeted Dr. Anthony Fauci — if it counts
as success for Trump to persuade many of his supporters to distrust one of his
own advisers.
Presidential incumbency is a powerful political asset,
especially during a crisis, because a president can speak and act for the
country rather than just for his party. But Trump rarely attempts to conform to
expectations of presidential behavior, even when it would be useful to him. He
often seems interested in the presidency chiefly as a platform to express
himself. Although most Americans dislike the personality he puts on display,
this tendency was more tolerable when times were good, as they were during the
first three years of his presidency.
Trump has always had an ability to direct attention where
he wants in a way that other political figures can only covet. These days, he
uses that power to elevate issues that obsess him but are well down the list of
Americans’ concerns, from the injustice allegedly done to Roger Stone to the
unfairness of specific cable-news hosts to him.
Some well-wishers urge Trump to talk about a second-term
agenda, but he cannot do it credibly when he has done so little to advance a
first-term one. Immigration and health-care plans are always just about to be
unveiled, but never are. “Infrastructure week” has been deferred so often as to
become a running gag. What he is really offering is four more years of enraging
liberals. That promise, at least, is something he can deliver on.
Trump won last time in large part because he was blessed
by an equally unpopular opponent in Hillary Clinton. Biden has entered this
campaign with a better public image. Trump’s efforts to change it have not been
working, in part because he has been attacking Biden from every direction. The
Trump campaign would have you believe that Biden was racially insensitive when
he talked about “superpredators” in the 1990s, and now wants to abolish the
police. Trump’s most consistent argument against Biden has been that the
Democrat is declining mentally — which has the disadvantage of lowering
expectations for Biden that he can then exceed.
More recently, Trump has been emphasizing the idea that
Biden would be a tool of a rising Democratic Left. That’s probably his best
line of attack, but it also indicates his challenge. If his campaign has to
warn about Biden and Ilhan Omar in its email pitches, it’s because talking
about Biden alone isn’t scary enough. And the correct strategic judgment that
Trump can win the race only if he makes it a choice between him and Biden
rather than just a referendum on his own performance constantly runs into the
candidate’s desire to make himself the sun and the moon.
While policy hasn’t been his focus, Trump has done some
good and important things with his presidency. He has been much better than
conservatives initially expected on abortion and religious liberty, judges, and
deregulation. If nothing else, he has represented a reprieve from Hillary
Clinton, who, even if she had been a weak president checked by a Republican
Congress, inevitably would have scored some progressive victories difficult or
impossible to reverse, especially on the Supreme Court.
But a president is more than a collection of policy
positions. The office has had, since the beginning, quasi-monarchical
trappings, and the president is the American head of state. How the holder of
the office conducts himself matters. Peggy Noonan once wrote that no
personality is ever perfect enough for the presidency: It exposes the flaws of
even the best men. Trump has more flaws than most, and has been less concerned
with trying to hide them than any previous occupant, indeed has affirmatively
advertised them.
His vices have taken a toll. There are periodic hopes
that he will reset and adopt a more disciplined approach, always dashed. In
2016, he did show he could tone it down for brief periods, but he can’t help
himself for long. So it is probably only events that can save him now: a waning
of the pandemic, a clear economic rebound, a Biden stumble, some other
exogenous event. None of this is unimaginable, but obviously none of it is
certain — and none of it is in his control, or in the control of the many other
Republicans whose political fates are tied to his. Trump won an upset as the de
facto challenger four years ago and will have to win a bigger one as the
incumbent.
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