By Rich Lowry
Friday, October 09, 2020
If this is the most important election of our lifetimes,
is it too much to ask that the president of the United States act like it?
The president’s most devoted backers talk about the
election in apocalyptic terms — Michael Anton of Hillsdale College, author of
the famous “The Flight 93 Election” essay in 2016, is the unsurpassed master of
the genre.
The stakes are undoubtedly huge. The policy swing from a
President Donald Trump to a President Joe Biden alone would be massive, and
progressives are talking about adding states for more Democratic Senate seats
and packing the Supreme Court — changes meant to shift the balance of American
government enduringly in their direction.
The warnings from the right about the potentially
existential stakes of 2020 often inveigh against Republican pundits critical of
Trump yet never get around to urging any correction on the president’s part.
Indeed, even as Trump, too, talks in dire tones about the consequences of a
Biden victory, he doesn’t seem to have absorbed the message.
If the existence of the country itself is on the ballot,
why not prepare better for debates? Why not use Twitter exclusively for
messages that advance his cause rather than detract from them? Why waste any
time on petty animosities and distractions? Why not write down a health-care
plan and a COVID-19 plan to blunt Biden’s most potent issues?
Why not, in short, do a few things that are uncomfortable
or unnatural in the cause of, you know, saving the country from imminent
political destruction?
Of course, by this point, even asking these questions
seems naive, although there were times in 2016 when Trump modulated his
behavior enough to make a difference.
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, journalist Ryan
Lizza looked back at the 2016 Trump-Hillary clashes and made the case that
Trump was relatively disciplined and kept coming back to his central themes.
In his first clash with Biden, in contrast, an
out-of-control Trump blew himself up in the course of trying to demolish the
former vice president. If Biden was calculatedly evasive and canned, Trump was
profligate and underprepared — the way he almost always is.
As my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru points out, in 2016 Trump
fastened on underappreciated issues that voters cared about — trade,
immigration, and PC. This time, he’s focused on matters that obsess him, not
the average voter.
The sources of the Russia investigation should, as a
matter of basic accountability, be established and disclosed. But no one who is
not already a Trump voter cares about dubious investigatory decisions from four
years ago.
Nor is anyone as exercised as the president about
critical things said about him on cable-TV programs.
Trump has waged a low-intensity campaign against masks,
for no good reason. By setting himself against them, largely on aesthetic
grounds, Trump further opened himself up to charges that he doesn’t take the
virus seriously — even before his illness and the White House outbreak.
Consider, on the other side of the ledger, how Trump, by
and large, leads on the top issue of the election, the economy. Still, there
has been no sustained case against Biden’s economic program. On what should be
his foremost advantage, Trump has turned the famous James Carville adage on its
head, “It’s everything else, stupid.”
If the time eventually comes for recriminations after a
defeat in November (not a certainty, even at this late date), Trump’s hard-core
supporters will have plenty of places to point — a once-in-a-century pandemic
and an overwhelmingly hostile media, among other things.
Be that as it may, Trump won’t have been stabbed in the
back; he will have committed a form of political hara-kiri because he found it
easier and more enjoyable than exercising a modicum of self-discipline.
If Trump loses, the story isn’t going to be what was done
to him, rather what he did to himself.
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