President Trump went off on a Twitter tirade after an advertisement from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project aired during Tucker Carlson Tonight, sophomorically smearing the PAC’s backers George Conway as “Moonface” and Rick Wilson as “crazed.” Trump’s fulmination wasn’t just unbecoming of the Oval Office, but also dumb because, in all honesty, the Lincoln Project ad simply wasn’t good.
? Mourning In America pic.twitter.com/djkH0ySCqo
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 4, 2020
From a purely cinematic perspective, the “Mourning in America” spot takes the potentially riveting conceit of a nation strangled by the coronavirus and illustrates it as banally as possible. Generic shots of dilapidated buildings and hackneyed criticisms of Trump bailing out “Wall Street but not Main Street” fall flat. But the ad’s true error is its narrative reliance on an unavoidable global shutdown and not Trump’s own words and personal failings.
“Mourning in America” seems to indulge in an ugly portrayal of America overall, insinuating that the nation’s been embroiled in economic collapse for years rather than an intentional shutdown after a year of hovering around a half-century low of unemployment and record confidence in personal financial prospects. Sure, we know that the federal government wasted the crucial month after closing most travel from China, and as the leader of the executive branch, the buck stops with Trump, so he gets the blame. But consider, nearly every other nation has had to enact economically destructive shutdowns, and not only did the United States maintain the advantage of a much stronger economy going into the shutdown than most of our allies, but we’re also keeping our per capita death rate as a result of the pandemic much lower than other OECD nations such as Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom.
More importantly, polling provides Trump’s opponents a clear pathway for how to best highlight his flaws. Although Trump’s approval rating remains underwater and he trails Joe Biden in head-to-head matchups, voters still tend to trust Trump far more than the de facto Democratic nominee on handling the economy. Making our current economic situation the focal point of any Trump critique is just bad strategy. Trump-haters would be better off focusing on his press conference faux pas and persistent flattery of Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un.
As a matter of content, “Mourning in America” is a flop. But it clearly got a rise out of Trump, who may have been the Lincoln Project’s only intended audience.
