While Republican states reopen for business amid steadily declining coronavirus caseloads, Democratic governance in the tri-state area, Washington, D.C., and Michigan have continued to burn businesses to the ground while presiding over the worst death rates in the nation. Joe Biden is stuck in his basement, only reemerging for air to commit blunder after blunder, and the United States has still managed to outperform many of its allies in the per capita minimization of COVID-19 deaths.
And somehow, we’re on week three of President Trump rage tweeting baseless accusations that Joe Scarborough may have murdered his congressional aide.
….about whether or not Joe could have done such a horrible thing? Maybe or maybe not, but I find Joe to be a total Nut Job, and I knew him well, far better than most. So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
As the saying goes, Twitter is not real life, and voters have learned how to tune out Trump’s usual virtual drivel, but Trump’s Scarborough smear campaign could prove significantly more damaging than his other late-night Twitter rants.
Before the pandemic, polling made clear that despite Trump’s persistent personal unpopularity, the public was extremely satisfied with Trump’s America. As I wrote in February:
Whereas 51% of respondents grant Obama a “great deal” or “fair amount” of credit for the economy, 62% credit Trump. Democrats can try and claim that even if voters thank Trump for the economy, the issue still won’t be salient on Election Day. Again, polling belies these claims.
In Gallup’s December polling, a staggering 84% of those polled said that the economy was “extremely” or “very” important, more than any other issue. At the bottom of that scale, the least important issues were gay and transgender rights, wealth distribution, and climate change.
Even with a pandemic, Trump can easily run for reelection by reminding voters that he turned the slowest economic recovery since World War II into one of the best economies in generations, and he’s fully capable of doing it again. He can let Biden word vomit all over himself and let the Chinese Communist Party take center stage as the villain of 2020. Voters can ask themselves, is the sunk cost of Trump’s temperament and character occupying the Oval Office really more significant than the utilitarian benefit of Trump’s governance?
And right now, Trump is beckoning voters to decide that, yes, it is.
Voters rightly didn’t buy into the Russia hoax, and the media desensitized them so thoroughly that they wrongly ceased to care about Trump’s actual attempted abuse of power by leveraging funding to Ukraine. What they do care about is whether Trump crosses the line from slightly cantankerous and slightly rude to outright, deranged conspiracy theorizing.
Most people are not on Twitter, let alone politically active on Twitter. But the majority report following Trump’s tweets “a lot,” with nearly 4 in 5 people claiming they at least pay attention a “fair amount.” Trump fulminating about President Barack Obama or a border wall doesn’t cut through the news cycle. Trump accusing a news host he publicly palled around with just four years ago of murder does.
Trump can rant at Gretchen Whitmer and Andrew Cuomo all he wants. His ire in those cases can be read as righteous indignation on behalf of his people. Spewing insanity toward a television host while 30 million people are unemployed is a different story.
The Biden campaign’s entire reason for existing rests on the assumption that regardless of policy, Trump is too unhinged and unstable for voters to give him another four years of power, and that Biden is uniquely positioned to bring some normalcy and decorum back to the Oval Office. Trump has every reason in the world to be besting Biden right now, and instead, he’s tweeting deranged conspiracy theories that confirm the central tenet of the case for ousting him from the White House.
