Four years ago, when President Trump pulled off one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history, one possible explanation was that Hillary Clinton was such a uniquely bad candidate that Trump managed to win in spite of his outrageous behavior that turned off many voters.
But to Trump and his most ardent supporters, his pugilistic, unorthodox approach to politics was a central part of how he was able to generate such ferocious passion and win key states that eluded more conventional — they would say “weak” — Republican candidates.
Though we’ll long debate what happened in the 2016 election, Trump’s 2020 reelection bid was doomed by his boorish behavior. Time and again, he refused to act like a president. And he paid the consequences.
The economy was deemed the most important issue by the largest number of voters, and the national electorate deemed Trump better to handle the economy by 49% to 47%, according to exit polls. Yet at the same time, a 53% majority of people said Trump lacked the temperament to be president — a dynamic that held in key battleground states.
Making matters more clear, voters in states that went for Biden voted for Republicans down-ballot. It’s looking like Republicans will actually gain seats in the House and hold the line in state legislatures — even in states that Biden won.
That suggests while there was a real reluctance to the sort of revolutionary change the Left hoped Biden could be a vessel for, ultimately, voters were just eager to move on from Trump.
Despite Biden’s age, frequent verbal miscues, support for many controversial policies, and lack of campaigning for eight months, he won — even flipping once reliably red states of Arizona and Georgia. Yes, Biden had a friendly media. But Trump also had the platform of the presidency. Instead of using it to his advantage, he used that platform to draw negative attention to himself on a daily basis.
Voters did not elect Biden because they wanted a guy who was pushing 80 or because they studied his policy proposals. They elected him because they wanted somebody who could at least try to act like a president.
Trump had so many chances to act like a president. He could have shed his campaign style once he was elected or sworn in. Instead, he began his presidency spending days digging into a pointless lie about the size of his inauguration crowds.
Throughout his presidency, Trump’s Twitter feed and his public statements were filled with invective. He spread conspiracies and lobbed insults. Nearly every controversy Trump created during his time in office was due to his failure to grasp the gravity of the office — that saying things as president can carry significant consequences and thus is different than saying them as a private citizen. A stray tweet can rock the stock market or trigger an unnecessary foreign policy crisis or spread dangerous disinformation.
At the start of this year, with the economy booming, a string of foreign policy successes to boast of, and a failed impeachment effort, it was quite possible that Trump could have overcome all of these things and won reelection. But then, the coronavirus hit. While the devastation it brought was a challenge, it could have also been an opportunity to demonstrate that he could switch gears when actually confronted by a crisis. This was yet another chance for him to cut his schtick and start acting like a president.
Unfortunately for the nation, as well as his reelection prospects, he was incapable of doing so. He could not abandon the persona of indulging petty feuds during a pandemic. He could not understand that in a time of crisis, people want the truth, not happy talk and unsubstantiated boasts about how great things were going and how quickly it would be over. This wasn’t a crisis that he could talk his way out of by rallying supporters as he did with his “perfect” Ukraine phone call.
In late March, the brief period during which Trump was being relatively serious in his handling of the virus, his approval rating reached the highest point of his presidency, only to nosedive as he returned to his typical ways.
This isn’t to say that Trump was to blame for the virus making landfall in the United States. Or to overlook the early mistakes made by the experts when it came to developing tests and their mixed signals on mask-wearing. Or to excuse major mistakes made by state and local leaders that exacerbated the death toll.
But confronted with a fast-moving virus of which little was known, and presented with complex trade-offs between economic and social disruption and mass death, Trump still could not snap out of his pro-wrestling approach to politics.
History will record that Trump tried to downplay the virus. But as we write the rough draft, it’s important to note that Trump’s behavior was not just unserious but erratic. It would be one thing if, from the get-go, he argued that people shouldn’t give up their lives due to the coronavirus and resisted lockdowns. Instead, he was all over the place. He embraced “15 days to slow the spread” and then extended it. He tweeted, “Liberate Michigan,” and then, when Georgia tried to ease restrictions, he said that he “strongly disagreed” with Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump repeatedly praised Anthony Fauci and listened to pretty much all of his recommendations for months, but then closed out the campaign indulging chants of “Fire Fauci” at a raucous campaign rally.
As Trump faces obvious defeat, he is still incapable of putting the country before his fragile ego. He is making unsubstantiated accusations that the election has been stolen and claiming to have won “by a lot.” He will likely drag the country through weeks of litigation and months more of riling up his supporters about election fraud. In short, he will still not be able to behave like a president.
