New York Times columnist Charles Blow, if ignorant and simple, is at least honest. In his latest piece Sunday, Blow admits that the current health scare doesn’t spell certain death for Trump’s reelection campaign — not because we’ve apparently managed to beat virtually every dire projection of the disease’s progression, but because:
It reads like a frustrated tantrum because that’s all it is. If a president wanted to accomplish Trump’s stated goals of office, from a policy perspective, what would a campaign look like that the national media would find acceptable? Such a thing doesn’t exist and never could, and that’s mostly because Trump committed the unpardonable sin of winning his election.
Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign platform didn’t look fundamentally different from Trump’s in 2016, aside from international trade. Yet Romney is now showered with love by the same people who called him a racist when he ran for president. The biggest difference between Romney and Trump is that Romney lost. The media love a nice loser — ask Stacey Abrams. (Though, to be sure, with Abrams, the media are eagerly promoting her to win something in the future; with Romney, they were just glad he failed for good.)
If Trump wins reelection this November, it will largely have been for two reasons — first, because Joe Biden will not have given enough people a reason to throw in with him instead, and second, because the economy shows promise of restoration following the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden isn’t offering anything useful right now by simply proposing trillions of dollars more in federal spending for unemployment and “green energy” projects, so that basically leaves it up to the economy and Trump’s ability to persuade voters that he’s the best person to lead us back to what we had before the virus showed up.
“Don’t fall prey to false hope that defeating Trump will be easy, that his horrifically incompetent response to the coronavirus has doomed him,” wrote Blow. “It hasn’t. Trump will fight with everything he has to the bitter end to stay in power. He will never admit any fault. He will lie and lie and lie and lie some more. And the people who support him will stick with him every step of the way.”
This is another way of simply saying that the coronavirus is far from a death sentence for Trump in 2020.
