Heading into October, President Trump had an opening for a shocking comeback as the coronavirus ceded center stage to antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters were burning Democrat-run cities to the ground. He nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. With our unemployment rate nearly back down to what it had been when Barack Obama won reelection and Republicans united to change the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation, Trump could have turned Joe Biden’s consistently vast polling lead into a razor-thin margin.
But our obese, septuagenarian, egomaniac of a president finally reaped what he had sown. After a summer of gambling that his public derision toward mask-wearing while indoors and social distancing would not jeopardize his reelection odds, Trump and his closest consiglieres all cavorted with their supporters and the press only to test positive for the coronavirus.
All Democrats had to do is not be crazy, and while the bulk of the ultra-leftist party, its activists, and media agents have utterly lost it, Biden has stayed alive, and mostly liberal, in the Wilmington basement. All Trump had to do was let the Democratic Party riots and the Republican Party economic recovery and judicial agenda remain the A1 stories for just one final month. Instead, Trump’s hubris got the best of him, and his coronavirus infection ensured the coronavirus is the only story.
And now, a new unintended consequence of the president’s own complacency is the greatest gift he could have possibly handed to Biden: allowing the seemingly senile former vice president to bow out of one of the only things that could possibly flip the dynamic of the election in favor of Trump. That is, the upcoming presidential debate.
Trump already offered Biden one debate lifeline as he simultaneously tried to argue that the latter was one sentence away from having a stroke while filibustering the entire debate to his own detriment. Now that Trump has the coronavirus, and his own team has been moronically dodgy both about the timeline of his infection and his symptoms, the Commission on Presidential Debates really had no choice but to make the debates virtual. Unlike Trump, Biden is not obese, but he is even older than Trump and has a history of potentially more concerning preexisting conditions. If the public cannot trust Trump’s medical team saying he’s no longer symptomatic or testing positive for the virus, it would be grossly irresponsible to put Biden at risk like that.
Luckily, Biden is quite a bit smarter than the rest of his party, which has begged him not to debate. Biden’s campaign called for postponing the second debate, a Miami town hall, to Oct. 22. But consider the math. The proposed new date is when the third debate was supposed to be held, and that’s not two full weeks before Election Day. In effect, Trump could have just erased one of the only two 90-minute sessions to grill the media’s favorite candidate.
Yet, Trump bluffed. He needs another debate to salvage whatever hopes in hell he has of winning reelection, and he knows it, but he claimed he wouldn’t participate in a virtual debate, giving Biden the perfect out to do the same. Biden called for a postponement, which may very well be tantamount to cancellation. The only difference is that Biden is outperforming Hillary Clinton so spectacularly that not only are the odds of him taking the Rust Belt back quite high, but historically red states like Arizona are now at play.
Trump only has himself to blame.
