This piece by Tim O’Brien, one of Trump’s biographers, makes an important point about Trump’s standard approach toward everything: brag, whine, blame and insult. He reprises all the BS Trump said about the vote being rigged back in 2016 and all of his shenanigans this time and then offers this:
It’s worth worrying about how deeply Trump is corrupting the election, of course — and monitoring him closely. After all, he’s corrupted many of the people around him, including his own children. And, as Barton Gellman pointed out in a meticulously reported and provocative feature in the Atlantic this week, Trump has powerful tools at his disposal to try to upend the results — on and well after Election Day. My colleague Jonathan Bernstein sorts through Gellman’s key conclusions here, including how willing Republicans in swing states would be to assist a Trump coup.
But amid all the hand-wringing over what he may or may not do, don’t let Trump snatch away your own agency and attention. David Axelrod, as canny and experienced a political observer as there is, reminded everyone not to get overly distracted by Trump’s performance art. “You do wonder if the POTUS would sooner have us talking about his outrageous comments on the election than the 202,000 dead of COVID-19 or the 870,000 additional Americans who filed for unemployment this week,” he tweeted.
Axelrod might be giving Trump too much credit. The president doesn’t think strategically. He thinks like a toddler.
When Trump amassed billions of dollars of debt he couldn’t repay in the early 1990s, he ran to his wealthy father and siblings to help bail him out. As things snowballed, he carped publicly about how poorly banks and investors were treating him. They weren’t taking away his hotels, airline, casinos, yacht and other properties because that’s what they did to deadbeats — they were doing it because they had suspect motives and weren’t loyal. His reality TV show never received an Emmy — not because the show was awful, but because the awards were unfair.
So it goes with his re-election bid, albeit with much more significant stakes. Trump wants to pretend the system is stacked against him because he knows he’s in danger of losing, perhaps badly. In 2016, his claims of a rigged election reached a crescendo when polls suggested he would lose. It can’t be his fault, and he can’t be a failure, if everything and everyone around him conspires against him.
I suspect Trump is also aware that if he is forced to exit the White House and lose its protections, he’s more vulnerable to fraud investigations that imperil him and his children. It’s likely that has him on edge, too.
So expect Trump to remain in overdrive, seeding the waters with tumult. But don’t let him scare you. Take a cue from the mourners on the steps of the Supreme Court who greeted his appearance at Ginsburg’s casket on Thursday with loud chants of “vote him out.” One way to discipline toddlers who can’t control what they say and do — especially when they’re trying to ravage democracy — is to give them a very long timeout.
Easier said than done. But he’s right. A lot of what Trump says is him just laying the groundwork to excuse his loss. The bigger problem is this Supreme Court gambit, with the full support of the Republican Party. Just as Trump was preparing for his loss in 2016, through a series of unfortunate events, he won. It could easily happen this time as well through the sad, untimely passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.