Psychically, TFG “needs to make the election a referendum on himself.”
Perhaps the most delicious part of the 24/7 Trump reality show is watching the 77-year-old spoiled brat come apart at the seams, and his organization with him. It seems “panic mode is setting in.”
The former president never expected to win the presidency in 2016, botched the transition, didn’t know what the hell he was doing, hired sycophants and relations to whom he didn’t listen, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in his tardy response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Because he’s corrupt as hell, never ran anything larger than a small family business, and because Donald Trump is about Donald Trump 24/7/365.
Trump does not keep chickens that I know of, but they are coming home to roost anyway. Psychically and financially, if not yet criminally.
A smart, ah say, a smart challenger-candidate with Trump’s pandemic record wouldn’t touch the “Are you better off?” question with a ten-foot cattle prod. The classic strategy, David Frum explains in “The Ego Has Crash-Landed,” is to assume “the voters’ verdict will be on the incumbent; the challenger’s job is simply to refrain from doing or saying anything that gets in the way.”
But Trump psychically needs to make “the election a referendum on himself,” Frum writes in The Atlantic:
In two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The only hope he has of changing that verdict in 2024 is by directing Americans’ attention away from himself and convincing them to like Biden even less than they like Trump. But that strategy would involve Trump mainly keeping his mouth shut and his face off television—and that, Trump cannot abide.
Trump cannot control himself. He cannot accept that the more Americans hear from Trump, the more they will prefer Biden.
Almost 30 years ago, I cited in The Atlantic some advice I’d heard dispensed by an old hand to a political novice in a congressional race. “There are only two issues when running against an incumbent,” the stager said. “[The incumbent’s] record, and I’m not a kook.” Beyond that, he went on, “if a subject can’t elect you to Congress, don’t talk about it.”
Trump’s two issues, Frum observes, “are his record and Yes, I am a kook. The subjects that won’t get him elected to anything are the subjects that he is most determined to talk about.”
Couldn’t happen to a more fatuous sociopath.
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