Cowardly, yes
Donald Trump is not invincible in spite of MAGA mythology, explains Jamelle Bouie:
In the folk wisdom of recent American politics, Donald Trump is a figure of herculean invulnerability to traditional scandal. What lands as a crippling blow to most politicians leaves nary a scratch on Trump, who effortlessly deflected the slings and arrows of the 2016 presidential campaign and paid no discernible price for the “Access Hollywood” tape, his racism or his general incoherence.
There has long been a “please don’t hit me” reflex among established Democrats, a conditioned, abused-spouse behavior. Don’t make Daddy mad. Don’t impeach him. Don’t hold him accountable. You’ll just make him stronger. And madder. Bouie offers some examples.
Now on trial in Manhattan, Trump is grinding his teeth to nubs over humiliating descriptions of his sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, about the age of his daughter Ivanka. Yet the myth of his invulnerability is rising again, like the South.
Let’s look at the situation as it stands. Despite his best efforts, Trump has not been able to summon the grass-roots activity that signals political strength. There are no febrile crowds demanding justice for Trump at the courthouse door, no mob poised to wreak havoc in Trump’s name — not that he didn’t try to make one appear. And the broader public does not appear to have a problem with either the trial or the prospect of jail time for the former president.
A majority of Americans — 54 percent in the latest poll conducted for NPR and PBS NewsHour — say that the hush money trial and other investigations into Trump to find out whether he broke the law are “fair.” Forty-two percent of Americans, according to a CNN poll released last month, say that Trump’s conduct in his Manhattan trial has been “mostly inappropriate.” Twenty-five percent say that his behavior has been “mostly appropriate.” And according to a January Reuters/Ipsos poll, 71 percent of Americans — including 55 percent of Republicans — say that if Trump did break the law, he should be prosecuted, and if convicted, sentenced to prison.
If there were any sign that this trial was an asset for Trump — any sign that it put him on stronger ground with the voting public — you would find it in national polling. It’s not there. What we see, instead, is a steady head-to-head between Trump and President Biden.
There is also the evidence of the Republican presidential primaries, in which voters are still casting ballots. On Tuesday, nearly 22 percent of Republican primary voters in Indiana pulled the proverbial lever for Nikki Haley, who left the race in March. She won 16.6 percent of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary two weeks earlier. The trial, in other words, has not even rallied dissident Republicans toward the party’s standard-bearer and away from a failed challenger.
Trump is not yet toast, but he’s browning.
Since 2015, there has been this strong desire to make Trump more complicated than he is, as if his power and influence mean that he must have depth and substance. But he doesn’t. Trump is a glorified bully. And like all bullies, he wilts in the face of anyone willing to stand up and say no.
Joe Biden has been hitting Trump hard on social media, but his momentum has slowed since the Gaza protests have focused press attention there.
Brian Beutler complains:
But the current election, and to some extent the unexpectedly narrow margin of the 2020 election, are demoralizing to liberals because that element of naïveté is gone, and yet Trump remains formidable. Democrats are worried about what another Trump presidency would mean, but they’re also stunned by what the numbers keep telling them: We’re losing to that?
I’d encourage liberals who feel this way to imagine what would happen in a mass-market Hollywood film about a well-meaning protagonist who came to the same realization. Would he just keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting better sense to prevail? Or would he switch tactics, and come up with a new plan to stage a comeback?
My longstanding frustration with Democrats stems from the fact that they’re doing the first thing. I’m relieved to see Biden chastise journalists for underplaying the most important stakes of the election (the media really should do better!) but he and (more importantly) the other leaders of his party are simply not providing any of the high drama they know political media relies on to fuel stories into firestorms.
(At the ground level, getting Yellow Dogs to adopt new tricks is the story of my life.)
Democrats should be doing more to spin Republicans’ foilbles into major controveries., Beutler suggests. Republicans are pros at it, and used their skills to make the most of the campus protests.
But this was about Trump’s invincibility.
In this situation, Trump is not in control for once, and that’s bad news for him. He hates it. Late on Thursday, he had his lawyers ask the judge to lift his gag order with regard to Stormy Daniels once she’d finished her testimony. He wanted to savage her for the cameras outside the courtroom, but lacked the guts to take the stand and testify under oat that, as he claims, the encounter never happened.
Daniels herself taunted him for that.
Make the most of that, Democrats.
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