I don’t even know what to say about that it’s so stupid. If this is the real reason Trump voters are having a massive temper tantrum because their boy didn’t win, they we may have to re-evaluate democracy. These people don’t have very basic reasoning skills.
Here is the polling on Donald Trump’s approval rating. He has always been unpopular. In fact he is the only president since polling began to never get above 50% approval during his term:
The day before the election, the polls looked like this:
The final:
This article by Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, an unrepentant Trump supporter, is interesting because it shows the struggle in the minds of some of those who still have a slight grasp on reason, despite their insistence that Democrats are evil satans from Mars:
It was always a dice-roll. But in this moment, the case for having supported the president’s reelection bid is harder to make.
In this moment, two tumultuous months after Election Day, the case for having supported the president’s reelection bid is harder to make. The backdrop for it will be more propitious in the coming months — when Joe Biden’s aping of Obama-style pen-and-phone government crashes into a strikingly more constitutionalist federal bench; when a return to appeasement of China and Iran has us fondly remembering Mike Pompeo; when the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s reset to its preferred racialized anti-police crusade has us recalling the good old days of Bill Barr, who carried on as if defending speech, economic, and conscience rights were actually a Justice Department mission; when reregulation suffocates an economy ignited by deregulation; and when “climate” returns to its lofty place as the caprice by which progressives pick the economy’s winners and losers while empowering America’s adversaries.
The Trump fanatics notwithstanding, the case for Trump, in 2020 as in 2016, was never based on the comparative merits and demerits of the man. It was Trump as opposed to whom? That’s still the most sensible way to look at it. It is, of course, why few anti-Trump conservatives framed their opposition as positive support for the Democrats, even if that was its de facto effect.
The hard part in this family squabble is not diagnosing the weakness of the other side’s argument. It is grappling with the weakness of my own. The problem with “Trump as opposed to whom?” is that we who’ve supported the president on that basis are less the bottom-line realists we see ourselves as, and more like riverboat gamblers. And what we’re gambling with is the country.
[…]
Some conservatives have moored themselves to Trump, persuaded that our “transactional” president is magnificent — that even his recent hop aboard the Bernie/Pelosi/Schumer free-money train, after doing nothing about runaway spending and unsustainable entitlements for four years, is somehow a brilliant play. If their man says the election was #RIGGED!, then there must have been pervasive fraud, notwithstanding the lack of evidence and the president’s propensity to fold his tent when federal judges — some of whom he himself appointed — invite him to prove his case in court.
For the reluctant supporter, however, Trump has always been a roll of the dice: Avoid the certain nightmare of Democrats in power, and hope potential catastrophes won’t overwhelm the capacity of the president’s capable aides to compensate for his glaring flaws.
Thus my contention in support of the Trump reelection bid: You don’t so much vote for a president as for an administration. But it has been easier for me to see the weakness of this contention over the last two months. There is no separating the president from the presidency, in competence or character, and this is never truer than in times of crisis.
Crisis, after all, is really why we have the presidency. In normal times, the quotidian details of governance are handled by an administration, now grown to thousands of bureaucrats. The real genius of the Framers was to plan for the inevitability of crises. They are best met with not only energy but decisiveness, the kind a chief executive is better positioned to provide than a council, committee, or parliament. That is the awesome power of the presidency and, for better or worse, of the president alone.
Presidents are thus defined by their crises. That goes not just for the ones that happen due to circumstances beyond presidents’ control, but also for the ones their own shortcomings blunder us into.
He goes on to insult President Obama as an elitist snob with a massive ego and describes Trump as a bloated clown, but not really as bad as he could have been, so everyone relax. And then:
Although not of his own making, the pandemic was a true crisis that brought out the worst in Trump rhetorically. He spoke without thinking things through, and indifferent to whether what he said was true. He spoke, with thousands dying, as if COVID-19 were an unfair thing done to him rather than a tragic blow to the nation. In point of fact, the president’s actions were often commendable. The ramp-up in protective gear, ventilators, and testing capacity was impressive, and done with deference to state sovereignty. The push to develop vaccines in less than a year is nothing short of astonishing. He’ll never get the credit he deserves for it.
Trump being Trump, he could never grasp that with the presidency comes the responsibility to give the bad news to us straight, and credibly. In a real crisis, Americans don’t want a reality-TV presidency. They don’t want to hear the leader of the free world’s take on the ratings of cable news shows and the NFL. They want a president who studiously tunes out the partisan sniping while projecting selfless strength and confidence that Americans are up to any challenge — which, as President Bush demonstrated after 9/11, tends to silence the sniping, at least for a while.
Here’s where he grapples with reality a little bit:
This is the biggest point the Trump diehards miss. How is it possible that a zilch like Biden could garner 12 million more votes than the charismatic Obama got in 2008? They emote this question as if the very asking proved the gargantuan but somehow elusive election fraud. As if the nation’s population had not grown by 25 million since 2008. As if Biden’s haul is inherently fishy but Trump’s 12 million-vote improvement over his total from just four years ago is perfectly natural.
Biden may be a trademark hack, but that’s not why he stayed in his basement. He did that because he and the president had the same idea: Make the election all about Trump. The president started out in 2017 as one whom 54 percent of the country had voted against. He remained personally unpopular with over half the country throughout his term, especially when the pandemic erased his surging economy while highlighting his incorrigible foibles. It is not at all hard to see how Biden could collect a record-setting 81 million popular votes. In the main, they were votes against Trump, not for Biden.
Since the election, we’ve had two months of a president publicly insisting the election was rigged while hoping no one noticed that his campaign expressly declined the invitation to prove massive fraud and illegality in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, Trump’s team did not just formally drop fraud charges, they explicitly represented to federal courts that they were not alleging fraud. Yet Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) now vows to join Trump’s House allies in objecting to the counting of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. And other states’ votes, too. Even Hawley does not claim that the election was stolen or that any known departures from Pennsylvania’s election laws would have changed the outcome. He just wants to “raise these critical issues.”
He then concludes that the real problem is that Democrats will surely start stealing elections in just this way because they are EVEN WORSE!
McCarthy was Trump’s staunchest supporter during the Russia investigation and I do wonder if he will ever face the fact that suspicions about a man of Trump’s low character, the man he describes here, were well-founded. I doubt it. And arguing that this is bad because Democrats will do it is cheap (although I have resorted to it when the shoe was on the other foot myself.)
Still, I think it’s important that he made the important point that 81 million people voted against Trump because they can’t stand him. I know that’s hard for Trumpers to admit — that their Dear Leader is despised by a majority of the country. But maybe it makes a small difference that someone like McCarthy points it out.