No Matter Who The Democrats Nominate, Only Trump's Extreme Unfitness Will Defeat Trump

With Vance Along For The Ride, by Nancy Ohanian

In the last few hours, more polls showed Biden with no chance against Trump. More donors announced they won’t contribute to his campaign and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Jon Tester (D-MT), Sean Casten (D-IL), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Jared Huffman (D-CA), Marc Veasey (D-TX), Chuy Garcia (D-IL), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Morgan McGarvey (R-KY), Kathy Castor (D-FL), Gabe Vasquez (D-NM), Zoe Lofgren⁩ (D-CA) and Betty McCollum (D-MN) each asked him to do the right thing for America and step aside. And this, right after Trump’s putrid speech that should have been disqualifying. As Aaron Blake put it “the more than 90-minute-long speech was thoroughly confusing. It meandered between points, often going off-script with ad-libs that left a standard-issue Trump campaign speech without the kind of coherent, lofty theme that defines traditional presidential convention fare. And Trump’s initially subdued manner and calls for unity didn’t match the content of an often-divisive speech.”

Jonathan Bernstein went further: “Outside of that he’s running as an authoritarian, outside of his crimes and his history of sexual assault, outside of that he doesn’t believe in the rule of law, and outside of the other ways that he’s massively unsuited for the presidency: This guy also knows nothing about government and policy. Now, George W. Bush was massively underqualified when he became president, and it was harmful to his presidency and to the nation. But W. wasn’t a stupid guy, and he really did improve over the course of eight years. Trump if anything goes backwards. Bush treated setbacks as setbacks and tried to learn from them; Trump treats everything he does as a massive victory, ignores any evidence to the contrary, and just bulls (and bullies) his way ahead, never learning from anything. At any rate, it takes some real initiative to botch a convention acceptance speech, and Trump has now done it three times, with the third time being the worst.”

Ah… and inspiration for Democrats— if they can just get Biden to understand that it’s all over for him and that he needs to step away. I’m sure he will, though he’s wasting precious time now for no good reason except his own psychological incapacity to deal with a reality we all deal with in our lives as we age. Should this man have a driver’s license? Dan Pfieffer also looked at Trump’s speech and  noted that “one of America’s two political parties nominated a convicted felon who has been found liable for rape and tried to violently overthrow the government only a few years ago. Donald Trump is not an ordinary politician. He doesn’t believe in democracy. He promised to become a dictator on day one. If he wins, Trump already pledged to use the power of the state to exact revenge on his political opponents. Just last week, he suggested bringing Representative Liz Cheney before a military tribunal for the crime of opposing him. Trump stood up on that dais last night and gave what, for Trump, was a very boring speech. He sanded off the roughest edges of his extremism for the TV cameras. He mentioned Biden by name only once. He offered wandering platitudes and bromides. It’s as if the goal is to be so uninteresting he escapes notice. Many changed the channel. Others fell asleep on the couch. Most were just confused.

This is purposeful. From the outset, the goal of the Republican Convention was to humanize Trump and normalize MAGA extremism. They bolstered MAGA freaks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Charlie Kirk on the first day of the convention, which typically has the lowest viewership. They also gave muted speeches designed to avoid the outrage on which they have built their brand. Propagating the Big Lie about the 2020 election is the price of admission in Trump’s GOP. If you dare accept the obvious and provable reality that Trump lost fair and square, you will be exiled like Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger. Yet, with dozens of speakers over four nights, there was nary a mention of the 2020 election. Trump’s campaign honchos know that talking about the Big Lie is damaging with swing voters. It’s like wearing a t-shirt that says “Right Wing Kook.”

It wasn’t all normal. A former Trump aide came directly from prison to address the convention to raucous applause. Paul Manafort, another Trump aide who went to prison, was seen making the rounds on the convention floor. Hulk Hogan addressed the convention.

The goal was crystal clear: don’t remind voters of the chaos and incompetence that caused them to reject Trump four years prior.

…[In the past, m]ost of Congress, lobbyists, and political operatives laughed at Trump behind his back. Sure, they would prefer an incompetent, dim narcissist with the impulse control of a toddler who missed his nap over a Democrat, but many were just trying to endure the Trump years until the return of the “normal” Republican Party.

It’s not coming back.

This is now a party crafted in Trump’s image. He is their leader. There is no dissent or doubt. They believe what he believes— even if it runs counter to long-held party orthodoxy.

No matter what happens in this election, the transformation of the Republican Party into a bastion of MAGA extremism will have long-term consequences for the country. A two-party system cannot function when one party goes off the deep end.

…[Despite the media spin] Trump is not inevitable. He is vulnerable.

Yes, he is ahead in the polls today, but he can be beaten. Look at that guy on stage last night. The speech wasn’t good. It didn’t offer a compelling vision for the country. It was low energy, bordering on somnambulant. Trump couldn’t discuss his policy agenda because that would stick a thumb in the eye of most voters. There was no message. Trump lost his fastball. 

It’s easy to forget, given the tone and tenor of the press coverage over the last week, but the majority of voters in this country are anti-MAGA. Trump can— and will— be defeated if and only if we do the work to once again turn out the coalition that defeated MAGA in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022.

This crew, wrote David Frum, is totally beatable. The speech, he wrote “was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller. Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”— and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers. Whatever the explanation, Trump demonstrated in Milwaukee that President Joe Biden is not the only national politician diminished by the years. Trump too is dwindling into himself, even more isolated from such facts about the external world as elapsed time and audience impatience. Formless and digressive as it was, the speech did have one major theme— a theme that underscores why and how the Democrats should be winning this race.”

Trump stood on the podium in Milwaukee to sell nostalgia for his term in office. In fact, the Trump presidency ended in disaster, by many measures the worst fourth year of a presidency since Herbert Hoover’s in 1932: pandemic, mass death, economic collapse, rioting, and a surge in violent crime. By contrast, Biden’s presidency is delivering the best fourth year since … Who? Bill Clinton in 1996? Ronald Reagan in 1984? Calvin Coolidge in 1924?

Unemployment has reached the lowest level in more than half a century. The post-pandemic inflation has stopped and gone into reverse. The stock market has soared to record highs. Social indicators too are improving from the chaos left behind by Trump. In each year of the Trump presidency— not just in pandemic 2020, but for each of the three years before that— the rate of marriages and childbirths in the United States dropped. Under Biden, marriages and childbirths are rising again, Drug overdose deaths are lessening. The Trump-era violent-crime wave is receding at last.

The contrast could not be starker. Yet, if the polls are correct, it’s not helping Biden.

The Trump theory of his presidency is that Trump deserves credit for the good times of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and no discredit for the crisis of 2020. But both halves of that are backwards. the economy started growing fast in 2014, so Trump arrived in office just in time to claim credit for work that had been done by his predecessors. And then, managing crises is what Americans hire presidents to do. Trump’s crisis management was almost uniquely bad. He responded to the pandemic with a blend of denial, callousness, and quackery; then he responded to 2020’s nationwide spasm of riots and the crime spike that occurred on his watch by casting blame upon others.

One of of Trump’s skills is that he is a superb marketer of crap products. Anybody can promote a great steak or an elegant hotel, but Trump’s a genius at touting bad steaks and tacky resorts as if they were actually quality items. He’s doing the same with his record as president. He wants accolades for the strong economy in place when he arrived, while he effaces the memory of the wreck he bequeathed.

The truth is that Trump’s record as president was the same as his record as a businessman: rich until the inheritance ran out.

Why can’t Democrats make more effective use of the catastrophe left behind by the Trump presidency? Two reasons: one incidental; the other arising from defects in the party’s values and organization.

Here’s the incidental reason:

The job of defining what a presidency is all about— in other words, what it wants to do and what it has accomplished— is inescapably the president’s and his alone. If he cannot do that, he concedes the game before it has started. Trump was an unfathomably lazy president. He idled away the equivalent of almost a full year of his presidency on golf courses. When not golfing, he wasted hours upon hours watching— and complaining about— cable news. But however little time he committed to work, one task he did not shirk: demanding and getting credit for good news on his watch.

…The Biden presidency has too often disappeared into that gap between perception and reality, a gap that a different president might have closed.

…The Republican National Convention cast a bright light on the Trump party’s weaknesses: its extremism, its cultishness, its lack of welcome to the majority of Americans. The central idea implicit in the vice-presidential nominee’s speech was the superior Americanness of those with seven generations of ancestors buried in U.S. ground over those whose ancestors are buried in other places. The central idea in the presidential nominee’s speech was “me, me, me, me, me” for more than an hour and a half.

This crew is as beatable as any reactionary minority faction ever was beatable.

Democrats seem to be persuaded by the hope that the way to inflict the beating is to change leadership. But the biggest defect of the present Democratic leadership was imposed by the Democratic followership: the reluctance to accept the fact that four years of non-Trump leadership have accomplished an enormous amount that is worth defending.

With a predator’s cunning, Trump has always understood that the first step to winning the confidence of others is to project confidence in oneself. Trump has used that understanding for his own crooked and criminal purposes. But the same understanding can be put to good use by better people.

Believe! Or lose.

From Frum to Chait, who warned that “History has given us examples of megalomaniacal leaders surviving assassination attempts. (It’s one of the hazards of the job.) The experience does not generally make them cuddly and warm. The actual change wrought by the assassin’s bullet is that Trump now believes he can turn questions about his own authoritarian tendencies into an attack on his opponent for being uncivil. (Axios: ‘One close adviser, explaining the new convention plans, said Trump’s gambit is that now Democrats “can’t come after me anymore as a fascist. What’re they gonna do now?”’) Cooperating with that cynical tactic is a choice. But imagining Trump’s actual character has changed is a fantasy even the most willing enablers can hardly sustain now. A bullet wound is not a cure for sociopathy.”