Two stories picked up from Political Wire this morning:
Trump predicts 'big' win in November, pointing to 'silent majority'
Trump admits it: He's losing
This is not quite the contradiction it seems (close, though). Trump has never in his life had to confront reality in a way that he couldn’t find a way to wiggle out of, so the first story fits. But for the first time in his life, he is in a position where reality is catching up with him, so the second story also makes sense. The presidency, for all its power, does not let the president avoid reality the way lesser offices sometimes can.
So we get incidents like this:
President Trump predicted Sunday that he will have a “big win” in November due to a “silent majority.”
“THE VAST SILENT MAJORITY IS ALIVE AND WELL!!! We will win this Election big. Nobody wants a Low IQ person in charge of our Country, and Sleepy Joe is definitely a Low IQ person!,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning.
and at the same time this:
The president has privately come to that grim realization in recent days, multiple people close to him told POLITICO, amid a mountain of bad polling and warnings from some of his staunchest allies that he's on course to be a one-term president.
He knows what’s happening and he has no idea how to deal with it. People around him do know what to do (or what might work), but he is too fixed in his ways to listen to them. Trump is, finally, his own worst enemy. His solution to the problems his campaign is having is:
Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who effectively oversees the campaign from the White House, is expected to play an even more active role.
The man who made one of the worst real estate deals in New York history (666 Fifth Avenue), the man who made the Middle East worse (easy to do, let’s admit), the man who advised Trump to fire Comey, to get rid of Christie, is now the person Trump thinks will rescue his campaign. Uh huh.
Trump knows he needs to tear down Joe Biden, but he can’t focus on it:
Still, Trump advisers acknowledge that tearing down Biden will require a level of discipline he isn’t demonstrating. They have pleaded with Trump — who has used his Twitter account to vilify critics from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to former National Security Adviser John Bolton — to stop focusing on slights that mean little to voters.
Discipline is not a word one uses in the same sentence with Bunker Boy (except this one). While Trump was lashing out in all directions (including Biden, but to little effect), Joe Biden has been carefully and meaningfully reintroducing himself to the country, which already knows him well. Biden got there first and Trump has to play catchup. He won’t have even a chance to do that if his heart isn’t in it.
Which means that now is the time to hit him even harder. We have to keep the pressure up, to keep him off balance. The Lincoln Project had another great ad yesterday, aimed right at his support among the military and veterans’ groups. It’s not likely that he’ll resign rather than face the humiliation of a 400-EV blowout (FSM willing!), but it would fit his habit of walking away from the messes he’s made, leaving them for someone else to clean up.
This time, though, the mess is the country, from the pandemic to racial injustice to white power to letting Russia pay money to have our soldiers shot. Even Pence knows better how to fix these things than Trump, at least the pandemic. Besides, he’s a lousy liar.