What Would Trump Do Differently If He Was TRYING To Lose The Election And Tank The GOP?

People are looking at two big national polls this weekend, one by Marist, released by NPR and PBS that shows Trump losing with just 44% of the vote (and a sky-high disapproval of 57%!) and one from Kaiser showing Trump losing with 38% and with a disapproval of 56%. And, occasionally he's starting to face reality. One such occasion was Thursday evening on Fox with Hannity when he mused that Biden is "gonna be your president because some people don't love me, maybe and all I'm doing is doing my job." He then went into his whole litany of lies about what a great steward of the economy he's been, the myth on which he had been building his campaign-- until the reality of what he made into the Republican Plague hit him in the face and knocked him on his ass. Ezra Klein wrote that as Trump "has continued to treat the presidency as a media spectacle, the work of governance as a dull distraction from the glitter of celebrity"-- obsessing over cable news and Twitter conflict and neglecting the job Americans hired him to do-- he's loath to face up to his record: "More than 120,000 dead from Covid-19 [and] an economy in shambles. Coronavirus cases in America exploding, even as they fall across the European Union... Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president."

Trump seems to be doing everything possible to lose in November. Even the far right editorial board of the Wall Street Journal mused yesterday that "Trump may soon need a new nickname for 'Sleepy Joe' Biden. How does President-elect sound? On present trend that’s exactly what Mr. Biden will be on Nov. 4, as Mr. Trump heads for what could be an historic repudiation that would take the Republican Senate down with him."

Friday morning, the Miami Herald announced that "A record week of surging coronavirus numbers was only heightened on Friday, as state health officials confirmed 8,942 cases, nearly doubling the previous record of cases reported in a single day, two days earlier... Over the last seven days, Florida has reported 29,163 new cases. That’s nearly a quarter of all the confirmed cases in the state so far." Brainless, Trumpist governors Ron DeSantis (FL) and Greg Abbott (TX) finally reversed themselves and ordered their states' bars to close, something they-- and all governors-- should have done in March.





Meanwhile, Fauci told the Washington Post that Trump's testing strategy is a failure.

Not enough to get himself kicked out of office? His regime is still trying to make matters worse for sick people by demanding the Republican-dominated Supreme Court abolish Obamacare-- along with the insistence that insurance companies cover customers with preexisting conditions, the part of Obamacare that is universally popular-- even with hard core Republicans. James Hohmann wrote yesterday that "The Trump team’s core argument is that every Republican who voted for the tax cuts three years ago knowingly voted to destroy the 2010 law in its entirely, not just to get rid of the mandate that individuals buy health insurance. And, because the Supreme Court previously upheld the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that the individual mandate is a tax, Trump’s lawyers say that the whole system became invalid once Congress got rid of the penalty for not carrying health insurance... The brief is full of little gifts like this to Joe Biden and Democrats who hope to ride his coattails down the ballot."

All this stuff is bad for Trump and bad-- deservedly so-- for the GOP. But Trump figured out a way to make it worse yet. Emily Larsen, writing for the Washington Examiner reported that "Trump’s extreme opposition to mail-in ballots is more likely hurting him and down-ballot Republicans than it is helping him. Mounting evidence in voter registration data, a survey, and organizer anecdotes shows that instead of preventing the voting method from being a major factor in the November election, his stance is turning Republican voters off from using the method entirely, which could have the effect of depressing Republican votes. The president’s rampant alarmism on mail-in voting-- most recently claiming that foreign governments will rig the election by printing millions of mail-in ballots, an idea rebuked by elections officials-- frustrates those trying to push state election officials and Congress to provide ample absentee voting and in-person voting options and resources in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They point out that many analyses find that mail-in voter fraud is small and often prosecuted... Trump’s public lashing out against mail-in voting may come too late. All of the six most important swing states have some form of mail-in or absentee voting. Despite Trump, some state Republicans are doing what they can to organize mail-in votes. The Florida Republican Party sent an email in May to its supporters, reminding voters to request a vote-by-mail ballot. Pennsylvania’s GOP website includes instructions on how to vote absentee."

But not all state Republican parties are doing what Florida and Pennsylvania are doing. 85% of the votes cast for the Kentucky primaries were sent in by mail. How much of an increase was that? In 2016, there were 38,112 ballots mailed in. This year... around 800,000-- a 2,000% increase! But that record turnout is alarming Republicans. In Georgia and Iowa-- both controlled by the GOP-- barriers are going up to vote-by-mail, infuriating voters who find out what the Republicans are up to.

What the Republicans are doing-- whether in healthcare, voting, pandemic response... is all leading to what is going to likely be the most gargantuan repudiation of the GOP since 1932, when Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover was defeated 22,821,277 (57.4%) to 15,761,254 (39.7%)-- losing 42 states (carrying just 6). In the process, the Republicans lost 11 Senate seats (including their Majority Leader, James Watson (R-IN)-- the Mitch McConnell of his day) AND 101 House seats-- yes 101!-- losing the White House, the Senate and the House, all by immense margins. The news lineup in the Democratically-controlled House was 318 Democrats, 117 Republicans. The GOP lost all their seats in Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.