Trumpist Contemplates Trump's Rejection By The Voters: "Sometimes You Own The Libs; Sometimes The Libs Own You"

 

Lame Duck by Nancy Ohanian

Today everyone is writing about how depressed Trump is and how bleak his mood is. Awwwww.... The NY Times reported that Señor Trumpanzee "has spent his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters. But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president." Whew.

The Washington Post's David Nakamura noted that Trump Is In Hiding. He wrote that yesterday, "six American service members were killed in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission in Egypt. Tropical Storm Eta made landfall in North Florida, contributing to severe flooding. The number of Americans infected with the novel coronavirus continued at a record-setting pace, sending the stock market tumbling. At the White House, President Trump spent the day as he has most others this week-- sequestered from public view, tweeting grievances, falsehoods and misinformation about the election results and about Fox News’s coverage of him. Neither he nor his aides briefed reporters on the news of the day or reacted to Democratic leaders who accused Republicans of imperiling the pandemic response by 'refusing to accept reality' over the election results."

In her Times column, The Post-Presidency of a Con Man, Michelle Goldberg took comfort "in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect-- by initiating new grifts. Trump has been sending out frantic fund-raising requests to 'defend the election,' but as the New York Times reports, most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that 'will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.' Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal. These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office... But there are reasons to think that when he is finally ejected from the White House, he will become a significantly diminished figure."

Once Trump is no longer president, he is likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to patronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could complete the transition from Trump’s enabler to his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish self-abasement, Republicans with presidential aspirations will have an incentive to help take him down.

“His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attorney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I have to assume that, given the amount of civil litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s going to be at a completely new dimension.”

...It’s too much to expect any sudden exposure of Trump. There will be no cathartic moment when everyone realizes that the emperor was always naked. But the question isn’t whether Trump’s support will evaporate. It’s whether it will erode, especially once he loses the ability to make Republican dreams come true.

Besides, the threats to Trump are not only to his reputation, such as it is. In Bob Woodward’s book Fear, he wrote that Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd implored the president not to testify in Robert Mueller’s probe because he believed him to be an inveterate liar. (Dowd has denied this.) Should Trump face depositions in these civil cases, however, he’ll have no choice about submitting to interviews.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s former deputy, told me he expects Trump to pardon himself for any federal crimes he might have committed. That would mean that even if a Biden Department of Justice wanted to take the extraordinary step of prosecuting a former president, it would also have to litigate the constitutionality of self-pardons, a complicated, time-consuming process.

But he might face state charges that he can’t pardon his way out of. New York State Attorney General Letitia James has a civil investigation into possible financial chicanery by the Trump Organization. Trump is under criminal investigation by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance. While the scope of the probe is unknown, his office’s filings suggest Vance could be looking at tax fraud, insurance fraud and falsification of business records.

The “Manhattan DA’s office is a really good office, and they’ve done a lot of white-collar cases,” said Weissmann. “If they were to prove-- this is now hypothetical-- but if they were to prove tens of millions of dollars in tax fraud or bank fraud, people go to jail for that.”

Let’s say Trump, ever the escape artist, avoids prison, setting himself up as the warlord of MAGA-world at Mar-a-Lago. His post-presidency still won’t be easy. As The Times has reported, he’s personally on the hook for $421 million in debt, most of it coming due in the next four years. If a long fight with the I.R.S. goes against him, he could owe at least $100 million more.

“Mr. Trump still has assets to sell,” The Times reported. “But doing so could take its own toll, both financial and to Mr. Trump’s desire to always be seen as a winner.”

Trump is already trying to profit off his avid base, and he will surely continue. But it’s an open question whether, without the intoxicating aura of presidential power, he can sustain their devotion. There are several examples of once-formidable right-wing leaders reduced to footnotes after leaving office.

As Republican House majority leader, Tom DeLay was frequently described as the most powerful man in Congress. Then, in 2005, he was indicted on a charge of campaign money laundering. Though his 2010 conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, the last time he had any significant public profile was when he appeared on Dancing With the Stars in 2009.

Sarah Palin, too, was once a Republican icon; in many ways she presaged Trump. “Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party,” said a New York Times headline just before the 2008 election. It quoted right-wing activist Brent Bozell: “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proved that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.”

But since resigning as Alaska’s governor in 2009, Palin has lost her luster. Once a likely presidential prospect, she recently made headlines for wearing a pink and purple bear costume on the Fox reality show The Masked Singer.

Trump is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

After all that, could he be back in 2024? Of course. Trump is, if nothing else, relentless. But this election was just the latest reminder that he is far from invincible. When he is no longer in office, there will be many more.

One of my favorite of today's Trump woe-is-me tails was a "re-release" of Jane Mayer's Nov. 1 column: Why Trump Can't Afford To Lose. Can you imagine this scene of Trumpanzee despondency the day before the election?

Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options. He wasn’t especially religious, but, as daylight faded outside the rapidly emptying White House, he fell to his knees and prayed out loud, sobbing as he smashed his fist into the carpet. “What have I done?” he said. “What has happened?” When the President noted that the military could make it easy for him by leaving a pistol in a desk drawer, the chief of staff called the President’s doctors and ordered that all sleeping pills and tranquillizers be taken away from him, to insure that he wouldn’t have the means to kill himself.

No? Me either... besides, it was Nixon, not Trump. Still, Mayer notes that "No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses... the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, 'If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.' Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden."

She notes that the Financial Times estimates that, "in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets-- or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties-- especially his hotels and resorts-- have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. 'It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,' Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me."

Last winter, a Cabinet secretary told me Trump had confided that he couldn’t imagine returning to his former life as a real-estate developer. As the Cabinet secretary recalled, the two men were gliding along in a motorcade, surrounded by throngs of adoring supporters, when Trump remarked, “Isn’t this incredible? After this, I could never return to ordering windows. It would be so boring.”

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Trump’s national poll numbers have lagged behind Biden’s, and two sources who have spoken to the President in the past month described him as being in a foul mood. He has testily insisted that he won both Presidential debates, contrary to even his own family’s assessment of the first one. And he has raged not just at the polls and the media but also at some people in charge of his reëlection campaign, blaming them for squandering money and allowing Biden’s team to have a significant financial advantage. Trump’s bad temper was visible on October 20th, when he cut short a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl. A longtime observer who spent time with him recently told me that he’d never seen Trump so angry.

The President’s niece Mary Trump-- a psychologist and the author of the tell-all memoir Too Much and Never Enough-- told me that his fury “speaks to his desperation,” adding, “He knows that if he doesn’t manage to stay in office he’s in serious trouble. I believe he’ll be prosecuted, because it seems almost undeniable how extensive and long his criminality is. If it doesn’t happen at the federal level, it has to happen at the state level.” She described the “narcissistic injury” that Trump will suffer if he is rejected at the polls. Within the Trump family, she said, “losing was a death sentence-- literally and figuratively.” Her father, Fred Trump, Jr., the President’s older brother, “was essentially destroyed” by her grandfather’s judgment that Fred was not “a winner.” (Fred died in 1981, of complications from alcoholism.) As the President ponders potential political defeat, she believes, he is “a terrified little boy.”

Barbara Res, whose new book, Tower of Lies, draws on the eighteen years that she spent, off and on, developing and managing construction projects for Trump, also thinks that the President is not just running for a second term-- he is running from the law. “One of the reasons he’s so crazily intent on winning is all the speculation that prosecutors will go after him,” she said. “It would be a very scary spectre.” She calculated that, if Trump loses, “he’ll never, ever acknowledge it-- he’ll leave the country.” Res noted that, at a recent rally, Trump mused to the crowd about fleeing, ad-libbing, “Could you imagine if I lose? I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country-- I don’t know.” It’s questionable how realistic such talk is, but Res pointed out that Trump could go “live in one of his buildings in another country,” adding, “He can do business from anywhere.”

It turns out that, in 2016, Trump in fact made plans to leave the United States right after the vote. Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump supporter who served briefly as the White House communications director, was with him in the hours before the polls closed. Scaramucci told me that Trump and virtually everyone in his circle had expected Hillary Clinton to win. According to Scaramucci, as he and Trump milled around Trump Tower, Trump asked him, “What are you doing tomorrow?” When Scaramucci said that he had no plans, Trump confided that he had ordered his private plane to be readied for takeoff at John F. Kennedy International Airport, so that the next morning he could fly to Scotland, to play golf at his Turnberry resort. Trump’s posture, Scaramucci told me, was to shrug off the expected defeat. “It was, like, O.K., he did it for the publicity. And it was over. He was fine. It was a waste of time and money, but move on.” Scaramucci said that, if 2016 is any guide, Trump would treat a loss to Biden more matter-of-factly than many people expect: “He’ll go down easier than most people think. Nothing crushes this guy.”

Mary Trump, like Res, suspects that her uncle is considering leaving the U.S. if he loses the election (a result that she regards as far from assured). If Biden wins, she suggested, Trump will “describe himself as the best thing that ever happened to this country and say, ‘It doesn’t deserve me-- I’m going to do something really important, like build the Trump Tower in Moscow.’”

The notion that a former American President would go into exile-- like a disgraced king or a deposed despot-- sounds almost absurd, even in this heightened moment, and many close observers of the President, including Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s first best-seller, The Art of the Deal, dismiss the idea. “I’m sure he’s terrified,” Schwartz told me. “But I don’t think he’ll leave the country. Where the hell would he go?” However, Snyder, the Yale professor, whose specialty is antidemocratic regimes in Eastern Europe, believes that Trump might well abscond to a foreign country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S. “Unless you’re an idiot, you have that flight plan ready,” Snyder said. “Everyone’s telling me he’ll have a show on Fox News. I think he’ll have a show on RT”-- the Russian state television network.

...Schwartz agreed that Trump “will do anything to make the case he didn’t lose,” and noted that one of Trump’s strengths has been his refusal to admit failure, which means that “when he wins he wins, and when he loses he also wins.” But if Trump loses by a landslide, Schwartz said, “he’ll have many fewer cards to play. He won’t be able to play the election-was-stolen-from-me card-- and that’s a big one.”

But my favorite of all was Olivia Nuzzi's The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency for New York. She wrote that by Election Day, Señor T understood that losing was inevitable. "He accepted, even if he had no plans to concede, that his presidency was over. Nevertheless, in the residence, surrounded by senior advisers and family, he was furious. About everything. He was angry things weren’t going his way. He was angry Fox had called Arizona for Biden. He was angry that Biden had gone out on TV first. Everyone was offering him different ideas about what to say to the nation, to fight or to be measured or to say this or that, contradicting each other as the president grew angrier and angrier, throwing up one hand to silence people as he reviewed notes in the other. He was unhappy with the notes. He was unhappy with everything. And then he went out and ignored everybody who had tried to help.

[T]he campaign mounted half-assed legal fights in states they thought he still had a chance to win-- not because they thought it would bring them the election but because there wasn’t much else to do but fight. The New York Times reported that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said he was looking for a James Baker–type figure. Instead, they got Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski, and Dave Bossie. “That’s not a legal team,” one of the president’s friends told me. “It’s all so bizarre.”

This person, who speaks to the president often-- or, more accurately, who listens and says uh-huh as the president speaks-- said that Trump is not just done for, but done. “He wants to lose. He’s out of money. He worries about being arrested. He worried about being assassinated,” they said. “It hasn’t been a great experience for him. He likes showing people around the White House, but the actual day-to-day business of being president? It’s been pretty unpleasant for him.”

“A lot of what Trump says is the opposite of what he means. That’s true of all of us, to some extent,” the president’s friend said. But when Trump said he didn’t mind losing to Biden, even though he famously hates losers of any ilk, his friend believed him. “He doesn’t believe losing is shameful-- quitting is bad. Losing isn’t,” this person said. “He’s afraid. He’s the most insecure, afraid person ever. He’s too afraid to be president. He’s afraid to exercise power. He’s afraid to do the job. It’s why he’s overbearing and crazy-- he sabotages himself constantly because he hates himself and wants out. He’s always trying to hurt himself. That guy commits more self-harm than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”





...In the weeks leading up to the election, certain White House officials and people close to the president were busy laying the groundwork for a post-Trump reputational and relationship recovery tour. Trump may be holding rallies and refusing to admit Biden is a legitimately elected president on prime-time Trump TV, but the anti-professional class of operators who assumed power on his coattails know that they’ll have to shape-shift if they want to survive. I received messages from multiple staffers who said they were counting down the days until freedom from the environment they entered, and stayed in, willingly. That they had so much to tell me now that it was too late to matter very much. That they were not the same as the others around them, the people who didn’t see the place, the presidency, for what it really was.

Others didn’t feel they had anything to explain or defend. “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened,” a former White House official told me. “Live. Laugh. Love.” This person added, “Sometimes you own the libs; sometimes the libs own you.”

For Trump The Pandemic-- Which Is Infecting Americans In Great Numbers-- Is Over

 

Friday's new COVID reports were grim worldwide. I saw numbers of cases growing rapidly across the globe-- other than in mask-savvy east Asia. 15 countries stood out with eye-popping new cases (and, in some, horrifying numbers of cases per million residents):

• India +73,196 (5,042 cases per million residents)
• U.S.A. +60,558 (23,812 cases per million residents)
• Brazil +27,651 (23,746 cases per million residents)
• France +20,339 (10,595 cases per million residents)
• Argentina +15,099 (19,234 cases per million residents)
• U.K. +13,864 (8,468 cases per million residents)
• Russia +12,126 (8,717 cases per million residents)
• Czechia +8,617 (10,208 cases per million residents)
• Colombia +8,121 (17,525 cases per million residents)
• Spain +5,986 (19,041 cases per million residents)
• Netherlands +5,971 (9,436 cases per million residents)
• Ukraine +5,804 (5,738 cases per million residents)
• Belgium +5,728 (12,375 cases per million residents)
• Italy +5,372 (5,688 cases per million residents)
• Mexico +5,300 (6,222 cases per million residents)

Ten countries are in catastrophic conditions with over 20,000 cases per million residents. These are the countries that have mishandled the pandemic most egregiously and incompetently:

• Qatar- 45,445 cases per million residents
• Bahrain- 43,598 cases per million residents
• Israel- 31,297 cases per million residents
• Panama- 27,426 cases per million residents
• Kuwait- 25,672 cases per million residents
• Peru- 25,482 cases per million residents
• Chile- 24,934 cases per million residents
• U.S.A.- 23,812 cases per million residents
• Brazil- 23,746 cases per million residents
• Oman- 20,254 cases per million residents

Some time next week, Argentina and Spain will also slip above the 20,000 cases per million residents mark. There are already 30 America states above that mark! In fact, there are an even dozen America states above the catastrophic 30,000 cases per million residents mark, a mark that points to uncontrollable situations and cascading future deaths. Every single state that has crossed the 30,000 cases per million residents mark is a state that Trump won in 2016-- no exceptions. All are anti-mask states and most are voting for Trump again next month, even as they almost willfully, insanely increase their caseloads.

• Lousiana- 36,757 cases per million residents
• Mississippi- 34,837
• North Dakota- 34,170
• Florida- 33,938
• Alabama- 33,339
• Georgia- 30,990
• Tennessee- 30,897
• Iowa- 30,895
• Arizona- 30,786
• South Dakota- 30,763
• Arkansas- 30,258
• South Carolina- 30,236 (does not include Lindsey Graham, who refuses to be tested)

Reuters reported that "New cases of COVID-19 in the United States hit a two-month high on Friday... [with] hospitalizations in the Midwest at record levels for a fifth day in a row. Ten of the 50 states reported record one-day rises in cases on Friday, including the Midwestern states of Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio. Wisconsin and Illinois recorded over 3,000 new cases for a second day in a row-- a two-day trend not seen even during the height of the previous outbreak in the spring, according to Reuters data. The Western states of Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming also reported their biggest one-day jumps in cases, as did Oklahoma and West Virginia. Nineteen states have seen record increases in new cases so far in October. Amid the resurgence in cases across the nation, President Donald Trump, who recently contracted COVID-19, is set to resume his re-election campaign on Saturday by addressing supporters from the balcony of the White House."

Trump, who canceled rallies in Pennsylvania and Florida over the weekend, says he's doing one in Florida's Seminole County tomorrow. Yesterday, Washington Post reporters Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker wrote that Trump "has brushed aside his advisers’ calls for caution, instead embracing a political strategy built on playing down the virus and using his own battle with it to argue that the nation has already overcome the pandemic. 'People are going to get immediately better like I did. I mean, I feel better now than I did two weeks ago. It’s crazy,' Trump told Rush Limbaugh on his talk radio show Friday, a day when more than 850 Americans died of the coronavirus. 'And I recovered immediately, almost immediately. I might not have recovered at all from covid.' Isolated in the White House for a fifth straight day as his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, campaigned in Nevada, Trump spent several hours Friday venting to friendly media hosts and plotting his swift return to the campaign trail even as the status of his coronavirus infection remained unclear... In the Fox News interview late Friday, Trump said he had been retested for the virus but did not know the results."

[Trump] has claimed to be immune, called his infection with the virus a “blessing from God” and falsely claimed that a cure exists for a disease that continues to kill thousands of Americans each week. His campaign has continued to hold large indoor events with surrogates, shunning social distancing. It has made little effort to engage in contact tracing after dozens of White House officials and campaign surrogates contracted the disease.

...Minnesota Department of Health infectious-disease director Kris Ehresmann told reporters Friday that nine people who had attended Trump’s Sept. 18 rally in Bemidji, Minn., had tested positive for the coronavirus. One case involved a person who was known to be infectious at the rally, she said. Two attendees were later hospitalized after testing positive, including one who was in intensive care.

He spent 2 hours on Rush Limbaugh's show Friday mostly talking nonsense about Hillary's e-mails and criticizing Barr for not... arresting her or whatever bullshit he expects "his" Attorney General to do. Eventually, Limbaugh hustled him off the show. New York Magazine super-star writer Olivia Nuzzi analyzes how the entire Trump Regime has turned into the world's worst super-spreader. She reported that last weekend "Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying... and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed... was telling those close to him something very different. 'I could be one of the diers,' he said," always the drama queen. "Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing."

Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”

The polls suggest not just that the president will lose to Joe Biden but that he might lose bigly, in a landslide.

...And the circumstances have grown less pickable each day. “I think some of this is sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to the point where he’s almost turning into a laughingstock. What I’m worried about is whether he wants to completely self-destruct and take everything down with him vis-à-vis the election and the Republican Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s not gonna lose joyfully.”

It does appear at times as though self-destruction may be the point. How else could you explain the Plague Parade circling Walter Reed, in which a very sick Trump boarded a tightly sealed SUV with his Secret Service agents so he could wave at the supporters who had come to fly their flags on the street? Or the Evita-inspired return to the White House, in which a still very sick Trump ascended the staircase to the balcony, ripped off his face mask, and saluted to no one as his photographer snapped away? Or calling in to the Fox Business Channel to suggest his infection may be the fault of the Gold Star military families, since they were always asking to hug him? This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won-- after all, he thought he was losing in 2016, too. We all did. “You’re never as smart as you look when you win, and never as dumb as you look when you lose,” according to David Axelrod. In Trump’s case, it may be more like this: What seems like genius when he manages to survive is the very madness that threatens his survival in the first place.





A senior White House official told me there has been an ongoing effort to persuade the president not to do any of this, as there always is during his episodes of advanced mania. Asked what the effort looked like this time, with Trump physically removed from most of the people who might try to calm him down, the official said, “Well, for starters, it’s unsuccessful.”

One former White House official said that stopping Trump from doing something stupid that he really wants to do is possible only if you’re “actually sitting in front of him.” Sick themselves or trying to avoid a sick president, “the people he trusts and respects who would be barriers to that behavior don’t seem to be around,” this person said. “It just looks so chaotic. Duh.”

A second former White House official said the problem is “now people are so broken down, to the point where everyone’s been in ‘Jesus, take the wheel’ mode for the last couple years, and fighting against him is only gonna get them burned. Why even try?” The president’s staff, this person said, have no ability to think strategically because the president’s behavior poses new threats to survival every five minutes. “I don’t think they’re even considering what happens if he’s back in the White House and he needs oxygen or a ventilator. Their view is ‘If it happens, well, we’ll fucking figure it out when it happens!’”

One theory of Trump’s self-immolation campaign is that it’s about gaining a sense of control. “I don’t think he wants to lose. I think he wants to have excuses for why he did lose,” a third former White House official said. “If it’s the ballot, the China virus, if it’s Nancy Pelosi. I just think he wants an excuse.”

...Mary Trump is the president’s niece as well as a psychologist, whose best seller, Too Much and Never Enough, analyzes her uncle through the dysfunctional family he came from. In her view, the president is best understood as a self-unaware Tin Man, abandoned as a small child by his sick mother and rejected by his sociopath father until he became useful to him, whose endless search for love and approval plays out as mental warfare on the Free World he improbably represents. “In order to deal with the terror and the loneliness he experienced, he developed these defense mechanisms that essentially made him unlovable,” Mary said. “Over time, they hardened into character traits that my grandfather came to value. When you’re somebody who craves love but doesn’t understand what it means-- he just knows he misses it and needs it, but he’ll never have it because he’s somebody nobody loves-- that’s fucking tragic. He still needs to go to prison for the rest of his life. It’s not a defense. But it’s sad.”

...[Trump's] unwillingness to admit human frailty has led the White House and its doctors to keep information about his illness not only from the public and the press (three members of which have, so far, been infected at the White House too) but from his own staff. After Hope Hicks began experiencing symptoms at the Minnesota MAGA rally on Wednesday, forcing her to isolate in the back of the plane on the trip home, officials with whom she’d had contact remained in the dark. After she tested positive on Thursday afternoon, the White House failed to notify others who would soon test positive themselves. They learned about it when the world did, not with an official disclosure but with a leak to the media. “The president could’ve given it to her,” one of those people told me, in fairness, but “I would’ve done things different that day, had I known.”

Trump did know, but he didn’t change his plans. At 1 p.m. on Thursday, he flew to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, for a fund-raiser with hundreds of his supporters, some of whom he spoke with indoors. Later that night, he tweeted about Hicks being sick. “Terrible!” he said. “The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantining process.”

Reading the message, the person said, “I assumed he must’ve had a preliminary positive one.” The lack of transparency, this person added, is “symptomatic about how people I work with always keep the wrong things secret.” Suicidal in all senses, this is the Trumpian madness that threatens the president’s political and earthly future as it puts at risk everyone around him.

As one White House official put it, "Everybody at the top should be fired."

The public seems to agree wholeheartedly and is preparing to do just that. In fact, Catherine Lucey and Michael Bender noted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Trump is at his lowest point in the polls in months, behind in ad spending and has spent the past week off the campaign trail after a positive Covid-19 diagnosis." The current Real Clear Politics polling average has Trump down by 9.6 points-- 51.6% to 42.0%. The most recent poll, by YouGov for The Economist mirrors the average.

Trump Can't Dance

Trump Was Right To Fire Brad Parscale... But It Won't Help Him Avoid His Destiny

One of the most discussed pieces of reporting over the weekend was Olivia Nuzzi's New York Magazine look inside the chaotic, desperate last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. She goes beyond the reasons why Trump fired his rarely present campaign manager, Jared-puppet Brad Parscale, while noting the " tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized-- which followed weeks of massive hype-- preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died... The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic-- a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced."

Nuzzi wrote that "It was July before he 'saw for the first time' that he could be defeated, according to the [senior White House official] official. And he didn’t blame himself. He blamed a cruel world, a crueler media, and the Death Star’s failure to defend him from both. 'They thought they were running one campaign: We’re on cruise control for the president who gave us the greatest economy of all time, and all the messaging would flow from there. Which socialist are we running against? Bop, bop, bop. And everything changed, and they didn’t change,' the senior White House official said. 'The president started to hate the ads. He hated Beijing Biden-- he didn’t come up with that name.' In the West Wing, officials filed away gossip and unflattering data points about the campaign manager as if drafting a dossier. When it was reported that Parscale’s web of companies took in $38 million between Inauguration Day and the spring of the pandemic, according to the Federal Election Commission, the story circulated widely. Though Parscale has declined to make clear what portion of his bills to the campaign amount to his personal salary, the New York Times reported in March that Trump had imposed a salary cap on Parscale of somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000-- enough for him to become in midlife a collector of luxury cars and seaside real estate, or at least a media caricature of one. But it wasn’t only Parscale’s spending on Parscale that worried-- or 'worried'-- some of his colleagues; it was his spending on everything else, too, like the $15,000-a-month payments to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, and to Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, both of whom crisscross the country as campaign surrogates.





The courtiers surrounding Trump began wondering aloud about what Parascale was even doing aside from milking the campaign for his own accounts. Nuzzi spoke with one of the country's most prominent #NeverTrumpers, Lincoln Project founder George Conway, who told her that the Orange Menace "wonders who’s truly loyal to him and who’s not and who’s making a buck on him," noting that "triggering Trump’s paranoia" is one way to defeat him. "It doesn’t matter who is the captain of the SS Trump, because Trump is the one who is going to run it into the iceberg in the end. If there’s more chaos, all the better. We try to trigger the chaos in Trump’s DNA."

It started eating away at Trump that Pascale was making so much money off him. Three weeks after Tulsa, he was unceremoniously fired-- replaced by Bill Stepien. Right after Trump fired him, Parscale tweeted a Bible verse: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them." No one has seen him since.

Parscale’s value, as some saw it, lay not in what he could do for the campaign but in what he could do for Kushner. “Brad was willing to do whatever Jared said and keep quiet about it. Brad was willing to get yelled at by the president and not say to the president, ‘Well, actually, this was Jared’s decision,’ ” the first senior White House official said. “And Jared got to rule from afar because Brad would do whatever he said. In return, Brad made a fuck-ton of money and got to live by the pool in Florida. It was almost like this weird mutual partnership, whether they knew it or not.”

...In the case of the reelection campaign, what appeared to be a civil war at the highest levels of Trumpworld, with anti-Kushner factions inside and immediately surrounding the West Wing positioned against representatives of his interests at campaign headquarters, and a last-minute last chance for a reboot before November, was more like WrestleMania. The drama was both all-consuming and self-contained. Parscale and Stepien were both seen as Kushner allies, yet the regime change was nevertheless regarded as revealing some aspect of Kushner’s shifting status-- even as he remained functionally in charge the whole time. Kushner’s influence is so total that, even when his proxy is removed, he’s just replaced by yet another proxy. After all, if you’re not a “Kushner guy,” the dismissive term for officials perceived to carry out his will, what kind of guy could you even be?

...But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”

But what about the polls? “I’d push back on that,” Miller said. “I have much more timely data, and much more accurate data, than what you have access to. And it’s improved over the last four weeks, and over the last two weeks, it definitely improved. We’re headed in the right direction.

...If I just woke you up in the middle of the night and told you a guy who is deeply involved in Bridgegate is now calling himself campaign manager for Donald Trump, you wouldn’t have said, ‘You’re kidding me! I’m shocked. How did that happen?,’ ” Stuart Stevens said with a laugh. You’d have said, Of course.

Stevens is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns whose latest book, It Was All a Lie, is about his newfound realization-- at 67 years old-- that his life’s work was a mistake. As he sees it, Trump has a “management philosophy” that has guided him from the Trump Organization to the 2016 campaign to the White House and now to the campaign for reelection. “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump. When you look at Trumpworld, it’s all these people who weren’t involved in presidential races, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to be; it was because nobody would hire them. It’s not like Steve Bannon woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’d like to get involved in campaigns!’ Or Corey Lewandowski, all of these people. It’s how you end up with Brad Parscale. Top professionals won’t work for you.”

Almost all Democrats I know-- basically I know progressive Democrats-- abhor Biden's record. They're going to mostly hold their noses and vote for him-- a vehicle for saving the country from Trump and Trumpism. Not the #NeverTrumpers. They're enthusiastic. Biden's lifelong fiscal conservatism is just what they want in a president. Just ask Susan Molinari. "When Joe Biden makes a commitment, he always sees it through," the narrator says in this new Lincoln Project ad. Does that mean that we're about to vote someone in who is going to kill Social Security and Medicare?

Rushin’ To Destruction, 2019 In Review, Part 14-- "Highlights" From New York Magazine’s Interview With Rudy Giuliani

-by Noah

Interview with a demented vampire is more like it. Rudy Giuliani does look more and more like Nosferatu every day. Eventually, he will look like the gollum in the Lord Of The Rings movie. He’s already traipsing ‘round the world in search of that precious ring that will give him power. In so many stories like Lord Of The Rings, the embrace of absolute corruption leads to dementia and physical grotesqueness. This is what has happened to Rudy.

Rudy wasn’t much to begin with. He has always represented and symbolized the diseased parts of America. In that sense, when a goon like Wolf Blitzer dubbed him “America’s Mayor,” it may have been a highly accurate description and appellation.

After too long of a time, New York City eventually got wise to Rudy. Eventually so did much of the rest of the country. Rudy is a megalomaniac, a racist, narcissistic saliva-spraying dumbo. Only Rudy could have spent $50 fucking million dollars on his own presidential campaign and gotten just one delegate for the convention (although that record may soon be broken); and that one delegate hailed form what state? Florida, of course! And who else would put the security center for the World Trade Center right in one of the two towers after an attempt to bring them down with truck bombs? Rudy! That’s who! Genius! Is it any wonder that Rudy and Trump are such a matched pair of pals? They are roommates in Asylum America. And let’s not forget that FOX “News” and its viewership worship this creepy fungus of a man. Republicans hang on his every word. To them, he is a star of 2019, someone to follow and revere.

What follows are some of the make America great again moments of one of Trump’s “Best People.” When you elect a flatulent gasbag, Rudy happens. If you read Olivia Nuzzi’s New York Magazine interview with Rudy, even in encapsulated form as presented below, it quickly becomes obvious that 15 or even a 150 flushes will never be enough.

Let’s start at the beginning of the interview: Olivia Nuzzi’s description of her subject. It is surreal:

He sang me an aria from Rigoletto, one of the first pieces he fell in love with when he was introduced to opera in high school, as he theatrically conducted with his hands. Over a sweater, he wore a navy blue suit, the fly of the pants unzipped. He accessorized with an American flag lapel pin, American flag woven wallet, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring, and a diamond-encrusted Yankees world Series ring…

Four things struck immediately struck me about Nuzzi’s description: 1) The pinky ring! Say no more! Or, should I just wonder if Trump’s lifelong connection to mobsters has rubbed off on his lawyer? 2) The Yankees gave him a World Series ring. Shame on them, but, I guess it’s not surprising. The ring was given to Giuliani by the team’s late owner George Steinbrenner, a man who was once convicted of funneling illegal campaign contributions to Republican president Richard Nixon and then intimidating employees of his shipbuilding company to give false information to a grand jury. Birds of a feather. 3) Can you imagine being subjected to a demented old coot like Rudy Giuliani trying to sing opera? I know that I will never again be able to hear so much as 3 notes of opera without thinking of Rudy trying in vain to sing it. As for number 4, I suppose Rudy is used to participating in interviews with his zipper down but he should have known that Olivia Nuzzi doesn’t do that kind of interviewing.

Once the interview began, Giuliani related how he got back to New York in time for it. Rudy said:

We snuck out of Kiev to escape having to answer a lot of questions. They all thought we were going to leave on Friday morning, and I organized a private plane to Vienna on Thursday night.

Of course he snuck out, just like his thug buddies Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman tried to sneak out of the U.S. to avoid questions, and more. As Nuzzi points out, Rudy wasn’t clear if he meant questions from the press of from government officials.

As she spoke with Rudy, Nuzzi observed that he held 3 phones of various sizes in one hand. The phones were on, unlocked, and banging against each other. He accidently activated Siri who said she didn’t understand his command.

She never understands me

Nuzzi then describes Rudy poking at the phone, attempting to silence Siri. Think of it this way: A senile old man in a nursing home trying to figure out modern tech. This is a man who bills himself as a cyber systems security expert. It’s all too perfect that his client, the President of the United States, makes a habit of speaking and tweeting on unsecured phones, if only to make it as easy as pie for our adversaries, aka his pals, to know everything he’s up to.

Nuzzi then asks Giuliani how he ever trusted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman:

They look like Miami people. I know a lot of Miami people that look like that that are perfectly legitimate and act like them. Neither on of them have ever been convicted of a crime. Neither one.

Yeah, Rudy, they’re “legitimate businessmen.” The bit about neither one ever being convicted of a crime may be changing soon, and, as we all know, every legitimate businessman tries to sneak out of the country on one-way air tickets. Wave that pinky ring, Rudy.

Then, Rudy offers this. He’s so far gone, as we know from his appearances on Hannity, that he can’t even keep his stories straight within two or three sentences. We’ve seen similar statements from Rudy during his wacked out appearances on FOX “News.” If Rudy wasn’t the heinous individual that he is, the evidence that such statements give might almost engender sympathy.

I have no business interests in Ukraine. I’ve done two business deals in Ukraine. I’ve sought four or five others.

Rudy Giuliani reads his own press and feels betrayed by friends who warned him about tarnishing his reputation. Like many people in his condition, he has become more than a bit paranoid. One of his ex-wives implied that he’s an alcoholic. He states that old friends suspect the abuse of other substances affecting his mental state, too. He gets sarcastic and defensive.

Oh yeah, yeah. I do a lot of drugs. There was one I was addicted to. I’ve forgotten what it is. I don’t know where the drug things come from. I really don’t. The alcohol comes from the fact that I did occasionally drink. I love Scotch. I can’t help it. All of the malts. And part of it is cigars. I love to have them with cigars. I’m a partyer.

The idea of him snorting crushed adderall with Trump comes to mind. Party down, dude!

Rudy apparently feels even more betrayed by the lawyers of the Southern District of New York. He considered them to be his guys working in his world. He had power there but that was the 1980s. He feels entitled to some looking the other way action. He thinks “his guys” might be jealous of him.

If they’re investigating me, they’re assholes. They’re absolutely assholes if they’re investigating me.

Nuzzi says he starts drooling onto his sweater as he gets into his paranoia and bitterness at possibly being betrayed by those who see the law as the law. In all of this, he is unbelievably Trump-like.

If they are, they’re idiots. Then they really are a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York liberals… If they think I committed a crime, they’re out of their minds.

Rudy speaks and acts like his client. Speaking of the whistleblower, he even engages in projection:

How do we know he isn’t a paranoid schizophrenic? How do we know he isn’t an alcoholic?

The money shot of Nuzzi’s conversation with Rudy is the one that most of us heard the day the conversation was published. It’s hard to tell, though, which of Rudy’s mutterings are more bizarre. Anyway, what leapt from the page was Rudy’s engaging in the grand Republican tradition of George Soros conspiracy theorizing. Republicans are obsessed with Soros. They blame him for a lot of their credibility problems. They spread tales of him spending billions against republicans even though what he spends is a pittance compared to what a whole battalion of Republican-supporting billionaires each spend against Democrats. Rudy claims that former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch is “controlled” by Soros:

He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents. Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him. Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about-- he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion-- synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel. He’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.

Well, Rudy does call George Soros a human being so there is that. The whole article shouldn’t have been called “A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani.” It should have been called “Rudy Off The Rails,” but we already knew that. Still, it’s good that Rudy puts his mental state on display so openly, not that we can readily do anything about it. Once in a while, though, sunlight actually does serve mankind as a disinfectant.

As Bob Dylan Could Have Said About The Status Quo Joe Campaign, "He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying"

I left the U.S. in 1969. The idea of Nixon being the president was too much for my 20 year old sensibilities. I traveled the world and eventually wound up living in Amsterdam. While I was in Afghanistan my sensibilities were further assaulted while a northern Democrat, Louise Day Hicks-- from Boston no less-- ran on a racist platform and was elected to Congress. She only remained for two years before being defeated by a non-racist Democrat. (Ten years later I felt as mortified when a Jewish woman, Bobbi Fielder, in the San Fernando Valley-- that's part of Los Angeles-- ran on a similarly racist platform and was also elected to Congress. At least she was a Republican, but a Jew?? She served 3 terms and just died, age 81, last March.

1969-- moi

Around the same time Hicks was making a spectacle of herself in Boston, Joe Biden was dipping a toe into politics himself. He admits that back them he "thought of myself as a Republican." The Delaware GOP tried recruiting him to run for office but he was hesitant because didn't like Nixon. Because of that antipathy for Nixon, he registered as an Independent. After he went to work for a local Democrat, Sid Balick, he switched his registration to Democrat and soon after began running for office, appealing to white resentment of black people.

Earlier this week, Benjamin Hart and Olivia Nuzzi asked at New York Magazine, Why Do Joe Biden’s Supporters Like Joe Biden? Good question; I've hated him since he first started serving in Congress as a racist and conservative.

Hart mentioned to Nuzzi that her cover story on Biden asserts that he has "a personal and deep a connection" with his fans, "especially those who have experienced personal tragedy, which the former vice-president is, sadly, well versed in. For months, pundits have speculated Biden was on the brink of collapsing in the polls, and this has continued not to happen. His connection to President Obama is often cited as a reason for his staying power. Does that underrate his actual skills as a retail politician?"

She told him she thinks "there’s a lot of denial about the reality of the Democratic electorate, which is more moderate and older than the loudest voices on Twitter. And those loud voices have extraordinary influence over our thinking in the media and over the tone of the coverage. And some of those voices are members of the media themselves. And what you don’t really have is much patience for or room for voices from people who look and sound like Biden’s voters in this space. So I think maybe it’s hard to keep things in perspective."

Ben: But do you think there’s more to the connection between Biden and his voters than “he’s moderate” and “he was Obama’s vice-president”? There’s a notion that the people who like him just do so out of a kind of default setting, not because they actually feel that fondly toward him.

Olivia: It’s hard to say. When you see people share emotional stories with him or hug him or stare into his eyes-- that doesn’t seem like they’re doing it because they’re so jazzed to be in the presence of someone they think is “electable.” At the same time, I think people get excited to meet a celebrity. They also get excited to meet somebody close to Barack Obama.

Ben: There’s also a fairly widespread notion that if Biden had run four years ago, he would have had a good chance to win the primary and then would have wiped the floor with Trump. He is certainly showing his age more in several ways now, but, as you write, it’s not as if his previous presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2004 were great successes. There was a reason Obama preferred him not to run in 2016, after all. Do you think his decline has been that precipitous, or is it just slightly exacerbating stuff that was already there?

Olivia: The latter, I think. I’d also note that his stated public reason for not pursuing the nomination last time around was because he had just lost his son Beau to brain cancer.

Ben: You write of Biden’s team: “For many of these staffers, the campaign feels like it should be a coronation. Joe Biden 2020 isn’t a labor of love or ideology. It’s about the proper order of things. It’s about who’s entitled to what.” I saw at least one Biden ally pushing back on this idea. Are there no senior advisers who genuinely think Biden’s policy vision would be the best for the country moving forward? Or is that just a kind of afterthought?

Olivia: I wouldn’t say there are none. It’s not as though every single senior member of the Biden campaign anonymously spilled their guts to me (though I would love that. Call me!) But certainly, my reporting suggests that the prevailing attitude is what I wrote in the story. And of course, I don’t expect any Biden allies will be publicly confirming the negative aspects of my reporting.

Ben: Indeed.

Biden’s initial response to the Ukraine scandal involving his son was a bit halting, not least because he really likes to keep his family separate from politics. But if he wins the nomination, he’ll have to deal with the full fury of Trump and his allies every day. Did you get the sense from your glimpse at the campaign that it’s equipped and ready to handle that kind of thing?

Olivia: So there’s this scene in the story where we’re in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Biden is giving a speech about climate change (under the beating sun in the middle of an 85 degree day. I’m still mad about it). And that was the day after the news of the whistle-blower leaked. So after the event ends, all the press assembles by the door to the building Biden had retreated into, as we normally do, to wait for him to come out so we can ask him questions. And we waited for, I think, an hour and a half, so long that a campaign aide brought out a tray of little cups filled with water so we wouldn’t die. And I’m standing there thinking, Surely, he’s looking forward to stepping out here and going off on Trump. I mean, why wouldn’t he?!

But then he comes out, barges past the press, and steps into his waiting car. That’s not in itself an uncommon occurrence, for Biden or any other candidate to ignore the press, of course. But at that moment, I couldn’t understand the delay in reacting to what seemed like a story that ultimately broke in his favor. What I’ve learned is that Biden is terribly cautious-- as funny as that may seem given his reckless speaking style and debate style. And he waits a long time to make any decision. And he is not a very sure person; not these days, anyway, with so much hanging on by a thread. So that’s why you don’t get him calling for impeachment until like three weeks later in New Hampshire at the last second, because he’s never sure quite what to do.

Ben: Sometimes, that really comes off as a strength, as when other candidates immediately line up to take a position that may not be so well-thought-out, and he doesn’t jump into the fray.

Olivia: Totally. But I think it also contributes to the feeling that he’s a little out of it-- not quite sharp, not agile.

The new CNN poll that came out yesterday shows Bernie winning the first primary-- in New Hampshire-- among likely Democratic primary voters. And it shows Biden in third place with negative momentum, battling with Mayo Pete for the conservative lane in the Democratic Party:

• Bernie- 21%
• Elizabeth- 18%
• Status Quo Joe- 15%
• Mayo Pete- 10%
• Yang- 5%
• Amy Klobuchar- 5%
• Tulsi- 5%
• Steyer- 3%
• Kamala- 3%

Biden had a 9% drop since July, the biggest movement in either direction for any candidate. People are getting to know him as someone who is more  (less?) than just Obama's vice-president and a guy who lost family members and experienced tragedy in his life. (Kamala Harris is also losing ground rapidly). Tulsi jumped from 1% to 5%, likely because of her very strong anti-Hillary remarks. Here are some other results from the polling:

• Favorability/Unfavorable

Bernie- 66% favorable to 23% unfavorable
Elizabeth- 63% to 25%
Biden- 55% to 30%
Mayo Pete- 55% to 15%

• Asked who they would NOT consider voting for under any circumstance:

Status Quo Joe- 11%
Elizabeth- 11%
Marianne Williamson- 9%
Bernie- 7%
Tulsi- 5%

• Most likeable:

Bernie- 27%
Status Quo Joe- 20%
Mayo Pete- 14%
Elizabeth- 10%

• Most progressive:

Bernie- 47%
Elizabeth- 18%
Yang- 6%
Status Quo Joe 5%
Mayo Pete- 4%

• Best able to handle healthcare:

Bernie- 33%
Elizabeth- 17%
Status Quo Joe- 15%
Mayo Pete- 7%

• Best able to handle the Climate Crisis:

Bernie- 30%
Elizabeth- 15%
Status Quo Joe- 9%
Mayo Pete- 4%

• Best able to handle gun policies:

Bernie- 14%
Elizabeth- 14%
Status Quo Joe- 12%
Beto- 8%
Mayo Pete- 6%

Yesterday Tyler Pager reported at Bloomberg News that Biden is in danger of a humiliating loss in Iowa, coming in either 3rd or 4th, primarily because of "a poorly organized operation that has failed to engage with voters and party leaders. With fewer than 100 days until the Feb. 3 caucuses, Biden is failing to spend the time with small groups of voters and party officials that Iowans expect and his campaign’s outreach has been largely ineffective, according to 11 senior Democrats in the state. They worry that could send Biden to a crippling loss behind Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, who have highly organized campaigns in Iowa, said the Democrats." [Bloomberg, a multibillionaire, frowns on mentioning Bernie in his company's communications.]

The Iowa caucus is not really pollable in any reliable way, but what we do know is that in the 2016 caucuses, Bernie and Hillary were essentially tied. The most recent Iowa poll-- this one by Civiqs-- of likely caucus participants, breaks down like this, very bad news for Biden:

• Elizabeth- 28%
• Mayo Pete- 20%
• Bernie- 18%
• Status Quo Joe- 12%
• Klobuchar- 4%
• Kamala- 3%
• Steyer- 3%

Yesterday the NY Post published a report that David Axelrod, Obama's former top advisor, said Biden is running his campaign "as if he were in the federal witness protection program, and also trashed his 'bewildering' defense of son Hunter’s controversial business dealings in foreign countries. They have him in the candidate protection program,” Axelrod said in a profile of Biden in New York magazine, headlined “The Zombie Campaign."

Axelrod said, "I don’t know if you can do that. I don’t know if you can get through a whole campaign that way. Either he can hack it or he can’t hack it. If you’re worried the candidate can hurt himself talking to a reporter, that’s a bad sign... Perhaps he can [hang on]. But that’s generally not the way the physics of these things work. Generally, you’re either moving up or moving down. Warren is clearly moving up. There’s no sign that he is."

Status Quo Joe Biden-- The Perfect Candidate, At Least From Trump's Perspective

A new poll from NBC News released late last week, had some bad news for Trump. In July 32% of registered voters strongly approved of the way Trump was handling his job and the new poll shows that has sunk to 29%. Meanwhile, in the July sample, 41% strongly disapproved of how Trump was handling his job and that has increased to 44%. Much of Trump's support is coming from the former slave states that made up the Confederacy, although even those states disapproval has gone from 45% to 47%. Fucked up states, right? Well, that's also where much of Joe Biden's support comes from-- the candidate of the status quo ante, the male candidate with the secret facelift. ["Biden’s appearance is a matter of preoccupation for Biden-watchers. In the timeline of images from throughout his career, you can observe as he grows older and then younger and then older but somehow more elegant and alert. His hair is white now but thicker than it was in the 1980s. He’s thinner, but his cheeks are fuller than they were in 2008."] Yesterday Olivia Nuzzi wrote about his zombie campaign that appeals to people in these backward regions. "Biden," she explained, "speaking off the cuff is something the entire campaign seems focused on preventing at all costs." When Biden hold a rally his audience is "old and white, unless he’s in South Carolina."

The campaign, of course, has been trying to create an air of inevitability-- just as Hillary did in 2016. On Saturday he said he's undeterred by how rapidly Elizabeth Warren has overtaken him in more and more polls, noting that some of his supporters are already treating the primary campaign as a general election contest between him and Trumpanzee. "She doesn’t affect my strategy, period. And I’m not being facetious. I think she’s a fine person, a good candidate, but I didn’t get involved in deciding to run because of polling or a particular strategy." He acknowledged that even if he doesn't do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina could “catapult” him to wins across the South, and that losses in the other early states wouldn’t hurt him there. "This is a marathon. Even if I knew I was going to win every other state, the Lord came down and told me that, I’d still be in South Carolina." OK, back to Nuzzi:

The pitch goes like this: Joe Biden ought to be the nominee because he’s electable, a meaningless concept if recent history is any guide, and presidential, that wonderful word-- the thing Donald Trump could never be even though he literally is president-- despite the fact that Biden, who appears by almost any measure to be a good man, a man whose lone sin in life is ego (and does that even count anymore?), has spent a half-century grasping for this position and watching it slip through his fingers.

To anyone paying attention-- the army of political professionals more wired to observe shortcomings than are those likely to actually vote for him or for anyone else-- it looks, unmistakably, like it’s happening again. His vulnerabilities are close to the surface. There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years. This was true of Biden, who is 76, even more than it was true of Bernie Sanders, who is the oldest candidate at 78, up until Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning in Nevada earlier this month. (It’s not true at all of Elizabeth Warren, who is 70 but seems a decade younger. And it’s not exactly true of Trump, who is 73 and really just seems crazy, not old.)

But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and-- most of all-- his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money-- spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.

Yet Biden is still the front-runner. Volatile and potentially worthless as they may be, it’s what the polls say. Biden leads the field on average by a handful of percentage points, though his lead has trended steadily downward, from a high of 33 in May to 20 in June to 11, and then to 9.9, and 6.6, and 5.4, according to RealClearPolitics. In the whole campaign, there has only been one day-- October 8-- when he slipped to second place, an average of 0.2 points behind Warren. He’s also the front-runner in South Carolina, Nevada, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. “There is this sense of hanging on. And perhaps he can. But that’s generally not the way the physics of these things work,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me.

“Generally, you’re either moving up or moving down. Warren is clearly moving up. There’s no sign that he is.”

Biden is aware that it’s not going well. But it’s not apparent that he knows how to fix it. Recently, according to his staff, his anxieties have manifested more visibly. If he begins to question something small, he spirals, eventually questioning everything. Should he be saying this in his speech? Wait, should he be giving this speech at all? Should he even be focusing on this group? Is this even the right position? He freaks out over minor stuff on the trail that staffers don’t believe he should be concerning himself with and yet is unable to make strategic adjustments. But the staff concern themselves with unimportant matters, too, running what they think is a general-election campaign when they need to be running a primary. Inside the campaign, the Biden brain trust seems to exist more to comfort the candidate than to compel him, and strategy meetings inevitably devolve into meandering, ruminative roundtables that feel purposeless except to fill time in the day.

Nobody will tell the candidate in plain terms what they think he needs to change. Not that Biden really listens anyway.

Some on the campaign still believe he can win, in part because they believe he should win. But even to them, the path to a collapse seems clear: Biden loses in Iowa and New Hampshire, where his leads have been steadily declining for months and where, recently, Elizabeth Warren has overtaken him, and then, as a result, loses his sheer aura of electability, too. But inside the campaign, they reportedly see another path, though it might not seem, at first, an optimistic one: Okay, so he loses Iowa and then New Hampshire, but so what? Because he is who he is and represents what he represents-- the embodiment of both the white-working-class model of the electorate and the glow of the Obama years-- he can weather the losses and march to victory through Super Tuesday and beyond. “Their theory is a long, twilight struggle where they accumulate delegates everywhere as minority voters start playing a larger role,” Axelrod said. “But in reality, it’s tough to be a winner when you keep losing or at least appear to be.”

Biden would obviously like you to think about his age as experience, but another way of thinking about experience is as a record. He’s got a long one. When he was elected to the Senate, Pete Buttigieg was still a decade away from birth. There’s a lot of material, then, for Biden’s critics to work with. All sorts of stuff that doesn’t age well, or doesn’t quite compute, in this season of absolutism: Anita Hill and allegations that he violated the personal space of several women, controversy over his crusade against busing as a desegregation measure and his eagerness to work with segregationist lawmakers. Last week, after Biden attacked Trump for calling his impeachment a “lynching,” video emerged of Biden calling Bill Clinton’s impeachment the same thing. If it was relevant to American political life at any point since Richard Nixon was president, Biden probably said something about it, but it’s new to many younger voters and activists and talking heads now.

Many of them treat Biden’s talking as yet another symptom of his age, but Biden has always been like this. “His major defect is that he goes on and on and on,” Orrin Hatch told the Washington Post in 1986, when Biden was 43. To say he overcame his childhood stutter would be a bad joke, like one of those I BEAT ANOREXIA T-shirts they sell on the Jersey boardwalk in size XXXL.

In Des Moines, in August, he told a crowd, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Realizing what he’d done, he tried to correct himself. “Wealthy kids,” he said, “black kids, Asian kids. No, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.” Two weeks later, in Keene, New Hampshire, he said, “I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it? And what a neat town. This is sort of a scenic, beautiful town.” (When he returned to New Hampshire the following month, a protester held a sign that read WELCOME TO VERMONT, JOE.) And so on.

Biden is cocooned by family, longtime advisers, and former White House staff. His wife Jill, Val, Mike Donilon, Ted Kaufman, Bruce Reed, Annie Tomasini, Tony Blinken, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain. But beyond that small circle, veterans are harder to find on his campaign. Biden is chronically slow to make decisions, and his late entry into the race, which came months after many of his competitors, was an additional challenge to staffing the campaign. Many working at Biden headquarters in Philadelphia have no experience on a presidential campaign, and some have never worked on any campaign at all; even those closest to the candidate address him, deferentially, as “sir.”

“Some of these folks who have never worked on a presidential before are like, ‘Okay, I’m working for the former vice-president!’ They don’t really feel like it’s slipping,” one senior campaign adviser told me. “There’s such reverence for getting to work for the vice-president that I think, for some of those folks, there’s a mentality of How could we possibly lose? He’s who he is. I don’t think they see that that’s not all it’s gonna take.” (Yes, even Biden’s staff say “folks” the way others say “like” or “um.”)

For many of these staffers, the campaign feels like it should be a coronation. Joe Biden 2020 isn’t a labor of love or ideology. It’s about the proper order of things. It’s about who’s entitled to what. It’s the vehicle by which the Democratic Party Establishment arrives once more to power, the displaced Obama and Clinton professionals reinstalled at the levers. If the Republic is spared in the process-- which everybody genuinely wants, sure!-- that’s a plus. And it’s great branding. When it comes to the enthusiasm voters wear on their sleeves for Warren or Sanders, the Biden campaign strikes a cool, dismissive pose, as if it could be believed that a candidate for president weren’t preoccupied with such metrics.

The activist wing of the party is a lost cause to Biden just as he’s a lost cause to them. When they show up at his speeches to confront him or protest in support of the Green New Deal, something I’ve witnessed twice in New Hampshire, he attempts to formulate what he surely believes is a respectful response, and yet they don’t think it’s enough, because nothing that he says could be enough because of who he is. Can you blame anyone under the age of 30 for their cynicism, for their hostility?

“Internally, there was always this idea that there would be some point when he wasn’t No. 1,” one senior campaign adviser swears. “To some extent, people were prepped for that. There isn’t a culture inside the campaign right now like, This is a done deal and we’ve lost. The culture is, This is getting real. People are still reacting to that. The question is: Does this now change our strategy and our culture? That’s where we are right now, figuring out what this new stature means.”

Where they are, if you’re keeping track, is slumped. And it’s a strange dynamic-- the most qualified candidate in the race, surrounded by entitled staff who don’t understand that they have to fight for the nomination, or even the presidency, but without a real case to make beyond a Democratic succession that would amount to an Obama restoration. “He has no center,” as one person close to the Biden family put it. “He’s literally only a politician. That’s who he is. That’s all he is. Biden is fundamentally a toadie. He’s just political. He needs to kiss ass? He’ll kiss ass.”

“They have him in the candidate-protection program,” Axelrod says. “I don’t know if you can do that. I don’t know if you can get through a whole campaign that way. Either he can hack it or he can’t hack it. If you’re worried the candidate can hurt himself talking to a reporter, that’s a bad sign.” (Biden declined to be interviewed for this story.)

For his part, Biden is consumed with his endorsements, another sign of his perhaps outdated political instincts; getting insiders to declare their support meant something when powerful political machines controlled the primary process, but it has much less relevance to presidential politics today. And the only endorsement that could matter hasn’t materialized. President Barack Obama has remained silent on the 2020 primary even as he saw it fit to involve himself in Canadian affairs, endorsing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A senior White House official, reflecting on Biden’s weakness, told me Biden should have never even entered the race without knowing he’d have the former president’s support.

Of course, that was always less of a sure thing than it might have seemed. In 2016, Obama went all-in for Hillary, even as his vice-president contemplated a run. In the early stages of this race, he didn’t just avoid aligning himself with Biden but gestured toward other candidates, including unlikely contender Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, possibly to discourage his former veep from running.

And then there’s Hunter Biden himself, who was going to become an issue one way or another. The 49-year-old son of privilege and tragedy, he has had struggles with addiction and run-ins with the law that have been well-documented. The campaign did its best to control the subject, cooperating with a New Yorker profile over the summer in which Hunter candidly discussed his drug use and his relationship with his brother’s widow.

This is sometimes how flacks think they’ll get ahead of a story: You neuter the shock value by delivering the shock yourself. But when your son is a central character in an impeachment saga likely to envelop all of Washington and political news for six months, it’s a hard thing to get ahead of, especially when you don’t really seem to want to engage.

...[Biden's facelift is] a minor obsession of the White House, as you can probably imagine. Privately, Trump has marveled at the “work” Biden has had done and the fact that, in his opinion, he doesn’t look any better for it.

Those who know him say the president is against plastic surgery (by which I assume they don’t mean breast implants) and, especially, bad plastic surgery, and he considers it an all-too-common tragedy when someone has their face inexpertly altered.

A senior White House official who regularly discusses the campaign with Trump was describing how his view of Biden has evolved since the winter. It was then, before Biden declared, that the campaign began conducting polling and sharing the results with Trump himself. The internal numbers were as bad as the external. Biden destroyed Trump. The president’s anxieties only grew as Biden became a more popular topic on cable news. “It was easy to get caught up,” this official said. “The president saw that it’s easier to picture Joe Biden up on the debate stage than some of the others.”

Over time, as Biden formally waded into the race, and the president saw the reality of the candidate as opposed to the idea of Vice-President Joe Biden, he grew less concerned, according to the senior White House official. Biden was no longer “the guy he was worried about.” And one of the reasons was, in Trumpian fashion, “his look.” Though the official adds a few more items to the list as well: “His cadence. His inability to speak. His small crowds.”

Trump has also commented on Biden’s wardrobe choices, wondering why he’d wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts on the campaign trail that show off his graying chest hair and skinny arms. (Trump himself wears polo shirts almost exclusively while golfing).

Inside the White House and the reelection campaign, the true believers know how to decode Trump’s bitchy nicknames for his competitors. As iconic as “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted” may be, his crowning achievement remains “Low Energy,” his characterization of Jeb Bush. “Sleepy Joe” is considered Trump’s attempt at a 2020 remake of “Low Energy,” and it’s all about emphasizing Biden’s age.