Remember when he injected himself with bleach and tear-gassed George Floyd protesters?
About a month ago, polling guru Nate Silver wrote a (paywalled) piece for his Substack called “This Was Trump’s Election to Lose. And He Just Might.” Its most important line may have been this one: “In newsless periods, [Trump] becomes the favorite.” Everything else about him aside—and, granted, it’s a lot to put aside—Trump is a candidate who’s remembered by voters for being president when the economy was good and prices were low, and he’s running against the vice president from an administration that’s unpopular because of inflation. It’s a no-difficulty setting. Lie low and cruise to victory!
Trump is not a “lying low” kind of guy, though, and his response to the hurricane situation in the South—Helene hit last month, and Milton is headed toward Florida presently—is the latest instance of his compulsion to center himself in the national news, to his own detriment.
In a nutshell, his response to the hurricanes has been bizarre and unhelpful. Trump has said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is trying to avoid helping displaced Republicans in North Carolina, that it has run out of money because it’s housing illegal immigrants, and that there haven’t been any helicopters deployed for rescue missions in areas affected by Helene. None of those things, if you can believe it, are true. He hasn’t yet repeated Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that “they” (Democrats, Jews, whoever) can “control the weather” and are doing it in this instance to attack MAGA voters, but he probably will, sooner or later (in a vague way). Hell, he may have already done it on his Truth Social feed, but they don’t pay me enough to look at that thing. No one gets paid enough to look at it.
Anyway, hurricane conspiracy stuff is probably bad for him electorally. Polls (and common sense) suggest that voters want a president who can “unify” the country during emergencies. And in being as un-unifying as possible, Trump is re-creating some of the circumstances of his loss in 2020.
In that year, the U.S. was experiencing not just the COVID pandemic but civil unrest triggered by video of George Floyd’s murder. Voters as a whole didn’t like Trump’s handling of either issue. If you’ll recall, Trump usually ignored COVID precautions and had to be hospitalized after he contracted the virus in October 2020, which probably did not help instill widespread faith, just before the election, in his pandemic management skills. His responses to police brutality protests were generally considered inflammatory and divisive—perhaps most notably, he had protesters outside the White House tear-gassed and beaten to clear space so he could take a photo in front of a nearby church. According to polls, Biden went on to win voters who were concerned about the pandemic and the issue of racism, and was widely believed to be more likely to “unify” the country.
When Trump was nearly killed this July, he had the chance—really the best possible chance—to show that he understands how to be a dignified, “presidential” leader. He blew that chance pretty much immediately by, among other things, accusing Kamala Harris of lying about being Black (?). Natural disasters in the Gulf present another such opportunity, but he will probably just continue pissing into the wind.
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