Preview

Liberals are in a permanent shell-shocked condition over the results of the last election, after losing to someone known to America primarily as a reality game-show host. They have presumed that Trump carries some gut-level cunning and appeal, or fear the string-pulling of outside intervention, and they refuse to interpret whatever data is presented in front of them. They’re terrified to say the words.

Elections cannot be met with complacency. There’s the old adage of acting like you’re down by ten points. Downballot races take on even more significance in 2020, not just because of the bid to take back the Senate but because it’s a Census year, and the state legislatures that will be elected will have significant control (depending on the state) over redistricting. So if you want better leaders, work like hell to get them in the next four months. And yes, win big enough so it can’t be stolen. Don’t let me stop you.

But I’m not afraid to say this: Donald Trump is going to lose, and it’s critical to understand why. Not just for history, but for the next occupant(s) of the office to internalize.

Baseline polling can lead us to this conclusion. The respected Siena poll put the snapshot this week at Biden 50, Trump 36, with Biden ahead among men, tied among white voters, and dominant among white voters with at least some college education. In the states the numbers are generally the same, with Biden sporting double-digit leads in the tipping point states he needs to win. The 538 average, which stuffs and weights all polls together, still has Biden ahead by 9.3 points, and notes that Hillary Clinton’s average lead in the four months leading up to the election was only 4 points. The Electoral College still has a Republican lean, but it’s converging: Biden is up in 538’s average by 8.1 points in Pennsylvania, the tipping point state, only a point away from his overall lead.

But I’m not basing my prediction solely on polling. And I wasn’t someone who publicly claimed that Clinton would triumph in 2016. The main reason I say Trump will lose is that he’s bad at being president, and with the coronavirus he’s found a way to be bad in public.

Despite the alleged all-consuming attention on the Trump presidency, the bulk of it was idle gossip, the kind of “laugh-and-point” liberalism that comforted itself in palace intrigue, or one-off expressions of horror at rollbacks of regulations or unqualified appointees. But it became clear to me that Trump would lose in February, as cases of COVID-19 flowed out of China and around the world. I knew that this was a) a challenge unlike any Trump had previously faced, and that b) he would fare badly at it, because he’s not a good president.

Plenty of leaders have failed during the pandemic. What Andrew Cuomo did to send sick patients back into nursing homes was unforgivable. But I think we can agree that a president has more agency than anyone else in moments of national crisis. From the very beginning, Trump tried to push off that responsibility to the states, because of his aversion to being blamed for anything. But responsible he is, in numerous ways.

Trump’s CDC so botched testing that hundreds of thousands of Americans were infected before we had the information. He’s admitted to deliberately slowing testing at key points to make the numbers look better. He actively cheered reopening way too soon and offered no federal support for states to prepare. The FEMA program of commandeering and shuffling personal protective equipment was the work of a criminal gang. His attitude toward the virus was to dismiss its grave implications, even now amid the unending first wave. His campaign manager is in quarantine, and advance staffers have contracted the disease; his approach is crumbling around him. And the continual pronouncements of the great job he’s doing, amid 125,000 deaths and untold long-term damage to people’s lungs and their livelihoods, recalls Nero and the fiddle.

Americans habitually reject incompetence in their leaders. Before being feted as a kindly painter, George W. Bush was the most loathed man in the country, because he got us bogged down in a war based on lies, let an American city drown, and presided over a crushing financial crisis. He was bad at his job, in public. Herbert Hoover was bad at his job as millions suffered during a presidency shaped by the Depression. The nation rejected them. They’re in the process of rejecting Trump.

There’s a way for a hypothetical president to succeed in the next four months and eke out re-election: universal masking, massive support for testing and army field hospitals and contact tracing where needed, a wide-open money spigot to individuals financially affected. It’s actually a pretty simple formula.

Trump won’t do it. He’s taken the position that everything’s fine, and thinks that moving off that would show weakness. And even if he wanted to do what might seem simple for a replacement-level president, he’s so far below that standard as to make such steps impossible. This is why he should, actually, resign, as Chris Hayes called for yesterday. Instead we’ll have to settle for him being snubbed at the polls in four months.

Trump’s entire political career has been built on hucksterism and grievance. You can fool people with hucksterism for a long time, but not once slapped by reality. Then the sheen wears off. BSing his way through served Trump well in business, which we’re discovering is much more forgiving than government. But you can only whine for so long, as Biden noted yesterday, before it becomes pathetic. Trump can’t figure out how to attack the coronavirus, and without doing that work he cannot attack Biden. He knows he’s going to lose (Biden “is going to be president because some people don’t love me, maybe,” Trump said to Sean Hannity on Friday), because he’s incapable of the governing that would prevent it.

This is the important point. A president has to be president, not just play one on TV. They cannot just express competence, but actually succeed. The difficult truth is that Trump is carrying on a tradition. We’ve done very little to arrest our long-term crises for several decades. The next president needs to actually deal with them. FDR’s descendants wrote an open letter to Biden, urging outsized ambition to fill in the existing cracks exposed by this crisis. Passivity—at income and wealth inequality, at unequal treatment, at structural racism, at a raging pandemic but also the everyday failures we faced before—will only lead to disapproval and decline.

So when Biden wins, he needs to salve the festering wound that is American government, or we’ll get another in a series of wave elections that haven’t really ended since 2006. Trump’s humiliating defeat sets the course for Biden’s presidency: tangibly govern.

Personal income dropped in May because one-time stimulus checks stopped coming. (Bureau of Economic Analysis)
Texas closes its bars and restricts dine-in restaurants as the virus spreads. (Texas Tribune)
Can’t go outside because of coronavirus; can’t stay inside because of no air conditioning and the heat. (CNBC)
Remember when the reopen movement was the next Tea Party? One of their leaders has contracted coronavirus. (Washington Post)
Contact tracing has utterly failed in the U.S. (Axios)
Five percent of NBA players tested positive, a pretty high number considering all were asymptomatic as far as we know. (Bloomberg)
An eviction tracking system. (Eviction Lab)