Sherrerd:
This is a red herring. No one who opposes Trump believes he’s a smart guy. No one who opposes Trump believes he has a master plan.
When someone writes ‘Trump will do X because he thinks it will keep him in office ’ it’s NOT short for ‘Trump has figured out this master-stroke .’
It’s short for ‘Trump’s dumb-guy instincts, which to his mind have kept him in gold toilet seats all his life, even though the fact is that others such as his father and Vlad Putin have been bailing him out for decades for their own purposes, will lead him to do X, partly due to support from what Sean Hannity and Chris Ruddy have said to him, and partly because X fits Trump’s own predilections .’
They are not the same.
Inveighing against mythical opponents of Trump who supposedly think he’s a superb strategist–because there are no such opponents–is a waste of time.
I’m going to re-use a post I made earlier today in another threat. It was in response to somebody saying Trump was desperately trying to hang on to power for another four years.
That only makes sense if you feel that Trump’s actions are helping him stay in office. And I think they’re pretty obviously having the opposite effect.
The Covid19 crisis could have been a golden opportunity for Trump if he had half a brain. It was a major international crisis and all he really needed to do was sit back, do what the experts told him to do, and then stand in front of a camera and present himself as a leader who was rising above politics.
He would have been like Bush or Giuliani after 9/11. People would have forgiven him for all of the screw-ups earlier in his term as long as he looked competent during the crisis. People want to trust their leader in a crisis and believe he knows what he’s doing. All Trump needed to do was meet them halfway and say the right things. Trump could have had 75% approval ratings and he’d be coasting towards his second term now.
Instead Trump seemed to intentionally take the worst possible approach to the medical crisis. And then, when a few of his supporters tried to suggest that maybe he shouldn’t be held responsible for a virus, he decided to promote a race war.
This isn’t the way a man who’s trying to survive acts.