The Case That Trump Really Is Toast, and That He Probably Knows It

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In the seemingly endless Friday the 13th series of horror movies, Jason, the primary villain, “died” so many times, before coming back to life, that at a certain point everyone presumed he was impossible to kill off. Similarly, President Trump, the Rasputin of American politics, has overcome the odds and predictions of doom (including from me) so many times that commentators are understandably extremely wary of writing him off prematurely.

However, a very strong case can be made that Trump’s reelection chances really are currently dead, and would now require an unforeseen event of massive proportions to resuscitate them.

The first part of this argument is simply in the polling numbers. In every key metric (approval rating, popular vote matchup, and in battleground states) they are not only terrible for Trump, but also show very little room for potential improvement.

With a 56% disapproval rating, that obviously means that currently well over half the country would REALLY not like to vote for him. Consequently, Trump’s base of voters has shrunk just enough to where he currently just cannot get there from here.

It isn’t so much that Trump, as he has been all year, is losing to Joe Biden by a significant margin in the popular vote polls, it is that the extremely well-known incumbent president has somehow not cracked 41% in any poll since June 24th. If this race was an amusement park ride, Trump’s current support would not be tall enough to even be allowed entry.

The battleground states tell a remarkably similar story, with Trump’s average not currently topping 42% in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, the very key states he won in 2016. Even more ominously, he is only averaging 43% in Florida, a state where, if he loses, it is nearly inconceivable to get the 270 Electoral College votes needed for re-election.

There is also no indication that recent events will do anything but depress Trump’s numbers even further. His shockingly brazen and overtly corrupt (especially for a man who got elected promising to “Drain the Swamp!”) commutation of the prison sentence for Roger Stone’s felony perjury convictions indicates that Trump is so politically clueless that he can’t get himself out of this mess, or, perhaps more likely, he actually knows that he is not going to get re-elected and is starting not to care about how his actions are perceived.

Maybe the strongest part of the case that Trump now needs an “Act of God” to beat Biden is that almost all of his possible escape hatches have been already closed off.

At the start of the coronavirus crisis, I theorized that liberal forces were going to cause football to not be played this year and that this might help Trump politically. While liberals have indeed laid the groundwork for that to eventually happen, they are not going to get widespread public blame because the waters will be too muddied, and the virus is not nearly under control enough for Trump to credibly claim that killing football is a gross overreaction (if anything, I now see this working against Trump as it will depress part of his base).

Similarly, I thought that turning the election into a referendum on mandatory mask-wearing was going to be a potential winning issue for Trump. However, partly due to the virus being seen as still out of control, and a shockingly high percentage of formerly freedom-loving Americans being in favor of government having the authority to mandate this, it has worked out in the opposite way, and Trump has effectively waved the white flag on the topic.

Even the most reliable Republican wedge issue of modern times, Democrats radically overplaying their hand on racial/social/cultural topics, which has very clearly happened in the last few months, has shown absolutely no sign whatsoever of working in Trump’s favor. If, as I wrote previously, Trump has lost THAT political superpower, how can he possibly make a dramatic comeback?

The last card for Trump to play in an effort to turn this around, one which I theorized about on my weekly Trump-focused podcast on July 1st well before it happened, was from him to go ALL in on forcing public schools to fully reopen. Had he pulled this off, and if it had gone well, it would have gotten Trump right back in the game by giving suburban moms some legitimate reason to vote for him.

However, in a sign that Trump is so politically toxic that he now has an anti-Midas touch, liberal medical forces, which had previously been in favor of fully reopening schools, immediately and outrageously walked that position back, seemingly out of fear of being perceived as pro-Trump. The reality is that, for better or worse, few schools are going to fully reopen and, much like with the football issue, Democrats, with their friends in the media protecting them at every turn, are not going to get any blame for that, even if nothing horrible happens in the mostly conservative areas where having real school is tried.

Finally, there are the issues of the virus itself and its impact on the economy. Neither look at all promising for Trump.

A week ago, I wrote that while the daily death rate would likely rise slightly in the near future, that, despite a large “surge” in the number of new cases, it would not be a dramatic increase. Since then, the prevalence of new cases has exploded to a level (71,000 on Friday) that I did not anticipate, meaning that, for at least the next month, the daily death rate will be at least as high, and likely rather noticeably higher, than the rather low level at which it had been before this recent spike of new cases.

This means that any argument that Trump had that his administration had finally “defeated”” or even significantly controlled, the virus is now gone until at least the end of summer. It also means that any progress with regard to sparking a recovery in the economy, which has so far been remarkably resilient, will not only be curtailed, but could very well be reversed, possibly even to disastrous proportions.

Sure, Biden still has to decide if his VP nominee will be Senator Kamala Harris or Rep. Val Demings, who will then be attacked by Republicans as poor choices for such a uniquely important pick. However, the news media will never allow either of them, if only because of their “historic” significance, to become a real detriment to his ticket.

The last theoretical shot for Trump would be a debate with an elderly and clearly shaky Biden. Trump’s fans are sure he will crush his verbally weak opponent in debates, but expectations for Biden will be so low that I don’t see how that could happen dramatically enough for it to really matter, assuming there even ARE debates, in which Biden, thanks again to his allies in the media, may not even be forced to participate.

While a Trump win now appears extremely unlikely, and maybe impossible, that does not mean that this contest is not without great drama. We have never had a presidential election where the margin of victory/defeat was more significant, and that is still very much in doubt, with all sorts of scenarios very much in play.

But that is another subject, for another day.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.