Consider: Donald Trump made his closing pitch to voters yesterday standing next to the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool, where he delivered at great (i.e., Trumpian) length his account of how he’d saved it, extolled the oil industry’s record profits, and spoke fondly of our supposed victory in our war on Iran.
The entire event should have been paid for by the Democratic National Committee.
This year’s Republican campaign “strategy” stinks from the head, of course. On an hourly basis, Trump has gone out of his way to offend the American people: focusing on concerns more appropriate to a D.C. property manager, hailing the diversion of Americans’ income into the pockets of the rich, and claiming victory in the war he started without the faintest idea of how to end it.
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But Trump’s not the sole author of this year’s Republican woes. There is the supine White House staff that dare not hint to him that making his closing pitch in a way that dramatized his indifference to the actual concerns of the electorate might not be a great idea. There is the raging war on immigrants run by the most important member of that staff, Stephen Miller, that is mobilizing Latinos to go to the polls and vote Democratic. (It’s the most heavily Latino regions of Southern California that have seen the greatest uptick in early voting this year.) There is the Republican cabal on the Supreme Court, which by its gutting of the Voting Rights Act and its support for Republican gerrymandering looks to be boosting turnout by rightly infuriated Black voters in the affected Southern states, putting what should be slam-dunk Republican Senate seats in jeopardy. And there’s the Republican Congress, which has indulged virtually every Trump whim, no matter how electorally poisonous it may be.
Trump’s poolside blithering yesterday provides a good compendium of this year’s Republican campaign. It contained a clear expression of what matters to him about the current economy:
“We had an expression: drill, baby, drill. And that’s what’s happened. And we’re making an absolute fortune in our country.”
It boiled down his attacks on the Democrats to a two-word phrase that he used several times during his remarks:
“The Democrats want to blow all of this up by electing communist jihadists.”
It contained his characteristic hyping of anything for which he claims credit, whether it matters to American voters or not:
“This is a massive piece of pool. There’s never been anything like—when you look at the size, it’s the biggest anywhere in the world by far, and was treated with a lot of love, and then it was treated with a lot of hate, and we’ve got to stop the hate because they came in and should never have done what they did. And despite all that we went through, the Reflecting Pool right now looks better than it ever looked, and it is better.”
It contained phrases that few if any other political figures would come up with:
“We’ve achieved more in less than two years than any administration in American history, and I’ve kept every single promise I made, except far more. I’ve actually kept far more promises than I made.”
It contained an evaluation of the pre-restoration pool that could be applied to the entire Trump presidency:
“It had a bad aroma, to put it mildly.”
If the late Roy Cohn were still alive, he’d tell Trump to shut the fuck up. Beating this guy and his goons is a historic and nationally existential necessity, but, really, it shouldn’t be all that terribly hard.
