Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Barr has been a naked partisan in using the Department of Justice as a tool to advance Trump’s political interests.
Cast your mind ahead a couple of months, to the beginning of October. The polls—which today show Donald Trump trailing Joe Biden by around 8 points—have not changed, or may have gotten worse for the president. The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage, as the number of American dead approaches 250,000. Tens of millions remain unemployed. Trump’s attempts to disqualify Biden in the eyes of voters have failed; most of them believe Biden is neither senile nor a closet socialist nor a monster with a plan to “abolish the suburbs” and “hurt God.”
With the days until the election ticking down, what will Trump do?
The almost inevitable answer is that Trump will unveil some kind of October Surprise, a last-minute maneuver intended to torpedo Biden’s candidacy, boost his own, and bring him to an unexpected victory.
It will almost certainly fail.
To be clear, this is not to say that Trump might not win, nor that the various ways in which he is already attempting to rig the election won’t have an impact. But the October Surprise, whatever it is, will not be the vehicle that delivers Trump to reelection. At least not if all of us are forewarned and prepared.
There is a long history of October Surprises of one sort or another, some ineffectual, some shocking, and at least one notable for what didn’t happen. Though the record is muddy, it does appear that in 1980 the Reagan campaign worked to make sure the government of Iran would not release the American hostages it held before the election; they were ultimately freed on the day of Reagan’s inauguration, giving him a thoroughly undeserved public relations triumph.
But in many cases, an October Surprise captures everyone’s attention for a time, but doesn’t keep the embarrassed candidate from winning. The Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump bragging about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity broke on October 8, 2016; he still won. As did George W. Bush, despite the revelation just four days before the 2000 election that years before he had pled guilty to drunk driving (in that case it was actually a November Surprise).
Without credibility, an October Surprise can’t succeed.
The most influential October Surprise was probably the letter then-FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress on October 28, 2016, informing them that despite having closed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices, the bureau had located some new emails that might or might not be pertinent to that investigation. The result was a campaign earthquake, seizing the attention of the entire news media and generating frenzied discussion about whether Clinton was just as corrupt as the Republicans claimed.
The coverage was exemplified by the extraordinary New York Times front page the next day, which featured no fewer than three above-the-fold stories about Clinton’s emails. Some analysts have made a strong case that had Comey not violated Department of Justice policy to inject himself into the campaign just 11 days before the election, Trump would not have been able to pull out an improbable victory in which he became president despite winning 3 million fewer votes than Clinton.
But the reasons the Comey letter had such an enormous impact help us understand what will make it so hard for Trump to produce something similar. At the time, Comey was hardly a national celebrity; if he was known at all by most voters, it was as a career DoJ official, a non-partisan G-Man. His statements and actions, however they might have been criticized, were interpreted by almost no one as part of some kind of scheme to get Trump elected. That certainly wasn’t how journalists saw them, which is why his letter was granted both blanket coverage and the presumption of legitimacy.
Compare that to how we’d interpret something similar coming from Attorney General William Barr. Barr has shown himself to be utterly corrupt and dishonest, from his distortions of the Mueller report to his official attempts to discredit the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election to his appalling interventions on behalf of Trump’s criminal cronies Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. When Trump lamented in 2018 that “I don’t have an attorney general” because Jeff Sessions was unwilling to act solely in Trump’s personal interest, Bill Barr was what he had in mind, and what he got.
In fact, Barr has been such a naked partisan and so aggressive in using the Department of Justice as a tool to advance Trump’s political interests that it would be a shock if he didn’t attempt some kind of last-minute abuse of power to aid Trump’s campaign. Asked recently if he would commit to not releasing the results of the investigation he ordered into the Russia probe until after the election, he answered simply, “No.”
But how will Barr’s inevitable attempt to help Trump be received? If a week before the election he held a press conference to announce that the DoJ was opening an investigation into whether Joe Biden committed some nefarious crime, no one would treat it without skepticism. “But Her Emails” would loom large in everyone’s memory. It would be a story about Trump and Barr’s corruption of the government, not a story about whatever accusation he was leveling at Biden.
And let’s not forget that the country recently got a lesson in how this works, because an attempted October Surprise was precisely what got Donald Trump impeached. By squeezing the president of Ukraine to announce that Biden was suspected of corruption in the former Soviet republic, Trump was hoping to create a shocking media event that would transform the race. In fact, Republicans in the Senate are still trying to gin up the same story, but no one except Fox News diehards believes a word they say on the subject.
What Trump confronts is a credibility vacuum, one that covers not only him but all those who work for him and advocate for him. Everyone, both voters and journalists, fully expects him not only to lie but to come up with some kind of dirty trick.
And without credibility, an October Surprise can’t succeed. It’s a media strategy, a PR play, and as such it depends on people accepting the charges as true and legitimate. Trump long ago lost the ability to convince anyone except his ardent base of just about anything.
To be clear, even though Trump probably can’t create an effective October Surprise out of whole cloth, there are practical things he can do—and is already doing—to rig the election in his favor. Administration officials are reportedly “scrambling to ponder possible executive actions he could take to curb mail-in voting,” in addition to his comprehensive efforts to destroy the Postal Service, which will likely hamper voters’ ability to get their mail votes counted. As the New York Times recently reported, scientists inside the government are increasingly worried that the administration will rush out a coronavirus vaccine before the election even if it isn’t proven safe and effective, so Trump can hail it as his own personal defeat of the pandemic.
In fact, one might assume that Trump and his aides already have some kind of October Surprise planned and ready to implement. But if history is any guide, this could be one more case in which their malevolent intentions are limited by their incompetence. If Trump is going to win, he’ll have to find another way to do it.
