How Loser Trump Defeated Himself.

He could have won. Except he acted true to himself in the pandemic: Dumb, reckless and incompetent.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

For many Democrats, defeating Donald Trump has been a top priority since Wednesday, November 9th, 2016.

And now (for the next four years at least), it’s done.

But it was a long slog. It was harder, sadder, more depressing—and less definitive—than it should have been. At the end, there’s as much exhaustion as exhilaration.

Biden wasn’t my first pick as the nominee. But sometime in 2019, a wise political acquaintance explained to me, painstakingly, why he would ultimately be the best pick if Democrats truly wanted to win. I didn’t really buy it then. And only after Biden became the nominee, as I watched the campaign unfold, did I appreciate that my acquaintance had been correct. Biden plus Harris—plus the prospect of all-star Administration—seemed like an irresistible contrast to the corrupt, soul-crushing,  family-destroying shitshow we were living through.

I believed the polls. I expected a landslide. And then, in the wee hours of Tuesday night, I started freaking out.

But Joe and Kamala pulled through. And while many, many people—some famous like Stacey Abrams, some heroic but unsung—deserve tremendous credit and praise for the victory, this article isn’t about them.

It’s about how Trump ultimately defeated himself. But first, a few words about those who failed us along the way:

The media.

When I launched this newsletter at the start of the year, I predicted “the media will fail us.” And they did, big time. In the midst of the pandemic in March and April, I took to watching half an hour of network nightly news (ABC, CBS or NBC) each night. The Covid coverage remained the lead story for many weeks until the protests took over and the campaign heated up. In the last few weeks, the pandemic and the election merged into one story dominated by statistics (cases, hospitalizations, death counts, unemployment and GDP rates, and poll numbers) and Trump’s antics (Fauci drama, Covid diagnosis, Super Spreader rallies). In the process, Trump’s incompetence in managing the pandemic was repeatedly made clear. But his lies and his blame-shifting were amplified night after night.

And that’s all Trump supporters need to hear. It doesn’t remedy the situation when “fake news” points out the lies after doing Trump’s work by broadcasting them to the nation.

Four years of “normalizing” the President and “respecting the office” even in the face of rampant crime, corruption and obstruction (and impeachment), brought us, yet again, to horse-race-style election coverage, even as kids in cages were getting abused, Trump and the GOP moved to pack the Supreme Court and take away healthcare and reproductive rights—and the planet kept on burning.

In a busy news year, lazy journalists in all media continued parroting Trump’s lies about the “great economy” he built before Covid—and his fantasy promises about doing it all again and better. They also kept amplifying his bullshit about being the best President for Blacks since Abraham Lincoln—even as Blacks died of the virus at a 2-1 rate compared to whites, the Black unemployment rate skyrocketed above 13% and poverty and food insecurity soared among all the races.

The Republican Party.

After Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote, did anyone in the current GOP speak out against any of the corruption—or the death and devastation Trump’s real-time incompetence brought to the nation in 2020? We heard a lot from former Trump officials, retired generals and national security experts, ex-Congresspeople and Senators. But the only Republicans who defended the institutions Trump was demolishing and paid even lip service to traditional conservative principles were “disgruntled” outsiders and old farts who held no sway over the MAGA cult and the QAnon conspiracy theorists.

The Lincoln Project, RVAT, etc.

We also heard a lot of noise from Republican Voters Against Trump and The Lincoln Project. In the end, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt and Kellyanne’s husband got more famous. But Ohio stayed red. Iowa stayed red. Texas stayed red. Florida stayed red. Their work was ultimately useless.

So-called “Christians.”

Don’t get me started.

I just wish Christians would act more like Jimmy Carter and less like the one who has threesomes with the poolboy or the one who said Covid was caused by premarital sex before dying of Covid.

If you don’t think Jesus would have voted for Joe Biden over the adulterer who stole from kids with cancer and said we should simply let old people die from Covid for the good of Wall Street, then you’re going to the wrong church.

The poorly educated MAGA cult.

Despite being among those with most to gain from a Biden Presidency, these deplorable racist idiots clung desperately to their belief in their psychotic cult leader.

In doing so, they proved again and again why the con artist Trump loves selling to them. They are just so much dumber than your average marks.

Even after Trump himself caught Covid, they came back, maskless, to breathe in his lethal cocktail of BS and COVID-19, only to be left stranded in the freezing cold as he flew home to his comfy bed, where he could fall gently asleep watching Hannity on his DVR.

When you look back on 2020, it’s easy to imagine that without the pandemic, Trump would have won re-election this year. But it’s important to note:

The pandemic didn’t kill the Trump Presidency.

A public health crisis is no reason for a competent President to lose an election. All year long, Trump and Hannity have been trying to convince us the H1N1 pandemic was a total disaster in Obama’s first term. It wasn’t. But if it had been, perhaps Obama would have become, like loser Donald Trump, a one-term President.

But Trump, as regular readers of this newsletter know, is a psychopath. As clinical psychologist Vince Greenwood, Ph.D., told me in September, Trump lacks the skills a normal human being—or a normal President—would employ in a crisis like the one we’re living though:

A humane and comprehensive response to COVID would have required empathy  and a capacity to work diligently on complex issues. The absence of these qualities is deeply ingrained in his personality structure.

One other aspect of Trump’s psychopathy is, of course, his pathological lying. As I wrote in March:

Trump has pushed the American perception that all politicians are corrupt liars beyond caricature.

But Americans draw the line at being lied to when other Americans are dying...

… America’s lack of testing for coronavirus has been inexcusable. But Trump’s ongoing lack of truth is what is truly unforgivable.

It wasn’t the pandemic that killed the Trump Presidency. It was Trump’s relentless lying, his reckless incompetence, his complete lack of empathy—and his clear, undeniable stupidity.

It was Trump’s response to the pandemic that killed the Trump Presidency.