As you probably already knew, the next six months of 2020 presidential campaigning are going to be ugly. I do not say this happily, but I do so based upon a lifetime of watching candidates run for election and reelection. Almost invariably, politicians return to what worked successfully in previous campaigns.
Consider the most recent presidential election of 2016. When exit polls across the nation asked actual voters whether their opinion of the two candidates was favorable or unfavorable, their answers were Donald Trump 38 percent favorable and 60 percent unfavorable, and Hillary Clinton 43 percent favorable and 55 percent unfavorable.
In the same survey, just 36 percent of voters found Clinton to be “honest and trustworthy,” while 61 percent did not. For Trump, the numbers were even worse: 33 percent saw him as “honest and trustworthy,” and 64 percent did not. Continue reading.
When he isn’t watching Fox News or tweeting insults at his perceived enemies, President Donald Trump spends a lot of time hunting scapegoats. Always preoccupied with escaping responsibility, Trump’s lifelong delinquency is suddenly a matter of life and death, as coronavirus claims thousands of American lives on his presidential watch. And as it becomes clearer that the United States might have easily avoided the worst consequences of the pandemic — and failed because of federal inaction — it is Trump whose historic reputation will plummet.