Why Can’t Trump Break Through?

Pol­i­tics

Why Can’t Trump Break Through?

The for­mer pres­i­dent has failed to cap­i­tal­ize on big moments and a weak oppo­nent.

It is like one of those foot­ball games where each team fum­bles repeat­ed­ly as it approach­es the red zone. Nei­ther can put togeth­er any kind of sus­tained dri­ve. After the first Trump assas­si­na­tion attempt, the coun­try was prob­a­bly ready to give the for­mer pres­i­dent a deci­sive lead: all he had to do was give a calm­ing, uni­fy­ing, some­what hum­ble con­ven­tion speech, per­haps find some prov­i­den­tial mean­ing in his mirac­u­lous turn of the head the moment before the shots were fired, and wrap it up in 35 min­utes of so. He had been pres­i­dent before, done a fair­ly good job, and many were inclined to for­get about his ridicu­lous behav­ior between the 2020 elec­tion and Jan­u­ary 6, 2021. There was no nation­al clam­or for him to mod­i­fy his hard­line posi­tions on immi­gra­tion, which was broad­ly pop­u­lar, or become a born-again Ukraine hawk. Even the for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment was will­ing to con­cede qui­et­ly that the proxy-war NATO expan­sion gam­bit had prob­a­bly failed—at a price paid by many thou­sands of young Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian men. 

But Trump of course could not man­age that, and those who in the East­ern time zone went to bed some­time before the mean­der­ing address was fin­ished, well after mid­night, awoke to Demo­c­ra­t­ic strate­gists claim­ing, some­what to their sur­prise, that it was still a winnable race. 

Then came the remark­able inner par­ty coup against Joe Biden, which was, qua polit­i­cal maneu­ver, as deft as any­one my age had ever seen in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Kamala Har­ris was sud­den­ly the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee, and for a sus­tained month of unimag­in­ably fawn­ing media cov­er­age, no one could quite remem­ber why it was that Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians and fundrais­ers had for years been shak­ing their heads about the vice pres­i­dent, and won­der­ing what maneu­ver Biden could exe­cute to get her off the tick­et. The month of August was a reminder that a heavy pre­pon­der­ance of the media favors Democ­rats, and an even greater one hates Don­ald Trump: We were treat­ed to a …