Donald Trump is lazy and stupid
As I said recently, there’s a narrative emerging from the defeatist camp, as a corollary to the “only-Bernie-could-beat-Trump” fiction, that Trump is going to win in November because the polls say he’s going to lose. No, that’s not a typo and you didn’t misread it, that really is how some people “think.”
The idea goes (and I am here making a huge concession by calling it an “idea”) that because the polls said Hillary Clinton was going to win the presidency in 2016 and she didn’t, the polls have now and forever become wrong and they will always be wrong. To use a brackish, medieval word, the polls have “magically” become their own antithesis. In short, the new rule from now on is that polls will be 100% accurate so long as we infer the exact opposite of what the polls say.
I hope I don’t have to spend any time pointing out how silly that idea is. I hope everyone gets that such nonsense is wrong on its face. Okay, let’s move on.
I will aver this, Donald Trump could actually win in November. And no, it’s not too late. He really could and I will tell you how he could win, and I will tell it brazenly and right out in the open. All he has to do is roll up his sleeves and sincerely get to work on coronavirus, stop worrying about what people are saying about him and start using the actual power he has with the Republican Party to get things done. It would mean hundred hour weeks of nonstop work, phone calls, favors, a great deal of federal spending and a strong federal message to the American people to spend the next hundred days — at least — in lockdown, and requiring that the American people use masks and gloves and social distancing whenever they go out.
Trump and his pirate ship Party spent 1.5 trillion dollars on the rich in 2018, so they could spend another trillion on the American people making sure every household is economically secure for the next hundred days without batting an eye. It would be a Herculean effort to be sure, not unlike Franklin Roosevelt’s hundred days after first taking office in 1933, but it could happen. Trump could enforce a lockdown and pay for it so the American people would remain safe, and he could threaten martial law if any states didn’t cooperate.
I’m not saying it’s a guarantee that Trump would win in November by doing this, but I think if he did it right it could very well give him a ten point bump — or better. He’d have a lot of grateful Americans out there who got hundred day stay-at-home vacations on the house. And such a draconian program would also quite probably save a half million lives or more.
Now, I don’t know about you but this is how I define mixed emotions. I surely do not want Trump to win another four years. But I also don’t want all those people to die, either. Not to worry, though, this is all theoretical anyway. I know Trump won’t do any of what I suggest because Donald Trump is stupid and lazy. Trump won’t do the right thing for the same reason he has never been a true millionaire, let alone a true billionaire. He lacks the work ethic and the ability to understand that good old-fashioned hard work is a legitimate way to get things done. Cheating, looking for angles, touting snake oil miracle cures and swindling and lying to people make for bad public policy. But it’s all the child-raping murderer knows.
It is because Donald Trump is stupid and lazy that he will lose in November. Naturally I’m not one hundred percent sure he will lose, but Trump’s loss does look all but inevitable. He is his own worst enemy, not only because he is stupid and lazy, but also because he’s driven by his own insatiable ego. He can’t stop having his self-immolating press briefings. He can’t stop demonstrating that everything is all about him and he has absolutely no compassion for the sixty thousand Americans who have died on his watch already.
This isn’t so much a presidential campaign, but an exercise in how an enemy can destroy himself — less a blitzkrieg and more a sitzkrieg. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should take anything for granted. We shouldn’t. We should take no chances and work as hard as if Trump were ahead in the polls. Unlike Trump, we do have the necessary work ethic and integrity to win. Meanwhile we are fortunate in that no one is a better advertisement for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.