Does Donald Trump even want to win?
By now we all understand the stakes. If Donald Trump wins this election, he essentially becomes king for life. If he loses this election, he’s going to prison for life. As crucial as it is that we defeat him, it’s just as crucial for Trump that he wins. Yet Trump is very much acting like someone who doesn’t want to win. How can that be?
The evidence is strong that Trump isn’t trying to win. He went with a crappy running mate simply because he didn’t want to be outshined. He’s holding very few rallies in swing states, simply because he can’t face drawing inferior crowd sizes. Instead of accepting that every poll now has him losing, and trying to do something about it, he’s instead insisting the polls are all rigged against him. Instead of accepting that he needs to behave so he can try to appeal to moderate voters outside his base, he’s making the kinds of sexist and racist remarks so over the top that they can only cost him votes.
These are not the actions of someone who’s trying to win an election… unless he’s too far gone to understand what’s really going on or how any of this works. When he needed to pick a running mate, he went with someone who kisses up to him. When he needed to add another campaign official, he went with a proven failure but familiar face. When he needed to get back out on the campaign trial, he picked a state (Montana) where he knew he could draw a bigger crowd than Kamala Harris. When he saw he was losing in every poll, he told himself he’s secretly winning.
There’s a pattern here: Trump is trying to comfort himself. At every turn, instead of doing the thing that might give him a better chance to win, he does the thing that allows him to get through the day without his own head exploding from the stress. In other words Trump is so far gone down the cognitive failure rabbit hole, and so confused and panicked as a result, he keeps doing what’ll allow him to survive the day instead of the thing that might allow him to survive the year.
It all suggests that as Trump’s brainpower shrinks, his universe is shrinking as well. There are probably moments where he remembers and understands that he has to find a way to win this election or else his life is over as he knows it. But those moments are probably quickly interrupted by Trump’s inability to consistently remember what’s going on or where he is. And then he’s back to being scared and confused and thinking that he just needs to comfort himself in the moment. You’d feel sorry for someone in Trump’s condition, if he weren’t one of the most evil villains in history.
The question isn’t whether Trump wants to win, but whether he’s even able to think that far ahead. Of course he wants to win. But he doesn’t seem capable of consistently focusing on or prioritizing such a goal. Most of the time he’s simply cognitively adrift.
That said, Trump’s failure to try to win doesn’t automatically mean that he won’t win. 2016 was a multifaceted fluke that’s unlikely to happen again for a wide variety of reasons, but it did happen, and one could argue that for different reasons Trump wasn’t really trying to win that time either.
So let’s all keep two things in mind. First, Trump is indeed too far cognitively gone for his actions to be counted as trying to win, even if he thinks he’s trying to win. Don’t let his nonsensical behavior trick you into thinking that he has some secret evil genius master plan. He doesn’t. He’s just senile. Second, even with Trump giving us the gift of not trying to win, we still have to work hard and beat him. Elections don’t win themselves – even when the opposing candidate is a confused zombie. Sign up here to help Kamala Harris win: go.kamalaharris.com
