Donald Trump’s endgame
Hanlon’s Razor is an epigram that is occasionally useful in the twilight of the Trump era and goes, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Its usefulness comes in describing those few remaining apologists for Donald Trump who have morally painted themselves into a corner and are too embarrassed to admit they made a mistake. They are the slow ones, the weak-minded, symbolic descendants of the fanatical holdouts who were still supporting Hitler as the Allies closed on Berlin. They didn’t stand up early against Trump when it was still justifiable — and even a bit fashionable — to do so, and now in this darkening Trumpian Gotterdammerung it is, finally, too late. They will never live it down, and we should never let them.
But Trump is the exception to Hanlon’s Razor. Trump is driven by stupidity and malice and a natural indolence that comes from years of getting things his own way without ever having to work for it. Donald Trump is, if nothing else, unique. The coming together of forces that made his misbegotten presidency possible will probably never happen again. For the first time in its history the United States of America elected a loser for president, and the only ones who will vote for him in November are suckers.
Trump proves his unfitness everyday with his absurd tweets. Even his devoted holdout followers are embarrassed by them. It has almost become obligatory for his biggest fans to shamefacedly confess that they wish he didn’t tweet so much. His tweets would serve as Exhibit A in any courtroom assembled to prove that he couldn’t possibly have done his job. He had an alibi: he was tweeting.
In short, I can’t see how Donald Trump can’t lose in November. Put another way, if he wins it will be because there really is some way to cheat on a grand scale in a presidential election. Trump really has blown it, and he keeps on blowing it daily. He is hemorrhaging supporters every single day. The only ones who remain, as I say, are the truly stupid, the truly delusional, the truly desperate. Whatever calumnies they keep heaping on Joe Biden, they wish inside their secret selves that Donald Trump had just a little more of that Biden gravitas, that Biden humility, that Biden compassion.
Instead Trump tweets the way Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump tweets the way unstable people on street corners rant. He tweets easily provable lies and he does it in an era where every citizen has access to google.
He demands to know why Joe Biden won’t speak out against the violence that sometimes accompanies the Black Lives Matter protests, when in fact Joe Biden did just that. You can easily google it and watch the film. Biden condemns the violence in no uncertain terms that cannot be misconstrued as anything else.
Trump tweets that America has the best record against coronavirus when in fact it has one of the worst. He tweets that jobs are coming back when in fact the economy is in a shambles and joblessness is the worst it has been in decades. He tweets “LAW & ORDER,” words made meaningless when he refuses to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse for the cold blooded murder of protesters.
Trump’s tweets feel desperate because they are. His ship of state is sinking like the few remaining leaky MAGA-festooned boats that still support him in his silly, pathetic armada. Let’s send him to the bottom of the ocean in November and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the 46th President and 49th Vice President of the United States of America. 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.