Here’s the big thing everyone missed
In order to defeat an opponent, you first have to understand and correctly assess that opponent. Because Donald Trump was named the winner of the 2016 election, everyone has spent the past three years cautioning that we took him too lightly. Trump must have known what he was doing all along, the narrative goes, and we’d better figure out what evil genius strategies he’s using. Or we’d at least better sit back and cower in fear over the possibility that he might use these evil genius strategies again in 2020.
Here’s the problem: none of that happened in 2016. What really happened was that Donald Trump ran one of the most ineffective general election campaigns in modern U.S. presidential history. He found a fairly narrow base and then just kept pandering to it, even though it wasn’t large enough to put him over the top. As an insurance policy he conspired with Russia and WikiLeaks, but that didn’t provide enough help to make him the winner either. Trump only “won” the election because James Comey made the last second move of writing the most tragically misguided letter in history.
Whenever I point this out, the “vigilant” types always insist that I’m making the mistake of underestimating Trump. If I were underestimating Trump, they might have a point. But I’m not, and if you go back and analyze the campaign that Trump ran in 2016, you’ll see that I’m overwhelmingly right about this. Trump just spent the whole time flailing and stroking his own ego, and then he got lucky due to a fluke event. What the “vigilant” types don’t get is that overestimating your opponent can be just as harmful to your chances of winning as underestimating him.
Allow me to give an example. Let’s say you’re a football team with a strong passing game, and you’re under the mistaken impression that the opposing team has a strong passing defense, when it actually has a weak passing defense. So you spend the entire game not throwing aggressive passes. In so doing, you’ll probably cost yourself the game. Your opponent had a weakness that needed to be focused on and taken advantage of, and you failed to do it.
There’s a pervasive myth that Donald Trump is somehow effective at any of this. If that’s the case, why was he on track to lose in embarrassing fashion until he was unwittingly bailed out by an idiot who wrote a misguided letter? If Trump is good at any of this, why he’s saddled with few accomplishments and a low approval rating, instead of achieving numerous accomplishments and a high approval rating? Why did his Ukraine scheme to rig the 2020 election result in impeachment instead of resulting in actual election help for him?
The answer is so straightforward, but we’re all afraid to embrace it: Donald Trump is terrible at this. He’s a highly ineffective campaigner, because he narcissistically focuses on people who are already in love with him, instead of the people he needs to win over. His ideas have never resonated with enough people. Even his cheating efforts have been hilariously inept – and absolutely have not worked. Russia put in all that effort yet it still wasn’t able to install Trump in office; only Comey’s letter did that.
So if you’re sitting around trying to figure out the evil genius strategy that Donald Trump has been using, then you’re wasting precious time, because there isn’t one. If you’re cowering in fear that he’s about to pull off some election jujitsu that’ll make him magically win no matter what we do, then you’re really blowing it. If you’re indulging in any of this nonsense, you’re actively harming your own side by assigning him magic powers that he – very obviously – does not have. If you want to beat him, start by acknowledging that he’s absolutely terrible at all of this. Then focus on which of his numerous weaknesses you want to exploit the most aggressively. If you pretend he’s some kind of evil wizard with magic powers, you’re giving him a fighting shot in 2020 when he otherwise doesn’t have all that much of one. Please, don’t go down that very stupid path.
