Donald Trump’s Plan D

| 9:09 am EST January 4, 2020
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Donald Trump is about five minutes into his latest half-baked scheme, and the fatalists out there are already out in force, insisting that Trump is going to magically win reelection because of it. What the fatalists don’t get is that Trump’s schemes to get reelected have all failed – and at this point he’s resorting to trying the bad ideas he previously rejected.

For instance, Donald Trump’s Plan A for reelection was to conspire with Ukraine to smear Joe Biden. It’s not clear that this would have gained Trump a single vote even if he had pulled it off, but the whole thing blew up in his face, to the point that he got impeached over it. Trump then resorted to Plan B, which was to somehow magically use impeachment to make his poll numbers go up, which didn’t work at all.

At that point Trump had to fall back to Plan C, which was to force the DOJ Inspector General to falsely announce that the FBI tried to frame his 2016 campaign. This was definitely not something that Trump was going to be able to pull off, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have gained him a single vote.

Now that Donald Trump has struck out with all of these progressively dumber schemes, he’s resorting to Plan D: blow up some things in Iran, and use the threat of war to paralyze the Resistance into inaction. Trump understands full well that while a popular president can use war to extend his popularity, war will only serve to make an unpopular president even more unpopular. He’s counting on you not understanding that.

In any case, the notion that war with Iran is somehow going to improve Donald Trump’s odds of reelection is absolutely laughable. It is, simply put, not how anything works. There is the danger that Trump’s big bluff with Iran could accidentally lead to war – and that would be devastating for the United States. But it would also mark the absolute end of Trump’s 2020 chances, and he knows it. He’s trying out this high-risk, low-reward scheme because he’s all out of better options.