Donald Trump stays up all night in a complete panic
Donald Trump’s core base of supporters – the people who truly believe in him and the crap he’s been peddling – make up no more than 20% of the country. His approval rating is twice that high because there are plenty of other people out there who don’t love him, but figure they might as well stick with him as long as he doesn’t screw up the economy or do something to get us all killed.
The problem for Trump is that this week the stock market went off a cliff, and Trump did a series of stupid things that have increased the odds that we’re all going to get killed. No one is rooting for the economy to tank, or for a virus to kill a bunch of people. We all wish this weren’t happening. But the political reality is that this is terrible news for Trump, at a time when his roughly 40% approval rating is already far too low to be in contention for 2020.
Trump needs to be raising his approval rating, and instead we’re heading into a disconcerting stretch that could significantly lower it. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Trump doesn’t seem to be sleeping very much this week, and he’s coming off as being high as a kite. For instance, take this tweet that he posted well after midnight last night:
So, the Coronavirus, which started in China and spread to various countries throughout the world, but very slowly in the U.S. because President Trump closed our border, and ended flights, VERY EARLY, is now being blamed, by the Do Nothing Democrats, to be the fault of “Trump”.
For the record, that tweet is one big long forty-seven word sentence, complete with multiple references to himself in the third person. You get the idea that if Trump were speaking this tweet out loud, he’d be hyperventilating while doing so. What’s remarkable here is that Trump is trying to paint himself as both the hero of the coronavirus crisis, the victim of the coronavirus crisis. Imagine being so broken in the head that people are dying horrifically from a doomsday virus, and you think you’re the real victim because you’re being politically inconvenienced by it.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report