The thing everyone is missing about Donald Trump’s abortion debacle today
Donald Trump tried pivoting sharply toward the center on abortion today, and suffice it to say that it was a debacle for him. He moved close enough to the center on the issue so as to alienate and outrage his base (even Lindsey Graham is screaming at him today), but he didn’t move nearly close enough to the center to pick up any votes from the pro-choice crowd. It was classic political buffoonery from someone who doesn’t understand how things work.
But here’s the thing. It’s actually not classic behavior from Donald Trump. Every modern presidential nominee, from both parties, tries to pivot toward the center for the general election. The trick is to try to do it in such a way that you pick up votes in the middle while keeping your base. Sometimes a “pivot” is as simple as deemphasizing the issues where you’re further to one side, and emphasizing the issues where you’ve always been closer to the middle. But there’s always a pivot. Unless you’re Trump.
In the 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump famously declined to pivot toward the middle in the general election. Once he was the nominee, he did absolutely nothing to try to pick up votes from the center. The result was that Trump lost by three million votes in 2016, and lost by seven million votes in 2020. Failing to pivot was a dumb strategy, and it proved that Trump was an ineffective campaigner who had no idea how politics even worked.
Yet now here in 2024, Trump is suddenly trying to pivot toward the center now that he’s the presumptive nominee. He’s finally following the kind of political strategy that any knowledgable political advisor would give him. Of course he botched the pivot so badly, it’s proof that the advisors he’s listening to are complete idiots. We don’t have to worry about the Trump campaign suddenly being good at strategy; they’re clearly worse at it than ever.
But the real story here is that Trump has gone from stubbornly following his own bad intuition, to passively going along with whatever bad advice his idiot handlers are giving him. The net result is the same: a bumbling campaign that can’t do anything to help itself, and will only succeed if 1) it gets lucky, or 2) the other side is too busy staring at their screens to bother putting in the work required to defeat Trump. But it’s overwhelmingly clear that Trump is no longer calling the shots within his own campaign.
It’s the latest sign, in a mile long series of signs, pointing to Trump now being too far cognitively gone to even be involved in the decision making in his own life. When it comes to people with severe dementia, it’s not just the failing memory. It’s not just the confusion. It’s the general passiveness, where the patient can be convinced of anything through pure repetition. Tell a dementia patient something enough times, and they forget that they heard it from you, and they start to think it was their own idea.
So the real story from today is that Trump really doesn’t appear to be calling the shots in his own campaign at all. His handlers convinced him to stop doing rallies. And now they’ve convinced him to make a clumsy pivot on abortion. It feels like they can convince him of anything at this point. And yet their ineptitude suggests that they’re going to botch this as badly as a senile Trump would if he were still calling the shots. But Trump clearly isn’t calling the shots anymore – on anything. He’s no longer capable of it.
