Welcome to Donald Trump’s worst nightmare

| 12:01 pm EDT October 6, 2020
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If there’s any strategy at all in Donald Trump’s increasingly deranged behavior over the past few days, it likely centers around a simple gambit. If Trump loses the election he’s going to rot in prison anyway, so he might as well risk his life by rushing back to the White House while deathly ill, in the hope of turning his failing campaign around and finding a way to win.

For Trump to have any chance of pulling off this long shot gambit, he’ll need to pick up some sympathy votes. Considering he created the pandemic nightmare in the United States and killed more than 200,000 Americans before catching it himself, that was always going to be a hard sell. But now the numbers make clear that he’s definitely not getting a sympathy bump.

New polling from CNN shows that about two-thirds of Americans believe Donald Trump was negligent in spreading the coronavirus to the people around him. This is a big deal because it means that, rather than garnering any sympathy over his own coronavirus, most Americans are angrier at him than ever.

Donald Trump’s worst nightmare is that he leaves the hospital and permanently damages his health in the hope of turning around his election prospects, and the election turns out to have been unwinnable for him anyway. But let’s run up the score on him anyway, by working on voter turnout, phone banking, and volunteering.