Trump tweets about testing Joe Biden for drugs.
Meanwhile, COVID cases are rising, Trump paid no taxes, and unemployment is 8.4%.
Trump is a genius.
Donald Trump is willing to go on stage and sweat. He will do anything, anything, to get attention.
Within circles of standup comics, "doing a sweat show" means a comic is willing to do anything for a laugh. Something outrageous. Something humiliating. Something painful. Something like banging out the William Tell Overture with spoons against one's face. Or eating a live tarantula. Or smashing watermelons with an oversize hammer. It is so weird and desperate that the audience laughs in some mixture of horror and admiration that the comic did something so outrageous.
He is in the news today for spending $70,000 on his hair in one year, and taking it as a tax deduction, as does Ivanka Trump with her $110,000 in grooming deductions. Trump paid zero taxes most years over the past fifteen, and $750 a year in 2015 and 2016, according to a NY Times report out Sunday. Say what? If voters put their minds on that they would think Trump was cheating on his taxes, living with private planes and gold toilets while the rest of us paid 20, 30, 40% and more of our income in taxes. What a rip-off. What a scoundrel.
All this would be trouble for Trump if people noticed it and cared. The people whose attention matters, do not.
Trump supporters don't care; Trump supporters have already decided Trump is a cheater and bully, but he is a fighter on their partisan side and that is what counts. He is trolling Biden, after all, and all is fair. The unengaged, low-information swing voters, and there are enough to swing this election, don't notice because Trump is doing what he does brilliantly. He distracts. He seizes the subject. It isn't COVID, unemployment, jobs, or his taxes. It is Biden on drugs.
In North Carolina Trump said Biden got "a big shot in the ass and he comes out and for two hours he is better than ever before. We're going to ask for a drug test." The crowd loved this. Trump continued with this theme at a press conference on Sunday. "People say he was on performance enhancing drugs." Trump had a hit idea in his schtick, and he is running with it.
Amid this, serious things are happening. The Trump policy on COVID has the consequence of making the USA an outlier among developed nations. We have more cases, more deaths, and are facing longer, worse economic shutdown than are peer nations in Europe and Asia. Trump said COVID was a hoax, then maybe not, and that masks and social distancing aren't all that important, then are, then aren't. Trump's unstated policy is one of protect yourself, herd immunity, and fast track a vaccine. This policy has consequences that cannot be said aloud, that herd immunity means lots of people will get the disease, some get very sick and some die, "it is what it is." Take our licks. Focus on the herd immunity, not the extra million--maybe two million--people will die sooner rather than later. The big policy question, whether people are OK with that, isn't actually discussed. Who notices, amid the firehose of news from Trump?
There are consequences for being a sweat clown. Some are good. The outrageous comment makes people think about the underlying premise, that Biden is a doddering senile fool, propped up by drugs. At Tuesday's debate some viewers will be looking for signs of frailty, and if people expect to see something then confirmation bias inclines them to find it. The fact that a drug test challenge is outrageous does not make it ineffective.
 |
| Comic, smashes watermelons for laughs. |
And it is better for Trump to put attention on Biden's frailty than his own taxes or on COVID. And while Trump may be over-exposed for people paying attention, he may not be for people who barely follow politics. Compared to Trump, any politician would be boring, especially Biden.
There is the downside for Trump. Trump looks deeply, fundamentally un-serious. He acts like a clown. In the campaign of 2016 voters may have thought this was a campaign act, and then he would become "presidential." It turns out to be the one and only Trump act. Lots of informed, engaged voters, both detractors and supporters, are uncomfortable with that.
But to his supporters, there is a saving grace, this third Supreme Court nomination. He is a clown and a con man, but he (and the Federalist Society and Mitch McConnell) get serious about judges. His supporters can not help but notice that Trump is not reliable on lots of things but by gosh one thing he gets seriously right: appointing very conservative judges and ramming them down the throats of whining Democrats.
And Trump smashes Democrats the way that the comic Galloper smashes watermelons. Fun!
There is a market for that kind of thinking and Trump connects with it. Democrats should not under-estimate that. A slapstick comedy show will get better ratings than does C-SPAN.
3 comments:
It is one thing to keep Democrats sober as we go into the election. Too bad Hillary's advisors didn't heed that caution in 2016. It's another to continually minimize the import of the events adverse to Trump, most recently the exposure of his taxes. The least one can say about such revelations is that nothing has come out since the conventions that helps his candidacy. He began some 8 points behind Biden and he needed things to emerge either for him or against Biden that would move the needle. It's been one damning revelation after another. True, they don't seem to lower his approval ratings much, but which incumbent wishes to get to election day with a 42-43% approval rating? His last chance is to best Biden decisively in the upcoming debate, but look at the new ammunition these revelations have given Biden--his calling dead and wounded vets "suckers' and "losers"; his taped admission to Woodward that he knew from the start that COVID-19 was going to hit us hard; now his taxes. Why keep discounting such bad news for Trump? You've become predictable and verging on tedious.
I think Peter is playing the devil's advocate here, as he often does, to stimulate discussion outside the liberal bubble.
That said, I agree that there are plenty of arrows in Bidens quiver.
Debating an idiot shouldn't be too hard. And Trump's minions will say he won no matter what actually occurs, so I don't expect their minds to change. But the undecideds are still in play and I think Biden can close that sale.
How fun. I am pissing off people right and left, most who write me directly. Thank goodness Herb wrote here.
My post called Trump:
A clown
A con man
A COVID management failure
A leader who plans to allow a million Americans to die via an effort to get herd immunity
Leader at a time of high unemployment
A tax cheat scoundrel who rips off taxpayers
Someone "deeply, fundamentally un-serious"
I would have that that that would have assured this post's bone fides as being pretty Trump skeptical, but it was not quite enough to counter the fact that I also said Trump's sweat-comic antics have a purpose of distracting from his failures, and that it might work among people who are not paying attention.
I consider my friend Herb's good comment a superb primary source. It documents how difficult it is for people to get past Trumps multiple failures and character flaws to see what in the world people could possibly see in someone so flawed as a president and person. My effort in the past years has been to tease out just what that magic sauce is--after all, it got him elected president--because it seems so very implausible that the same GOP voters that nominated McCain and Romney could also nominate and then fall in love with Trump. But they did. How could voters that elected a Black, cultured man then turn and vote for a vulgar, crass, dishonest, caricature of a slick salesman. Some big piece of it is Trump celerity and charisma, his stand-up comedian rapport with crowds. Trump is a clown comic there with a big hammer, smashing a watermelon for laughs. Trump smashed 15 GOP rivals, then "Crooked Hillary" then as president anyone who crosses him, and now, to the delight of, alas, a huge hunk of voters, Biden, Sanders, AOC, Democrats generally.
I totally agree that I am tiresome. Trump's act is tiresome, so I feel stuck in the same loop. When Trump is gone I will move on.
Post a Comment