Everyone is in denial about November
The 2016 Hangover
By Daniel W. Drezner
April 20, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
"Over the weekend, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts read a lot of analysis about what the Trump administration was thinking and doing about reelection. What all of this analysis had in common was a refusal to acknowledge some brute facts.
My personal favorite is this headline on an Associated Press story: “Coronavirus could complicate Trump’s path to reelection.” I know the AP is as strait-laced as possible in its coverage, and to be fair, the story is straightforward in describing Trump’s challenges come November. Still, this is equivalent to a headline on Dec. 8, 1941, saying: “Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could complicate America First’s desire for isolationism.”
The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post all ran stories over the weekend covering the Trump campaign’s belief that it can attack Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, as being soft on China. One Trump spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times’s Eli Stokols and Janet Hook that internal research “shows that Joe Biden’s softness on China is a major vulnerability.” The Gray Lady’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman report that “while Mr. Trump’s team knows that his own words will be used against him, they believe they can contrast his history favorably with that of Mr. Biden.”
My Post colleagues Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Annie Linskey and Toluse Olorunnipa have the most jaw-dropping opening: “President Trump’s campaign is preparing to launch a broad effort aimed at linking Joe Biden to China, after concluding that it would be more politically effective than defending or promoting Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
All of these stories are interesting but nonetheless contain an air of unreality about them. They assume that the Trump campaign’s gambits can somehow alter the trajectory of the general-election campaign. The thing is, Biden is going to have a pretty easy rejoinder to Trump about being soft on China. Furthermore, as Martin and Haberman note in their story, “Eager to continue trade talks, uneasy about further rattling the markets and hungry to protect his relationship with President Xi Jinping … Mr. Trump has repeatedly muddied Republican efforts to fault China.”
Biden’s tactical response is not the important thing, however. The important thing is that campaign tactics are meaningless when the administration has bungled its pandemic response and the economy is cratering. As noted in this space last week, Trump is starting the fourth quarter of the campaign behind and with a lousy field position. Biden is beating him in the polls. Democrats have united behind their candidate. Trump cannot campaign on the economy. Attacking Biden on China is like trying to bail out the Titanic with a toy bucket.
Furthermore, spending two hours a day at a podium does not help Trump. His antics might appeal to his base, but there’s a reason other Republicans want him to cut down his appearances. They put all of his weaknesses on display. And for those who fear that this crowds out Biden, let me suggest that at this point in the race, the more Biden appears in the public mind as “Generic Democrat,” the better his chances for victory as the safer “not Trump” choice."
moar:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/20/everyone-is-denial-about-november/
deep state parrot wanna cracker