October 14: How Is Trump's Campaign Strategy Going?



How Is Trump's Campaign Strategy Going?

by Jonathan Bernstein, bloomberg.com

October 14, 2020 06:45 AM

Sound and fury.

Photo by: Photographer: Chris Kleponis/Polaris/Bloomberg

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It’s quite an accomplishment for an incumbent president to be losing in head-to-head polling tests by 10.5 percentage points with just three weeks until the election. In fact, as CNN’s Harry Enten notes, Trump is in the worst shape an incumbent has been in at this point in the polling era. Trump could still win, but it’s increasingly unlikely.

When things go this bad, there are many reasons. The economy is awful. The pandemic is still raging. There’s a long history of scandals that take a toll, even if none was sufficient to entirely destroy Trump’s presidency by itself. Compared with those realities, communications strategy is unlikely to be a major factor. Then again, normally both sides are reasonably competent. I thought I’d look at just one tweet and think about how it reflects a larger failing of this campaign.

Here’s Trump, Tuesday morning, piggybacking on a comment about Dr. Anthony Fauci: “Actually, Tony’s pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications. ‘No problem, no masks.’ WHO no longer likes Lockdowns — just came out against. Trump was right. We saved 2,000,000 USA lives!!!”

First: Why is he attacking Dr. Fauci? You may recall that previous incumbents would have a message of the day, and that everything, including every word from the candidate, would be an attempt to drive home that message. I have no idea what Trump’s message might’ve been on Tuesday, but surely it wasn’t feuding with Fauci. More likely, there was supposed to be a positive message about his Supreme Court nominee and a negative one about his opponent, Joe Biden. Not this.

Second: Why is he attacking Dr. Fauci? Fauci remains wildly popular! Also, he’s not Trump’s opponent in an election that’s three weeks away.

Third: Why is he attacking Dr. Fauci? Trump polls terribly on the pandemic. It should be the last topic he wants to remind voters about.

Then we get to the text. “Actually, Tony’s pitching arm...” I follow the news about as closely as anyone and I’m also a huge baseball fan, but it took me a while when I saw this one to remember that Fauci threw out the first pitch at a Nationals game at the beginning of the season and that the effort was a flop. I then also remembered that Fauci’s wild pitch was more endearing than embarrassing. So as an insult, this doesn’t really work. Not to mention that it also reminded me that no one wanted Trump to throw out the first pitch and that he made a pathetic effort to invite himself to do it and that he then pretended to cancel.

Next: “far more accurate than his prognostications. ‘No problem, no masks.’” This one presumably refers to Fauci’s comments early in the pandemic in which he suggested that masks wouldn’t be helpful in preventing the spread of the virus. That turned out to be wrong — but once the evidence was in, Fauci began consistently hammering the message on best practices, including masks. Once again, this also reminded me of Trump’s (far more numerous) inconsistencies on the matter.

After that we get a non sequitur: “WHO no longer likes Lockdowns - just came out against.” I think Trump is here taking something out of context — or, more probably, repeating something he heard from someone who got it wrong in the first place.

He ends with “Trump was right. We saved 2,000,000 USA lives!!!”

Two things about that. Trump is now forgetting that his claim to have saved two million lives had to do with … lockdowns! Granted, Trump never shut anything down — governors did, and more importantly individual citizens stopped doing a lot of things they considered dangerous. But he did push guidelines early on that encouraged shutdowns, and at the time he said it was necessary because otherwise two million (or so) lives would be lost; he used to compare that strategy favorably to what Sweden was doing.

Perhaps more to the point, though, that figure is nonsense. As it is, with 215,000 deaths, the U.S. is about ninth in the world in per-capita fatalities. Another two million would give the U.S. about seven times as many deaths as Peru, the current worst case; there’s no reason to believe that without Trump’s “successes” we’d be off the scale by world standards. 

Overall? Even if the target made sense, Trump’s tweet is full of obscurities (which make it hard for anyone who isn’t fully engaged in his ongoing monologue to understand) and obvious inaccuracies (which make it easy for the media or for Democrats to criticize). It may be entertaining for Trump’s strongest supporters, but no candidate can win an election with only their strongest supporters. 

It also gave Biden a layup. The Democratic nominee responded, “Here's something that will be very different if I'm president: I'll actually listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice and expertise, not attack him for telling the truth.” 

1. Pearl K. Dowe on Kamala Harris and the fight against stereotypes.

2. Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction on the effects of the Black Lives Matter protests.

3. Also at Mischiefs: Matthew Green on the congressional elections.

4. Lydia DePillis on Trump’s trade policy. 

5. Perry Bacon Jr. on Democrats with a chance to win Senate seats in Republican states.

6. Alyssa Rosenberg on the state of the Trump show.

7. And Lilly J. Goren on the 25th amendment in popular culture.

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To contact the author of this story:

Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net

Published on October 14, 2020, 7:45 AM EDT

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