How Trump’s childish bullying hurts Connecticut
The presidential debate of 2020, and please, l et Tuesday’s roadkill be the only one, will l ive in histor y as the World’s Most Powerful Human tr ying to show strength by acting like a third-grader. I apologize to third-graders ever y where for that remark.
Connecticut emerges as one of the biggest losers on a night that shortchanged voters across America and collectively embarrassed the nation. This state, like other blue states, has swung too f ar to the left and Tr ump leaves Republicans unable make headway.
In Tr umpworld, the place where each candidate f alls on the scale of perceived strength and weakness surpasses all issues, all other measures. Health care access, the coronavir us crisis, job recover y, climate change, immigration (which never even came up Tuesday), law enforcement, Black Lives Matter — none of it amounts to much in the balance between President Donald Tr ump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sure, Tr ump supporters might vote for him because he f avors a f aster reopening of the economy or more tax cuts or a ban on refugees or maybe an end to vehicle emissions standards. But any Republican can deliver that st uff.
The magic of Tr ump, the reason he’s president, the explanation why he was willing to bring shame on himself and the nation Tuesday night, is that he understands character is irrelevant to his supporters and issues are just levers on the machine of perceived strength to his hardcore base.
Simply put, he wins re-election if his base, plus 8 percent of voters, agree he appears tougher, stronger, more resolute, less compromising. That’s all they talked about on Fox News after the debate, and they’re not wrong.
Strength through bluster, strength through intimidation, strength through mind control by lying, strength through name-calling, strength through constant interr uption, strength through other people’s stumbles, strength through mocker y. It’s all a show to hide his profound weakness as a person.
Why else would the president of the United States refuse to denounce neo-f ascist white supremacists? “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antif a and the left,” he said to one of his notorious hate groups when moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News asked him to disavow them.
Why else would the president of the United States refuse to say, when asked three times, that he will respect the will of the people on Nov. 3, absent evidence of real election fraud from mail-in voting? He needs a bogeyman and he makes up stories about ballots gone missing.
Why else would the president of the United States concede only halfheartedly that human activity is causing climate change — “to an extent, yes” — while blaming “forest management” for the historic wildfires? He needs a villain in order to look strong and fossil fuel doesn’t fit that bill.
Tr ump’s strateg y badly hurts conser vatives and especially moderate Republicans in blue states such as Connecticut, arguably the bluest. They must share a ballot line with him, a heav y burden.
Certainly Tr ump holds sway with many in the state GOP who appreciate how he’s moving the nation rightward, especially through the courts. But the party hits a l ow ceiling in blue states, with our tradition of old-line, business Republicans (who pay their taxes instead of cheating) and Yankee fiscal conser vatives
GOP state chairman J.R. Romano, a Tr ump Republican under fire in his own party, though not for supporting Tr ump, makes a valiant argument that the president doesn’t hurt Connecticut Republicans. Some legislative races may surprise us on Election Day, he insists. But overall the roster of challengers is less than what the loyal opposition should mount in a state that’s damn near broke. Far l ess.
Consider, on Wednesday the state House of Representatives is po ised to ram through a risky bill that will force Ever
source and United Illuminating to compensate ratepayers in extended power outages. Sounds great but it is likely to backfire and lead to higher electricity prices, precisely the opposite of what we need.
It’s not that Republicans all oppose the bill; many support it. But some in the opposition party at least want to wait for cooler heads and the levity of a full session in 2021. They don’t have the numbers or the power in part because of Tr ump’s childish ways — and thus the clown show, as Biden rightly called it, hurts the st ate.
And it hurts the whole democracy because, really, who wants to play this game? I was unable to line up a Connecticut rank- and-file conser vative Tuesday for a post-debate analysis I had hoped to
do with watchers from the left and right. Can you blame them for laying low?
Biden played along l est he appear weak — and took matters too f ar. “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown,” he said at one po int, after earlier snapping, “Will you shut up, man?”
The Delaware Democrat even engaged in some arrogant bluster of his own, rebuffing a po int about the party platform by saying, “I am the Democratic Party right now, the platform of the Democratic Party is what I approved of.”
I’ll never understand why Biden and the Dems don’t make Tr ump’s weakness as a leader the main theme.
The challenger also missed, by my count, eight easy opportunities to score po ints. For ex
ample, he f ailed to follow up Tr ump’s last-in-hiscollege-class jab by saying at least he took his own entrance exams. He f ailed to properly defend the science behind masks against Tr ump’s mocker y. He f ailed to cite numbers showing the Obama jobs record is better than Tr ump’s by almost any measure, even without the corona-collapse.
But Biden did what he had to do — not crack under the taunts. We’ll see whether that’s enough to hold his lead through Election Day.
What we already know is that the Tr ump chaos hurts Republicans and conser vatives in sophisticated states like Connecticut at a time when, in this liberal’s view, we need balance against oneparty r ule.