GENE THERAPY
Polls have President Donald Trump thinking: “What election?”
Forced briefly into the netherspace between nose-diving economic metrics and the soaring rhetoric of multiple former presidents at the funeral of civil rights icon John Lewis, President Donald Trump went full bellow on his plan to keep from becoming one of those former presidents in January. He had to say something. The virus raged out of control and his polling had turned to ash, so I thought he’d cook up something fairly bold yet, to him, perfectly obvious.
Like he’d make Stella Immanuel his new surgeon general. Acting, of course.
Hope you caught Dr. Stella’s act on the internet. She’s attracted a fever storm of attention for her reinterpretation of the pandemic into terms more palatable to an administration still puzzled that hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die from the sniffles.
In her view, apparently, masks are unnecessary, hydroxychloroquine is a perfectly obvious palladium, some gynecological ailments are caused by demon semen and “reptilian” aliens are involved in the U.S. government.
She’ll get no disagreement from me on that last part.
But making Dr. Stella the surgeon general wasn’t what Mr. Trump was up to at all. His initiative was a bit broader, tweeting: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
If there was a surprise in there, of course, it was that someone still thinks the USA is still capable of embarrassment. More urgently, it meant the White House public relations shop had to decide quickly which joke-explainer it had to trot out. Sarcasm?
No, too tired. Kidding?
Oh no. Just got burned on that one.
“I don’t kid,” Mr. Trump said after his disastrous rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20, the one where he screeched, “So I told my people, ‘Slow the testing down please.’”
He never did any such thing. He might not kid, but he lies effortlessly.
Moreover, look at the progression from just last week.
Last week: I won’t say whether I’ll accept election results.
This week: What election?
Even some of the president’s most reliable Republican lickspittles scoffed at the notion of a delayed election, huffing about precedent, protocol and the Constitution. Some of these people have apparently failed to notice that Mr. Trump is not of the opinion that any of those things — and in particular any law, right up through the Constitution, the supreme law of the land — applies to him. He’s been pretty sure it doesn’t since he was about 5.
Way too often, he’s discovered that he’s pretty much right.
Most everyone, even in Washington, is still convinced there is no way the president can postpone an election, but Mr. Trump is most assuredly not one of them.
This might not have come up at all this week were it not for the president’s increasingly dire polling. In calculations released late Thursday, a Financial Times poll tracker based on data from all polls compiled by RealClearPolitics projected an electoral vote outcome of 308 for former Vice President Joe Biden, 128 for Mr. Trump. None of the states designated “solid” for Mr. Trump had more than 11 electoral votes.
The principle driver of poll data right now remains the COVID-19 pandemic. A Quinnipiac poll in Florida, battleground of battlegrounds, had Mr. Biden up 46-42 on April 16. By July 20, Mr. Biden’s advantage in the hottest spot on the COVID-19 map was 51-38.
Asked Monday in North Carolina about polls indicating he’d lose the state by 4% after winning by 4% in 2016, Mr. Trump volleyed his trademark up-is-down, day-is-night analysis.
“The poll numbers we have are very good,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re leading in North Carolina. We’re leading in Pennsylvania, we’re leading in Arizona, we’re leading nicely in Florida . ... I think our poll numbers are very good.”
So good, in fact, we might have to postpone the election so that people can vote “safely.” Open schools, sure (they don’t vote). But voting is suddenly too unsafe.
Michigan, where Mr. Trump picked up 16 electoral votes in 2016, saw advertising by the Trump campaign drop through the floor this month because Mr. Biden led 49-33 in one poll. A lost cause.
In Pennsylvania, another swing state Mr. Trump won four years ago, a Franklin & Marshall poll released Sunday had Mr. Biden leading 5041. Even Fox News — FOX! — has Pennsylvania leaning hard to Mr. Biden, 50-39.
That is the kind of thing that can make an election unsafe — for Mr. Trump.