Americans know they’re worse off today
The sight of Donald Trump standing by himself behind the briefing room lectern, doing his best to sound presidential and in command of a crisis, was a reminder of a milestone to which no one at the White House cared to draw attention.
Tuesday — the day that Trump delivered his first coronavirus briefing in months — also marked the fourth anniversary of his acceptance of the 2016 Republican nomination at the GOP convention in Cleveland. It was there that he so memorably declared to thousands of cheering delegates and a national television audience: “I alone can fix it.”
Today, it is hard to find any measure by which the country is not feeling more insecure and worse off than it did when Trump was elected.
As the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus was rising toward 150,000, Trump said his administration was “in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful.” But he offered no clue of what that plan might be, or why he has yet to have any plan at all more than five months after COVID-19 claimed its first victim in this country.
Though the president acknowledged that the pandemic is likely to “get worse before it gets better” — a more realistic assessment than his customary “light at the end of the tunnel” talk — Trump continued to congratulate himself for a job well done.
Americans know better. The latest Post-ABC News poll found that 6 in 10 adults in this country look unfavorably on how he has handled the pandemic, and his overall job approval is slipping as well — to 39 percent, which is nine points lower than it was in late March.
While Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will always be with him, no matter what, some of the more skeptical segments of the coalition that elected him are eroding.
In 2016, exit polls indicated that Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among voters 45 and older; today, The Post’s poll shows him running behind former Vice President Joe Biden among registered voters in every age group.
Trump won white women by nine points four years ago; polling now indicates he and Biden are roughly splitting their votes.
This, in part, reflects a drop-off in Trump’s support among white women who do not have college degrees. In their families, they are often the ones in charge of decisions about health care and educating their children, which means they are likely feeling particularly stressed about the pandemic.
Biden now holds a double-digit lead among another slice of the electorate that is often overlooked by the commentariat: college-educated white men.
It is a matter of some dispute precisely how they voted in 2016 — the exit polls indicated that Trump won them by 14 points, while other measures showed them splitting more evenly. But the trend in the latest Post-ABC News survey could hardly have been clearer. Biden was winning them by 13 points.
These groups of voters likely realize the president’s juvenile tweets, his constant feuding with adversaries real and imagined, and his narcissism are not personality quirks. They are how he governs.
His is a style of leadership, if you can call it that, that is completely unsuited for the moment at which the nation finds itself.
What Trump needs to do now is prove he is up to the job of calming the country and leading it through this dark time. But instead, he is reverting to the 2016 culture-warfare playbook, painting scary and baseless pictures of a dystopian future if Biden and the Democrats are put back in power.
Maybe it will work, but I am doubtful. His decision to send in federal troops to aggressively confront largely peaceful protesters in Portland, Ore., against the wishes of local authorities, has backfired. The sight of paramilitary forces being deployed in their community inspired counterdemonstrations by a yellow-clad “Wall of Moms,” joined by dads carrying leaf blowers, which they said they planned to use to blow back tear gas.
Trump, however, has decided to take that show on the road to even more cities.
The president cannot salvage his reelection prospects from the White House Briefing Room or by conjuring racially charged nightmares of civil unrest.
Trump’s real problem is that Americans know all too well what their lives look like in 2020. They are in touch with reality, even if their president is not.