How Trump’s childish bullying hurts Connecticut
The presidential debate of 2020, and please, let Tuesday’s roadkill be the only one, will live in history as the World’s Most Powerful Human trying to show strength by acting like a third-grader. I apologize to third-graders everywhere 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 far to the left and Trump leaves Republicans unable make headway.
In Trumpworld, the place where each candidate falls on the scale of perceived strength and weakness surpasses all issues, all other measures. Health care access, the coronavirus crisis, job recovery, 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 Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sure, Trump supporters might vote for him because he favors a faster 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 stuff.
The magic of Trump, 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 interruption, strength through
other people’s stumbles, strength through mockery. 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-fascist white supremacists? “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa 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.
Trump’s strategy badly hurts conservatives and especially moderate Republicans in blue states such as Connecticut, arguably the bluest. They must share a ballot line with him, a heavy burden.
Certainly Trump 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 low ceiling in blue states, with our tradition of old-line, business Republicans (who pay their taxes instead of cheating) and Yankee fiscal conservatives
GOP state chairman J.R. Romano, a Trump Republican under fire in his own party, though not for supporting Trump, 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 less.
Consider, on Wednesday the state House of Representatives is poised to ram through a risky bill that will force Eversource 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 Trump’s childish ways — and thus the clown show, as Biden rightly called it, hurts the state.
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 conservative 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 lest he appear weak — and took matters too far. “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown,” he said at one point, after earlier snapping, “Will you shut up, man?”
The Delaware Democrat even engaged in some arrogant bluster of his own, rebuffing a point 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 Trump’s weakness as a leader the main theme.
The challenger also missed, by my count, eight easy opportunities to score points. For example, he failed to follow up Trump’s last-in-his-college-class jab by saying at least he took his own entrance exams. He failed to properly defend the science behind masks against Trump’s mockery. He failed to cite numbers showing the Obama jobs record is better than Trump’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 Trump chaos hurts Republicans and conservatives in sophisticated states like Connecticut at a time when, in this liberal’s view, we need balance against oneparty rule.