Does Trump want another term as president?
Well, does President Donald Trump approve of what news media are calling the “white power video,” or doesn’t he?
That burning question arose after the president retweeted a video last weekend showing a few residents of The Villages, a huge central Florida retirement community, jeering at a parade of Trump supporters in golf carts.
As the jeers turn ugly with shouts of “neo-Nazi” and the like, one Trump-supporting white man with a defiant smile holds up a fist and twice shouts “white power,” according to a later White House account.
Three hours later, after public pleas from other Republicans, including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican, the tweet was deleted.
But anyone listening for a denunciation of the “white power” chant would hear only crickets — and one more unforced error by a president who lately has made a virtually unbroken string of them.
At a time when he expected to be getting his reelection campaign act together and taking it on the road, Trump was sidetracked by two crises: the coronavirus “plague,” as he likes to call it, and the national racial reckoning that has blown up on various streets and other fronts since the video-recorded death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.
Trump, who long has claimed to be a “stable genius” with answers for everything, responded to these crises by making them worse.
He responded to mostly peaceful protests by denouncing them as “terrorists,” “antifa” and “looters.”
He responded to the coronavirus pandemic with daily televised briefings that showed the world how long he could ramble to the cameras and throw tantrums at reporters and muse, to the horror of his medical experts, about such things as the possible value of taking disinfectant internally to fight the virus.
Eager to get back on the road, he held a Tulsa, Okla., rally where fewer than a third of the arena’s 19,000 seats were occupied. That seemed to be a wake-up call, if not by much. The always-campaigning Trump seems to have lost some of his mojo.
For example, in an interview last week with his longtime pal and Fox News host Sean Hannity, he was asked for “one of your top priority items for a second term?” A softball, right? But the president responded with an indecipherable word salad about the value of experience, how many people he’s met in Washington and “idiot” John Bolton, former national security adviser and author of a new Trump tell-all.
“All he wanted to do,” Trump recalled, “is drop bombs on everybody.”
My mind raced back to the interview that killed another rising political star, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who during a 1979 interview failed to give a straightforward answer to CBS’ Roger Mudd’s question, “Why do you want to be president?”
Four years ago Trump probably would have answered with an obvious talking point. “Drain the swamp,” he might have said, or “Repeal Obamacare.” Or “Build a wall and have Mexico pay for it.”
Who can blame the president if he fails to see his presidency as fun anymore?
And need I mention that major polls find his approval ratings slipping behind his Democratic rival Joe Biden, who appears to be succeeding quite well with his counter-strategy: Clam up and let Trump destroy himself. A Fox News poll, which I respect for reliability even when I’m not pleased with the results, finds Biden widening his lead.
Of course, there is still plenty of time for that gap to close before November, if Trump makes a big course correction and Biden makes enough mistakes. Undecided and late-deciding voters and independents can make all the difference.
But independent voters are new ground for Trump to plow. Both of his campaigns and his presidency have focused primarily on his base and whipping up their fears and loathings about “American carnage.” But even his base is beginning to show signs of erosion, a reflection perhaps of Trump’s own inner carnage.
Clarence Page