Is it better to be considered evil or stupid?
President Donald Trump no longer has the ability to dictate the news cycle as adroitly as he once did. Otherwise, America would be obsessing over his weekend retweet of a golf-cart driving supporter shouting “white power” at anti-Trump demonstrators at a Florida retirement village.
A year ago, that image and Mr. Trump’s claim he “didn’t hear” the racist declaration before he retweeted it (despite the fact it is audible 10 seconds into the video) would’ve been enough to generate intense pundit chatter for two or three days as the mainstream media debated whether or not it was fair to call the president a racist.
Mr. Trump would’ve preferred dealing with questions of whether he was sending racist dog whistles to his base over what he has to deal with now: Is the president of the United States literally a traitor who has endangered American troops in Afghanistan by ignoring intelligence that implicates Russia in a plot to put bounties on the heads of soldiers?
Mr. Trump would much prefer America was fixated on protecting “our history” as embodied in Confederate memorial statues instead of talking about the surprising independence of the Supreme Court despite a conservative majority he solidified with the appointment of two justices.
Mr. Trump would prefer a debate about whether he is a racist — spoiler alert: he is — rather than one that centers around a narrative far beyond even his abilities to control with the usual Washington insider distractions and gaslighting.
Now the question being debated is to what degree of incompetence or dereliction of duty or sheer stupidity best explains Mr. Trump’s failure to deal with reports that the Russians bribed Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump claims that, contrary to reports he and Vice President Mike Pence were briefed by the White House’s National Security Council about the alleged plot as far back as February, they weren’t. It’s not like they were preoccupied dealing with the coronavirus because they obviously weren’t. So what did the president, in all of his incompetence, not know and when did he not know it?
While the White House claims that the American intelligence community still hasn’t reached a consensus on the truthfulness of the allegation, America’s allies seem to agree there has been a plot afoot for a long time and that it has resulted in the deaths of allied soldiers in Afghanistan, along with Americans.
On Monday, the president’s spokesperson claimed Mr. Trump still hasn’t been briefed, leading one to conclude that anyone who has read an American newspaper in the past week is better informed than the president about this issue.
Had this been any other administration at any other time, the claim that intelligence of this magnitude had been withheld from the president or that it simply wasn’t sufficiently vetted to present to him would’ve been so damning a claim that bipartisan congressional hearings would’ve been called for within hours of the story’s initial publication.
Instead, the debate is about the level of the president’s negligence and the scope of his mendacity. While it has been established by many unflattering accounts about the Trump White House by ex-administration officials and flunkies that Mr. Trump doesn’t “read” his daily intelligence briefings as much as have them read to him in condensed and simplified form, something this big would’ve stuck out even for such an incurious man.
Sure, Mr. Trump can technically claim he never “read” any such report, but it isn’t credible that he wouldn’t have been briefed on it whether he chose to “hear” such reports or not.
Because we already know the president is an inveterate liar, but not a particularly convincing one, no one sane is going to give him the benefit of the doubt about the
Afghanistan briefings because he will lie about even the most inconsequential things to spare his fragile ego a whiff of criticism about his overall competence.
So this is the question all American voters are confronted with as Nov. 3 approaches — Is Donald Trump evil simply while pretending to be out of the loop, or is he truly incompetent at a level rarely accomplished by a national leader? Can he be both evil and stupid to this degree?
Now that Mr. Trump is at least vaguely aware of the accusation against the Russians — he’s already calling it a “Russia Hoax” — what is he doing about it? And what is the Republican Party doing about the credulousness of its presidential standard bearer and the likelihood that he is, at best, a willing puppet of myriad foreign adversaries when it fits his financial or domestic political interests?
Given the danger his floundering presidential campaign is in, now trailing Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign by double digits in most places and high single digits in the battleground states, it’s easy to see why brazen appeals to racism and Confederate nostalgia is Mr. Trump’s go-to strategy.
He’s so desperate, he thinks he can energize the base by redirecting national attention to an old man in a golf cart shouting “white power!” Mr. Trump believes that redirecting attention to the movement to remove monuments of Confederate generals will generate enough electoral sympathy for his own “Lost Cause” in November. It won’t work this time.
Mr. Trump has been revealed as not only incompetent and corrupt when it comes to his handling of issues from COVID-19 to the hollowing out of the Justice Department, but also he now faces questions about his culpability in the death of American soldiers.
As the economy contracts and the coronavirus begins culling thousands of American lives daily again, he has no message justifying his desire to be hired for a second term. We’ve finally reached the point, so familiar in 19th-century American narratives where the con man, having packed up his fake hair growth remedies and love potions in the middle of the night, decides to skip town with his medicine show before the scammed townspeople can agree on a location to tar and feather him in the morning.
I would not be shocked if Mr. Trump, finally bowing to the inevitability of his looming defeat, announces his sudden disinterest in serving a second term. Most con artists think they can get away with their scams by simply running away from the scene of the crime, but I suspect Mr. Trump can expect to see the light of torches and the lengthening shadows of pitchforks on his trail for years to come.