President Trump is letting down his side with his behavior

If this is the most important election of our lifetimes, is it too much to ask that the president of the United States act like it? The president’s most devoted backers talk about the election in apocalyptic terms — Michael Anton of Hillsdale College, author of the famous “The Flight 93 Election” essay in 2016, is the unsurpassed master of the genre.

The stakes are undoubtedly huge. The policy swing from a President Donald Trump to a President Joe Biden alone would be massive, and progressives are talking about adding states for more Democratic Senate seats and packing the Supreme Court — changes meant to shift the balance of American government enduringly in their direction.

The warnings from the right about the potentially existential stakes of 2020 often inveigh against Republican pundits critical of Trump, yet never get around to urging any correction on the president’s part. Indeed, even as Trump, too, talks in dire tones about the consequences of a Biden victory, he doesn’t seem to have absorbed the message.

If the existence of the country itself is on the ballot, why not prepare better for debates? Why not use Twitter exclusively for messages that advance his cause rather than detract from them? Why waste any time on petty animosities and distractions? Why not write down a health care plan and a COVID19 plan to blunt Biden’s most potent issues?

Why not, in short, do a few things that are uncomfortable or unnatural in the cause of, you know, saving the country from imminent political destruction? Of course, by this point, even asking these questions seem naive, although there were times in 2016 when Trump modulated his behavior enough to make a difference.

Prior to the first TrumpBiden debate, journalist Ryan Lizza looked back at the 2016 Trump-Hillary clashes and made the case that Trump was relatively disciplined and kept coming back to his central themes.

In his first clash with Biden, in contrast, an out-of-control Trump blew himself up in the course of trying to demolish the former vice president.