Unhinged Trump

Ken AshfordElection 2020, Polls, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

In the past few days Donald Trump has:

  • Cranked up the volume on his pointless cold wars with China and Iran
  • Turned mask wearing into a culture war campaign issue
  • Accused a TV host of murdering an intern
  • Declared war on voting by mail and accusing children of committing voter fraud
  • Insisted that James Comey and a variety of others should be in jail
  • Pushed an absurd “unmasking” non-scandal
  • Insisted that Barack Obama personally led a spying campaign against him
  • Retweeted a video saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat”
  • Retweeted QAnon conspiracy theories
  • Threatened to repeal First Amendment protections for social media
  • Quoted a segregationist about how to deal with rioting by African-Americans

All of this has happened in the midst of an enormous pandemic which should be occupying all his time. Instead he’s virtually ignoring it because he can’t figure out what to do aside from handing it over to his son-in-law and then hauling out his iPhone to tweet about something he heard on Fox & Friends.

Is Trump mentally unstable? I don’t know. But he’s sure not mentally all there, is he? What kind of leader decides he can just shut his eyes to a deadly pandemic and instead spend all his time plotting revenge on enemies both real and imagined? Only a mentally infantile one. When will the Republican Party finally realize just what kind of trouble they’ve gotten us into?

The popular theory, which I don’t discount, is that Trump is reacting to the election polls, which make one thing clear: Joe Biden is winning. Either he is reacting uncontrollably, or this his his desperate attempt to latch on to something that will ignite his base or even more.

I know positive polling data makes liberals cringe, dredging up horror memories from November 2016. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the current reality, and that current reality is that in the polls of polls, this is the state of the game: 

  • WI: +2.7 Biden
  • FL: +3.3 Biden
  • AZ: +4.0 Biden
  • MI: +5.5 Biden
  • PA: +6.5 Biden
  • NC: +1.0 Trump

And that doesn’t include Georgia, which is also in play

Let’s just take those states in which presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden leads by a big four points, and we have this: 

ScreenShot2020-05-28at11.37.01AM.png?159

Biden already has an Electoral College victory, and he’s leading in the other four gray tossup states! And as I showed several days ago, Trump is losing ground with independents on a critical issue: jobs. 

Or… maybe Trump is just unstable.