Just out of curiosity, I decided to ask Google, “How many rallies has President Trump had.” I was not really surprised to discover an entry in Wikipedia entitled “List of post-election Donald Trump rallies.” The list includes all of his rallies since Election Day 2016 beginning with his “Thank You Tour” in December 2016. As of today there have been 131 because he got in two rallies in Arizona yesterday with events in Tucson and Prescott. Today he will be in Erie, Pennsylvania, and tomorrow he will hold the 133rd rally at the Gastonia Memorial Airport in Gastonia, North Carolina. The Gastonia event interests me because I know a lot of folks, many of whom voted for Trump in 2016, in Lincolnton, North Carolina which is just a little less than 20 miles north of Gastonia on US 321.
What is even more interesting to me is that there have been no rallies in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, California, Oregon, Washington State, or Arkansas. What does he have against Arkansas, a state that is certain to support him? Does Arkansas deserve less than Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Tennessee? He has been to Florida eleven times. Believe it or not, he has been to Nevada 5 times and they have only six Electoral College votes. If one were to consider his rallies to be an opportunity to speak to the nation, he has nothing to say to the whole West Coast and most of New England. He has come to New Hampshire twice where we have four Electoral College votes.
Yesterday’s twofer in Arizona makes a lot of sense. Arizona is an important state in the president’s Electoral College math if he wants to win the 270 votes needed to be reelected. The rallies in Arizona and most of the other states he visits are raucous. The polls in Arizona suggest that he is in trouble and he desperately needs Arizona’s eleven electoral votes. In 2016 Trump won Arizona by a small margin of about 90,000 votes, but now he is trailing Biden by several points. Similar reversals seem likely in Wisconsin and perhaps in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada. It is also true that Biden is doing well in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and maybe even in Iowa and Ohio. With only two weeks until the election, the president seems to be getting desperate, but there are pundits like William Galston at the Brookings Institute who still can still see a possible path to victory in the Electoral College for him. What they also see is the possibility of a constitutional crisis.
Galston presents four possible scenarios where Trump is able to close the lead that Biden currently has. In the first two, even though Trump cuts Biden’s lead, Biden still wins, but in scenarios three and four Trump wins, and the events possible around scenario four are disturbing.
Scenario 3. Trump cuts Biden’s lead to 2 points
Suppose President Trump’s campaign is so effective that he cuts Biden’s popular vote margin to just 2 points, replicating the 2016 results. In this event, Trump would carry all the states he won in 2016 plus Nevada—a total of 312 electoral votes.
Scenario 4: The nightmare
Suppose President Trump cuts Biden’s lead to 3 points. Although Nevada probably would fall into his hands, Pennsylvania would be too close to call. In this event, the state that most observers believe has the highest potential for electoral delays and snafus in counting mail-in ballots would determine the outcome of the race. This would all but guarantee a replay of the Florida controversy in 2000 that ended with Bush v. Gore, but with a much higher level of partisan polarization, more intense divisions over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and heightened threats of civil disorder. While it may not reach the level of rancor following the disputed 1876 election—when the post-Civil War Reconstruction era came to its bitter end—it could make the disputed 2000 election look tame by comparison.
Galston’s article was published yesterday about the same time that the Supreme Court came to a four to four deadlock on the issue of whether or not “mail in votes” in Pennsylvania could be counted if received up to three days after the election. A lower court had ruled that they could be counted, and that decision will now stand. But, even a delay of a few days in knowing who won Pennsylvania could create enough confusion to put the case before the Supreme Court, and by then Judge Amy Coney Barrett could be Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and the president could be elected by a favorable decision from a conservative court. There is no way to predict what might happen in the streets before and after the Court meets.
There is no question that the issue that gives Biden his greatest advantage over Trump is the president’s performance as a leader during the pandemic. Over the last few weeks, since he has recovered from COVID 19, the president has increased his efforts to downplay the severity of the pandemic. Many people had hoped that his own illness would cause him to “see the light.” The opposite has occurred. In his rallies he is downplaying the severity of the virus and suggesting that we should just relax and let “herd immunity” develop. Yesterday ABC News wrote on its Website:
President Donald Trump has in recent weeks increasingly aligned himself with ideas espoused by scientists pushing “herd immunity” to combat the novel coronavirus, a concept lambasted by public health experts as “dangerous” and called “ridiculous” by the federal government’s foremost infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Since Saturday, the president has repeatedly criticized “unscientific lockdowns” — falsely portraying public health experts as supportive of harsh restrictions — and argued against coronavirus-related limits on American society by repeating his months-old mantra, “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
It would seem that the president has made the decision that he can’t win by saying that his management of the pandemic was great when we now have passed eight million cases and 220,000 deaths. At our current pace we can expect to have over a quarter of a million deaths by Election Day. He had tried claiming that his leadership was spectacular before he made the mistake of talking to Bob Woodward. Down 12 points in the polls, the same margin that he came back from against Hillary Clinton, he was not getting any traction with his position that he had saved millions of lives. It would seem that now he is trying to say that he did well by not doing well because saving the economy makes more sense than saving lives. His favorite measure of the economy is the stock market, and it’s OK.
Trump’s greatest political skill is to recognize and then play to the frustrations that so many people feel. In 2016 he played to the frustration and anger of white Americans who wanted someone to blame for their impending loss of the advantage of being a majority. Now in the late stages of the 2020 election he seems to be playing to the frustrations associated with the virus that so many people have. Many people just don’t want to accept the need for social distancing and wearing face masks. They do not understand, or perhaps do not want to understand, the strategies that we must follow if we want to control the virus. The president’s best shot at reelection is to foster the idea that these precautions are the silly misguided recommendations of scientists and doctors who live in a different world. The president’s opinion, even this president’s opinion, carries a lot of weight for those who feel aligned with his policies, positions, and prejudices. His rallies have become pep rallies for those who are frustrated with the virus and want to move on from it in a fashion not dissimilar to the person who tells the boss, “Take this job and shove it!
In an article in yesterday’s Washington Post entitled “Trump attacks ‘Fauci and all these idiots,’ says public is tired of pandemic, public health restrictions as infection rates rise,” Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey write
President Trump dismissed precautions to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus and attacked the nation’s top infectious-disease expert as a “disaster” Monday, arguing that people are getting tired of all the focus on a pandemic that has killed more than 219,000 Americans and continues to infect thousands of people in communities across the country.
The president claimed that voters do not want to hear more from the country’s scientific leaders about the pandemic, responding angrily to a critical interview Sunday night with CBS’s “60 Minutes” by Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said in a call with his campaign staff Monday that was intended to instill confidence in his reelection bid two weeks before Election Day. He baselessly suggested that Fauci’s advice on how best to respond to the outbreak was so bad it would have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people.
Trump tried out “Fauci and all these idiots” with his campaign staff in the morning and then took the message on the road to Arizona later in the day. Perhaps it is cruel to say, but the picture that is the header for today’s post that I lifted from video of the president’s rally yesterday in Tucson suggests that there were plenty of folks present who were not demonstrating good judgement, and “idiotic” is a term that could be applied to their behavior. Challenging a virus to come and get you for political purposes qualifies as judgement that is so poor that a derogatory term may be what it takes to underline a warning of the danger since a virus is one of the few things in our society that offers equal opportunity to all. It seems wrong for the president who has had the virus and was rescued by therapies that are not universally available to promote behaviors that endanger others for his own political gain.
Hearing the president attack a scientist of Dr. Fauci’s status and experience may be satisfying for some people who have become tired and frustrated from exercising the recommended restraints on their daily existence. It is sad to realize that there is yet another way to sort Americans, some have the ability to hear and accept sound scientific advice, and others prefer to get their advice from a self serving wannabe authoritarian whose foremost concern is to stay in power and whose behavior demonstrates that he has neither the judgement or character necessary to adequately exercise the responsibilities of the office he seeks.
It is hard to live in a time of COVID restrictions. It is also hard to lose friends, neighbors, and relatives to a death they did not have to suffer. We will in time have a vaccine, and will have effective therapies. We are not obligated to accept the disease and death that is associated with a population gaining “herd immunity.” I shudder to think about what our system of care will be like if we are subjected to four more years of this man. Democracies, like people, do die. An idea like “Fauci and all these idiots” can be infectious and the scary reality is that such a germ coming from the president may find just enough “hosts” to kill all the possibilities we have for a better tomorrow. Please push back against this craziness, and at a minimum vote as soon as you can.
