Donald J. Trump’s recent actions have fit into a pattern that I find particularly concerning. Let’s assume, for a minute, they he plays the fool more than being a fool (or he has someone behind him to do that for him). What would the plan of such a person who did the following be:
- Demand the country “reopen,”
- Publicly support an astroturf campaign that directly facilitates the spread of the virus,
- Publicly threaten to adjourn congress,
- Push to hold in person primary elections in WI,
- Block attempts to keep the USPS open through bailouts, and
- Block attempts to expand vote-by-mail.
Trump may be an impulsive, narcissistic, illiterate, ignoramus, but the way he’s played the media like a fiddle should prove that he’s not stupid. What is a possible not-stupid motivation of someone who does the above? In sum: keeping power, by any means necessary.
The impeached talking orange knows that the economy won’t have recovered in time for November. It may take a while to acknowledge, but the second great depression is almost certainly here. Even failing that, a recovered economy isn’t possible, and wouldn’t be enough to paper over his rank incompetence at the start of this (not stupid at manipulating people, stupid at dealing with anything that requires intro college math to understand). Things are starting to look up: NY is flattening the curve, WA has flattened it, and CA kept the lid on it. If people hunker down and keep doing the right thing, we’ve avoided the public health catastrophe. At this pace, though, things won’t get back to normal by Nov, and Trump knows he needs “normal + good economy” to have a prayer of defeating Joe Biden, even if he had full-blown Alzheimer’s.
So, what’s a narcissist to do in a situation like this? Same thing he always does: double down. Make the epidemic worse so that it will still be too dangerous to reopen in Nov. Cripple the USPS to make vote-by-mail impossible, and stop people from even trying to set it up in time. This, and the backlash against the WI election, gives the excuse to “delay” (really, cancel) the November elections because it’s too dangerous to hold them in person, and impossible to vote by mail. And if Congress tries to impeach and remove him, again, well, golly, he’ll just adjourn them.
Say hello to Emperor Augustus Trump! (Romans still thought of themselves as a Republic for a long time after the emperors took control)
What to do? Luckily, there is still time. In an ideal world, they’d impeach and remove Trump in a week. More realistically, we need to fight as hard as possible to: keep the USPS open, expand vote-by-mail, expand the use of testing, and keep the physical distancing that’s keeping a lid on COVID-19 in place.
I admit, all of the above is speculation. I usually stick to Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Just because I don’t think I could convict Trump of being this malicious doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t be on guard for it. Luckily, the countermeasures are all things we should be fighting for, anyway!
In fact, we may be in luck. You’ll notice that a lot of the evidence above requires that Trump is too overconfident to avoid saying the quiet part out loud. The end game of “ends justifies the means” power politics is always a tyrannical dictatorship, whether the leader is left-wing or right. We’re just lucky that the Republican in charge when their schemes are coming to fruition is telegraphing the punch.
