Reading this site on a regular basis, I get a very good picture of the myriad ways in which Trump is failing. But a recent article on the BBC about Trump’s Tulsa rally and the impact it has had reminded me that outside of this bubble, some people see things very differently.
Frankly, I have gone off the BBC recently. During the recent British election, it was a blatant propaganda outfit for the Conservative party, as even an article in the New Statesman has described. So I don’t think the BBC can be regarded as an objective commentator any more than this place can. But the BBC still has a lot of credibility, and what it says matters.
Now, spoiler alert: the article broadly concludes that Trump is in difficulties. But some of the comments made along the way put a worryingly positive spin on him.
For example, we here recognise that Trump’s tax cuts were nothing but a giveaway to the wealthiest. For the BBC, however:
Perhaps the best day of all [for Trump] came with the legislative victory to reform and simplify America’s arcane tax code. It was a big win.
We recognise that Trump took a thriving economy that he inherited from Obama and trashed it. But the BBC tells us:
[T]he better days of the Trump presidency were to be the building blocks of his re-election campaign, and what his advisers had started to believe would set him on a glide path to victory. And in a word, this all came down to one thing - the economy...
As 2019 became 2020, everything seemed to be set fair on the economic front. Nothing on the dashboard was flashing red, and the engine was purring - unemployment was at a record low, growth was ticking upwards, inflation was not a problem, consumer confidence was on the rise.
We see a malignant narcissist who cares about nothing but himself. Yet somehow, in the same subject, the BBC sees someone who cares about ordinary people, and is constantly coming up with new ways to help them.
When his internal battery is showing only one bar, plugging into 20,000 cheering fans is what gives him a full recharge. It is also what allows him to stay tuned into the preoccupations of ordinary Americans - not just the preoccupations of what he sees as the liberal elite who dominate Washington and much of the media. He spits out ideas and sees what response he gets - and a lot of the issues the president campaigns on are road-tested at his rallies first.
The problems with the Tulsa rally are set out at length, fairly and without pulling any punches. The conclusion is also incontestable.
On Twitter and Facebook the next day, there was a slightly forlorn effort by the president’s allies to portray Tulsa as a great success, but the words ring hollow. Trump loyalists went into damage limitation mode. There was an insistence there were no missteps - the event was a success. But all the time they knew someone was going to have to walk the plank. The president does not suffer humiliation like this without someone having to pay the price...
...a slew of polls showed Trump’s standing with the public was sliding - and the common factor in all these snapshots of public opinion was an accusation of his erratic handling of the pandemic.
That last sentence is what really got to me and caused me to write this diary. It summarises the tenor of the whole article, which is that Trump was doing just fine and would be cruising to re-election if it wasn’t for that meddling pandemic. Hell, even that phrase “an accusation of his erratic handling” implies that there is room for argument as to whether the criticism of him is fair.
And although the coverage of the Tulsa disaster in this article describes it well, the article still pivots back to the idea that Trump was a President who was doing a perfectly good job until Covid-19 hit.
It has brought an important reality check for Donald Trump. Few politicians are better at shaping their own reality and imposing their own narrative on the national conversation. Even fewer politicians have shown the same alacrity for doubling down when they are in a tight spot as Trump. Coronavirus has shown the limits of presidential power.
Nor do they think that even Coronavirus is necessarily the end of his re-election prospects.
Trump believed all he had to do was announce a rally, and the crowds would come flocking. They might still love him and might still vote for him in November, but they’re not going to pack arenas in the middle of a pandemic.
There is at least some recognition that the optics are bad.
If the crowds stay away then it will be all too easy for the impression to take hold that Donald Trump is in decline
You think?! Me, I think his his inability to talk coherently and his boasting about passing a cognitive assessment make it incredibly difficult for that impression not to take hold. But heaven forbid that the BBC should report on these things. They do in this article make passing reference to West Point, but only in the context of him talking about that in Tulsa.
When he took a drink of water, he rather oddly held on to the glass with both hands. When he walked down the ramp at the end of his speech, he clung to the handrail clearly worried that he was going to lose his footing. It quickly became a source of much mirth on social media. The president went through a blow-by-blow deconstruction of what happened, which lasted the best part of 17 minutes. In a nutshell, the media had stitched him up.
The conclusion is really weak tea.
The failure of Tulsa, in other words, has totally upended the Trump campaign strategy. It has left a giant hole in campaign planning. How is the president going to project himself between now and November? And with what message? All we do know is that his convention is going to feature the exact same teleconferencing that the president had lambasted Joe Biden for during campaigning.
Surely, BBC, if this guy had a shred of competence, or a record, or anything, his message should be blatantly obvious, and the fact that he has to deliver it remotely would not be an issue. The fact that the removal of the medium of delivery means you have no idea what he can campaign on is a BIG FUCKING DEAL. You know, it’s the sort of thing that competent journalists notice and report on, and consider the implications.
It’s very sad that the BBC has gone so badly downhill. But this is a timely wake-up call that there can be no complacency, no assumption that what is obvious to us is obvious to everyone, no assumption that the media will report fairly and accurately. Every vote must be fought for as if desperately struggling to eke out the narrowest of wins. If by doing that the result is a landslide, then brilliant, but until November, no rest. No complacency.
