INDIANAPOLIS — If President Trump loses to Joe Biden on Nov. 3, it will be because he alienated wide swathes of voters who supported him four years ago, as well as influential Republicans and military.
Recent polling shows Trump erosion of support among critical voting blocs he carried four years ago: Senior citizens, Whites, independents. Trump carried senior citizens with 52% in 2016. A recent CNN poll showed Trump trailing Biden 60-39% within that demographic. An early October NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll showed Trump trailing Biden by 27% (62-35%). Trump’s tightly packed, maskless MAGA rallies aren’t impressing these voters.
The shock poll came on Tuesday in Wisconsin, where an ABC/Washington Post Poll had Biden leading Trump by 57-40% (a Marquette Law School Poll on Wednesday had Biden up 5%). Wisconsin has seen a 53% increase in average daily cases in the past two weeks, a record number of hospitalizations and a 112% jump in deaths. Voters aren’t buying the “We’ve turned the corner” rhetoric.
His first secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis, said last June, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people; does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.”
Dan Coats, former Indiana senator and Trump’s first director of national intelligence, told author Bob Woodward in the book “Rage,” about a conversation he had with Mattis. “The president has no moral compass,” Mattis told Coats. “True,” Coats responded. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Former Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, told friends, “The depth of his dishonesty is just astounding to me; the dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, who led the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, said, “Today, as we struggle with social upheaval, soaring debt, record unemployment, a runaway pandemic, and rising threats from China and Russia, President Trump is actively working to undermine every major institution in this country. He has planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of many Americans that our institutions aren’t functioning properly. And, if the president doesn’t trust the intelligence community, law enforcement, the press, the military, the Supreme Court, the medical professionals, election officials and the postal workers, then why should we?”
Former Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said in a USA Today op-ed, “President Trump lacks a moral compass” and “ignores the truth.”
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said he will not vote for Biden or Trump and hopes that history remembers Trump “as a one-term president.” Cindy McCain, widow of the 2000 Republican presidential nominee said, “My husband John lived by a code, country first. We are Republicans, yes, but Americans foremost.” She isn’t voting for Trump.
Former President George W. Bush and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Sen. Mitt Romney have publicly said they will not vote to reelect Trump. Romney, the only Republican ever to vote to convict a GOP president in an impeachment trial, observed last February, “In the end, the evidence was inescapable. The president did in fact pressure a foreign government to corrupt our election process, and really, corrupting an election process in a democratic republic is about as abusive and egregious an act against the Constitution — and one’s oath — that I can imagine. It’s what autocrats do.”
Miles Taylor, the LaPorte native, Indiana University graduate and former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration who was identified as “Anonymous” on Wednesday, said what he had witnessed from President Trump “was terrifying,” saying Trump has been “actively doing damage to our security.”
The Los Angeles Times writer David Lauter took on the strange phenomenon that Trump continually played to his base over the past four years, instead of expanding it. “The success of that closed information ecosystem explains a big part of why Trump’s core supporters so steadfastly back him through every turn of his administration. Inside the bubble, Trump literally can do no wrong. His often-repeated description of himself as now ‘immune’ from the coronavirus may strike the rest of the country as silly boasting; within the bubble, it’s a powerful metaphor for his status as übermensch.
“For Trump, the cost of creating the bubble is living in it,” Lauter explains. “The constraints of the bubble help explain Trump’s inability to forthrightly condemn conspiracy theories or white supremacist groups. And they powerfully affect his ability to communicate with outsiders.”
After a sensational 2020 thus far, featuring Trump’s impeachment trial and acquittal, a pandemic that set off the greatest financial scare since the Great Depression and has killed more than 225,000 Americans, with epidemiology models pointing to a half a million deaths, and President Trump endangering hundreds more with his CDC-violating MAGA rallies, what else could possibly happen with a misogynistic, narcissistic, erratic, and xenophobic president in a second term, unbound by future voter judgement, and employing a compliant C-Team administration?
Could it possibly be worse than what we’re witnessing today, with the White House science office declaring “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” as the “top accomplishment of President Trump’s first term” even as the pandemic spikes and engulfs our medical systems? Throw in his repeated threats against our “rigged” election process and his unwillingness to commit to accepting the verdict of the American people and the once assumed “peaceful transfer of power” and the dynamic is set for an ongoing disaster.
A second term of Donald Trump’s reality show would be a grave risk for our fragile American experiment in democracy.
The columnist is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
