Reveal his moral loathsomeness
Robert Reich asks how can we make sure Trump doesn’t get re-elected.
Most Americans hold a low opinion of Trump. He’s the only president in Gallup polling history never to have earned the support of majority for single day of his term.
Yet Mueller’s report probably won’t move any of the 40% who have held tight to Trump regardless.
So how to reach the 11% or 12% who may decide the outcome?
Reveal his moral loathsomeness.
Democrats and progressives tend to shy away from morality, given how rightwing evangelicals have used it against abortion, contraceptives and equal marriage rights.
I don’t. Abortion, contraceptives and equal marriage rights have nothing to do with real morality – they’re targets of fake, religious morality, which is all too often profoundly immoral. I don’t shy away from talking about morality, and I’ve harped on the pervasive immorality of Trump to the point of nausea.
Trump is revealed as a chronic liar. He claimed he never asked for loyalty from FBI director James Comey. Mueller finds he did. Trump claimed he never asked Comey to let the “Michael Flynn matter go”. Mueller finds he did. Trump claimed he never pushed the White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. Mueller finds he did. Trump even lied about inviting Comey to dinner, claiming falsely, in public, that Comey requested it. Trump enlists others to lie. He lies to his staff.
Trump treats his subordinates horribly. He hides things from them. He yells at them. He orders them to carry out illegal acts.
He acts like a thug. He regrets his lawyers are not as good at protecting him as was his early mentor Roy Cohn – a mob lawyer. When reports surface about the now infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016, Trump directs the cover-up.
Trump is unprincipled. The few people in the White House and the cabinet who stand up to him, according to Mueller – threatening to resign rather than carry out his illegal orders – are now gone. They resigned or were fired.
This is a portrait of a morally bankrupt man.
And there’s so much more. He’s cruel. He’s mean. He’s a bully. He enriched himself by cheating thousands of people, from workers and contractors to tenants in his father’s and his apartment buildings. He insults people in public. He mocks people in public. He punched his kid to the floor in front of the kid’s friends. He grabs women by the crotch.
The issue of Trump and morality came up in a back and forth between Giuliani and Jake Tapper.
“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Rudy Giuliani tells @jaketapper. #CNNSOTU https://t.co/Fe78m3aDWq pic.twitter.com/wfcU38vTWX
— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) April 21, 2019
Giuliani said there’s nothing wrong with taking information from the Russians, and Tapper pressed him on it. At 2:00 Tapper says “But you say there’s nothing wrong with doing that – ” and Giulian interjects “There’s no crime!” Tapper says “I’m not talking about crime, I’m talking about ethics, morality” while Giuliani talks over him “You’re talking about morality?!” There’s a tiny pause and then Tapper says “Yeah.” As in, “Yeah, of course.” It’s a nice moment. There’s an unspoken “Yeah, of course, and why aren’t you?”
I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt have occasion to say it again: Trump is morbidly interesting in the thoroughness of his bad. It’s interesting in a sick way that there is nothing redeeming about him. I’ve never known anyone like that in real life (and I don’t have any ambitions to, either). He’s not amusing, he’s not a good talker, he’s not charming, he’s not clever, he’s not informative…nothing. There’s nothing but rot from top to bottom.
From start to finish, a pretty damning combination summary: Reich’s and OB’s.
And Trump has already done so much of the work for us. I know of no other public figure whose public utterances consist of such a high proportion of self incriminating statements. His moral disfigurement is ever visible, like he’s part of some strange production of The Picture of Dorian Gray gone wrong, where the frightfully decaying portrait has been carelessly left out on stage for the entire performance, rather than hidden away for the shocking revelation at its conclusion. The result is that there is little, if anything, left to shock us. There’s just such a volume of sordidity that the hardest part is figuring out where to begin. It’s like trying to shift an ocean with sugar tongs.
The good news is that Trump’s win in 2016 was such a narrow margin that you don’t need to pry many Trump voters loose to defeat him in 2020. (Arguably you don’t need any; mere demographic change in the electorate and/or a reduction in third party votes would be sufficient.) And while you’d love to flip a 2016 Trump voter into a 2020 Dem voter, it’s still a good outcome each time you can persuade one to stay home or vote third party.
I think different approaches will work with different voters, more so with Trump than with past presidents, because there appear to be wildly different views of him even among his supporters. Some of his base thinks he’s a great, strong leader who rules the government with an iron fist — they could be shaken by all the instances in the Mueller report where his staff basically ignores him. Some of his base doesn’t care for the Twitter rantings and the silliness but think it’s ok precisely because nobody takes it seriously — reaching them probably requires pointing out how badly he has fouled up things like international trade, resulting in real harm to (ugh) “real” Americans.
I can’t remember where I first read this, but I recall a political insider noting that in 2016 focus groups, the one thing that moved the needle was attacking Trump’s “self-made man” image. If voters were shown that Trump was not the canny entrepreneur that Mark Burnett portrayed him as, but was in fact a lousy businessman who nearly squandered a significant fortune handed to him by his father, it had an impact.
Screechy, that is almost certainly part of the reason that there is so much scramble to keep his tax returns secret.