How to lose an election
Each time he opens his mouth, the former president seems to be allowing the election to wash down the drain.
“He/She is letting the election slip away.”
It’s not uncommon to hear or read those words during elections. In the case of the former president, who is vying for office for the third time in as many general election cycles, we’re watching him throw it away.
Since the former president earned the nod during the primary, I have said the following to more than one person:
“I have a feeling that neither Trump nor Biden will be the next president.”
These words were usually met with “Really? How?”
I had no idea at the time, but with each passing day since Kamala Harris entered the race, he’s worked to corroborate my stance. (See: NABJ interview; the birther BS; his inability to stay on message; and his unwillingness to share an accurate, coherent narrative for why he should be president.)
He can’t help himself
His most recent blunder boggles the mind: He insulted service members who were injured or killed in the line of duty during an antisemitism event at his New Jersey golf club while recognizing Miriam Adelson, a GOP mega-donor who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.
“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version,” Trump said, referring to the Medal of Honor.
“It’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead,” Trump said. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for — and that’s through committees and everything else.”
Talk about a grotesque slap in the face to the families of service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our freedoms, and those of our allies. Such asininity is nothing new coming from the former president, however. After all, in 2015, he famously ridiculed the late Sen. John McCain, who was held in captivity for 5 ½ years by the North Vietnamese, by saying that he respected "people who weren’t captured.”
Epic stupidity on display
His comments appear to be getting more absurd with each passing day, in fact. For example, more than a week ago he attacked VP Harris’s campaign for using AI to superimpose the crowd that greeted her at a rally in Detroit. (The images were, in fact, not digitally altered.)
“Didn’t exist,” he said.
My favorite was his comparison of his infamous Jan. 6 Capital Attack crowd to Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963:
“If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his (March on Washington) speech, his great speech, and you look at ours—same real estate, same everything—same number of people. If not, we had more.”
You can’t make this up. You also cannot deny that we’re watching a getable election go down the drain.
Losing votes each time he opens his mouth
Recently, I opened the WSJ to see a column titled “Trump is Looking Like a Loser Again,” by Gerard Baker, Editor at Large. Baker made the point that Trump’s most recent remarks fall into one of three categories: “false, obtuse or lunatic.”
“I don’t disdain the voters who have backed him as the way to express their disgust at a rotten, complacent political establishment—on both sides—that has dominated Washington for too long. … But, if things don’t change, the ranks of those voters won’t be enough to outweigh others who simply can’t face another four years of the Trump show and will back even a party hack concealing her real politics simply to escape it.”
The former president has already shed some high profile would-be voters.
Last Sunday, David French, a conservative author and attorney (and one of my favorite writers) wrote a column titled “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris,” saying that he’s “doing it in part to try to save conservatism.”
“I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m ‘still conservative,’ and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.
“The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”
I won’t be voting for Harris in November, but French accurately channels my feelings. It’s time to turn the page and excise the Republican party from the cult.