Choosing between two clowns is easier when one of them is Pennywise
Donald Trump is fundamentally a nasty person, a crude, self-centered bully. But he is a bully who is catastrophically lacking in self-awareness. And most of his supporters are just as clueless about how deadly that combination is to his hopes of re-election.
A Trump supporter's response to one of my Facebook posts the other day only serves to reinforce the point I was making: that accusing one's opponent of failings one also has in as great or greater a measure is simply not an effective strategy. Mr. Trump and his supporters are making insults about Joe Biden's alleged senility a major theme. I said that belittling their opponent's mental condition is not likely to be a very effective argument when your candidate is Donald Trump!
The Trump backer's response was that Biden can't string three coherent sentences together. I said that that's not only an exaggeration but failed to take into account Mr. Trump's well-established difficulty in formulating even one coherent sentence.
He mentioned"Sleepy Joe's" proneness to gaffes. I reminded him that even the worst of Biden's frequent gaffes pale before the ones Mr. Trump commits daily. In fact, I pointed out, it's hard to think of a figure in the history of the nation's politics who says embarrassing and patently absurd things as often and with as little self-awareness as our president.
I pointed out that at least Biden has never accused Ted Cruz's dad of conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK, claimed that 9/11 was "an inside job," denied that Vladimir Putin conspired to interfere in the 2016 election simply because Putin had told him so, done incalculable damage to our alliances by making untrue statements about their commitments to NATO, revealed information that "burned" an Israeli intelligence asset to impress visiting Russian diplomats with the how much he knew, inspired supporters to drink aquarium cleaner or, more recently, ingest household cleaners in an attempt to protect themselves from COVID-19 through half-baked and scientifically unsound claims about matters he didn't understand, denied until three weeks ago on that COVID was a big deal despite having been repeatedly told the contrary by the experts ever since January simply on the basis of his own intuition, or had to be corrected over and over by people like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx because of the false and potentially dangerous misinformation he was giving the American people.
Well, you get the idea. As a political strategy, these attacks on Biden are an example of what a friend of my dad's who was a boxing fan used to call "leading with your chin." If that kind of thing is the substance of a campaign, it's not going to work out very well for him.
And since Donald Trump is, after all, Donald Trump, you can count on it: that's exactly the kind of thing that will be the substance of his campaign against Joe Biden. He won't be able to help himself.
And then came the most incredible moment in the whole silly conversation: his statement that Joe Biden is a "perv" because of Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation. He was right, of course, in thinking that the revelation that Reade had allegedly told others about it at the time grants credibility to her accusation and ought to be a cause of more than a little concern about whether Biden should be elected. But he seemed either unaware or unimpressed with the fact that the evidence supporting Summer Zervos's complaint of the same kind against Trump is a great deal stronger. And then there's E. Jean Carroll's claim that Trump had sexually assaulted her. And Jill Harth's. And Kristen Andersen's. And Karena Virginia's. And those of about a dozen other women. His ex-wife, Ivanka, even accused him of rape!
And of course, Joe Biden is not known to have actually confessed to being a habitual "perv," to use the phrase my Trumpist acquaintance put it. He is not on tape saying anything remotely like
Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything...Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Don't get me wrong. The charges against Biden are grave. In my opinion, if true, they are disqualifying. But then, the same is true of the many, many charges of the same kind against Mr. Trump, some just as credible or even more so.
We can't "just believe women" and jail people or ruin careers and reputations based on a mere accusation; the claim by some feminists that there is no danger of mentally ill or downright wicked women falsely accusing men of sexual assault is preposterous on its face. And there is no question that the liberal media's absolutely reprehensible attempt to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court based on a series of far less credible accusations than Reade's contrasts oddly- in fact, disgracefully- with the gentleness with which they have treated Biden in the Reade matter. But on the other hand, since when have Mr. Trump's supporters been this eager to believe such an accusation? Both sides are guilty of hypocrisy here. Once again, the argument simply rebounds against the people making it.
Biden has a problem with honesty, even if it does pale in comparison with Trump's. And he probably has "slipped" a little. Sometimes the right phrase escapes him. And while a case can be made that he's as gaffe-prone as Mr. Trump, it's absurd to maintain that he's any more so.
Joe Biden is a remarkably flawed candidate. He would not have been my choice. If I had it to do over, I would have shown up at my local Iowa caucus a few months ago and supported Amy Klobuchar instead of waiting in vain for the returns in a bar a couple of blocks away. But on the other hand, as I blogged back in October of 2018,
A Trump-Biden race wouldn't be pretty. It would, from a certain perspective, be funny, a comedy show on CNN. It would be a campaign chock full of gaffes and bizarre statements, claims, and events. Each side would laugh at the foolishness of the other side's candidate, and at least claim to be totally oblivious of that of their own.
A narcissist like Mr. Trump could manipulate most of us out of our socks, especially given the fact that half the country is prepared to believe any outrageous statement he makes and see even his most bizarre and unstable behavior as normal. Any of the other candidates might well fare as badly in the face of the largely inarticulate, often incomprehensible, and largely false verbalizations of our president as the Republican debate participants or Hillary Clinton did in 2016. It's hard to bring facts to bear in a debate with a candidate who is impervious to them, especially when such a large percentage of the audience shares that failing.
But how would he handle a wild card like Joe Biden, who is as unpredictable as he is, probably better at schmoozing and mugging for the camera, and capable of putting on at least as good a comedy act as Mr. Trump's own? It would be interesting to find out. The fact that he, unlike the president, would know what he was talking about and occasionally would make sense might actually be noticeable as the one distinguishing characteristic between the two.
Yeah, if I were Mr. Trump, I'm not sure I would be so eager to take on Joe Biden. Biden not only can compete with him in the clownishness department but the fact that he would have some idea what he was talking about might be especially noticeable because it's the one obvious contrast between the two men.
The debate would do nothing for our national dignity, of course. But neither does having Donald Trump as our president.
What that Trumper on Facebook doesn't get- and neither, apparently, does Mr. Trump, who honestly believes that he is credible and competent and that Biden is not- is that none of those attacks on Biden are going to help the Trump campaign, even when to some extent they are true because it is so obvious and patent that they are just as true of Mr. Trump as they are of Biden, if not more so.
They are simply not reasons to vote for Mr. Trump rather than Biden.
Yeah, they're a couple of clowns. But the clownishness of each cancels out the clownishness of the other. At the end of the day, with their mutual clownishness not factor in the choice, it all comes down to the fundamentally nasty, self-obsessed, humorless, massively ignorant, psychologically unstable, fundamentally incompetent Trump versus the friendly, happy-go-lucky, other-directed, jovial, experienced and knowledgable Biden whom we would have every reason to believe would probably have some idea what he was doing.
Most people would probably vote for Emmett Kelly or Charlie Chaplin before they would vote for Pennywise. Even taking Biden's vastly greater knowledge and experience out of the equation, that would be a compelling reason to believe that Biden is going to win in November.
This, on top of a national catastrophe which Mr. Trump fundamentally mishandled from the very beginning and continues to mishandle even now. The voters seem to be starting to holding him accountable for it, too. He is the first president since polling was invented never to have enjoyed a favorable rating in the consensus of the polls over fifty percent even once. His one claim to re-election was a booming economy which in fact had merely continued on pretty much the same upward trajectory it was on the day he took office, a trajectory established by his predecessor in the depths of the Great Recession, and which in any case now is gone.
I have never agreed with or even understood the common view that Mr. Trump's re-election was more likely than not. He's excellent at blowing his own horn, but in the last analysis, he has managed to bungle literally every aspect of his job so obviously and so completely that I have never been able to imagine him being re-elected unless the Democrats did something really stupid, like nominating Bernie Sanders or someone else so far out of the political mainstream that they would not be a credible alternative.
The Trump campaign will be based on empty and easily-refuted bragging which will no longer impress anyone (if it ever would have) about imaginary accomplishments which would no longer be compelling even if they were real. Beyond that, it will be a constant barrage of mean-spirited, crude, disrespectful, and largely content-free insults hurled at Joe Biden- insults the substance of which, even if true, are obviously even truer of Mr. Trump himself and therefore will do him no good.
I do not believe, to be blunt, that the American people are dumb enough to re-elect Donald Trump. It won't be close enough for it to happen even by accident, as it did in 2016. When all is said and done, the Trump campaign will simply be unable to present the voters with a credible reason to prefer him to Joe Biden. All that it will have will be bluster, insults, character assassination, bullying, name-calling, and all the things which characterize both TrumpWorld and Mr. Trump himself, and are so alien to the fundamental character of the American people.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, may well be slipping. He may have forgotten a great deal. But among what he has forgotten is more about the way the world and the government work, and how to be President of the United States than Donald Trump ever knew.
Mr. Trump himself is all the argument for voting for Joe Biden the American people are finally going to need. Better Emmett Kelly than Pennywise.
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