How Trump's bluster undermines America- and helps Joe Biden

When POTUS suggests that Joe Scarborough murdered a legislative assistant, or that Rafael Cruz conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK or threatens to "change the law" (apparently by his own initiative) to roll back First Amendment protections of freedom of the press, or threatens to mess with Twitter because it fact-checks his incessantly false or misleading tweets, or repeatedly claims powers which anyone who has so much as read the Constitution knows that he does not have and pretends to brandish them against those who incur his displeasure, it has consequences few of us think about.

It proves to other countries that Mr. Trump is full of hot air and that they, therefore, need not take anything he says seriously.

It's the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome. The more often Mr. Trump huffs and puffs and threatens to blow people's houses down and then does nothing, or makes serious charges that turn out to be without substance, supported by exactly zero evidence, the less incentive state actors or anyone else has to listen to anything he says and the more reason they have to dismiss him and treat America as a "paper tiger," to use Mao's phrase.

Having a blowhard for a President has meant that the United States has been hemorrhaging credibility- and therefore influence- for four years. Now, admittedly, Joe Biden is something of a blowhard himself. But to repeat a point I've been making over and over in recent weeks, just about every one of Biden's faults and vulnerabilities- including the ones the Trump campaign has been making the most of, and will undoubtedly continue to make the most of as the campaign goes on- are deprived of their bite because Mr. Trump not only shares them but suffers from them each of them himself to a far greater degree than Biden does.

From questions about his mental status (including the occasional incoherence which in Mr. Trump is pretty much the rule rather than the exception) to accusations of sexual misconduct (one highly dubious one and a pattern of touching behavior of a kind that only recently has been considered unacceptable compared to 25 accusations of sexual assault including one of raping a 13-year-old and a taped generic confession to serial sexual harassment) to gaffe-proneness (really? Clorox? Internal UV light?) to- perhaps most critically- a simple lack of personal credibility, the crude and unsophisticated bullying style of Mr. Trump and his campaign seem apt to cause his attacks on Biden to bounce back and inflict far more damage on the President's own campaign than on Biden's, especially if the Democrats have the sophistication and the grace to play it smart and respond to the Trump campaign's attacks by pointing that out over and over again.

If Joe Biden was ever going to be elected president, it would almost have had to have been by running against someone like Mr. Trump, who makes his every fault look like a virtue by comparison and- again, assuming intelligent management of his campaign- effectively turns every negative he has into a plus. And if Donald Trump's bravado about supposedly being aggressive about asserting American interests truly needs an answer, it could have no more effective an answer than the degree to which bluster, empty threats, and unfounded allegations squander his credibility and weaken America's hand.