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I take ONE day off to finish some serious writing and come back to find Mad King Trump the Unready instigating the peasants into rebelling against the Barons of Michigan. Minnesota... Never a dull moment huh
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On a more serious note, Trump has obviously pivoted his strategy. He was previously thinking the daily press briefings were a great substitute for the shut-down rally track. Remember the ratings tweet? That’s when he still thought the briefings were home turf for him.
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But then Cuomo gave him a bloody nose and then the governors, media, and even conservative constitutional scholars forced a very visible, unspinnable retreat from the “absolute authority” posture. The redirection at WHO didn’t work. It looked like a three stooges slap cascade.
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So now he’s decided the briefings are not rallies but hostile territory. He cuts a weak figure as a rambling opening act to The Fauci show (Fauci is a dead man walking dead — first chance he gets Trump will take him out), and he can’t browbeat press into not asking hard questions
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So he’s done the cleverest retreat he can engineer. By making his LIBERATE tweets such an obvious and open undermining of his official posture, he’s signaled to the base that the briefings are now to be treated as “lying to the deep state enemy and talking in code”
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The code is of course not much of a code. “Cruel virus from a distant land” is about as subtle as esenihC suriV. His code can’t be too subtle le it will again look weak. But it’s enough to signal “the tweets are the real story. The pressers are deep state battles.”
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Still, this is a real setback for him. He’s had to cede the White House. He has no substitute for rallies now. Twitter is powerful, especially in conjunction with Fox and talk radio, but a lot of the power comes from piping clips and photos of rallies. So, a real loss.
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But beyond the strategic setback — he’s ceded an entire front that he’ll now have to work to regain — he’s also suffered a doctrinal setback. It’s now clear he’s fighting for re-election, regardless of the welfare of people, while governors, inept or not, are fighting the virus.
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He’s already made the virus the governors’ problem (retaining some ability to interfere by withholding federal help or using FEMA as his personal piracy outfit under Kushner). This looks weak and cowardly. Not only is he not fighting the virus, others aren’t even fighting HIM.
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It is insulting to not be your chosen adversaries main adversary. Cuomo for example, is supposedly trying to “Trump proof” his virus plan rather than honoring him with a direct plan focusing on him. He’s been reduced to annoying sidekick of the virus, the actual boss villain.
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He may still win in November, but he’ll never live down this humiliating period of playing second fiddle to a virus in the eyes of his enemies, most of whom are giving him the finger from a nominally weaker position while he helplessly loses his grip on his own front lawn.
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This period will be a source of anger and unhappiness for him, for the rest of his petty, miserable life, even if four more of those are spent in a vastly weakened White House. That makes me happy. Yeah I’m petty too. I am not actively revengeful, but schadenfreude I can do.
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