At the risk of jinxing things (I can be weirdly superstitious when it comes to electoral politics), it looks like Joe Biden is cruising to an electoral victory. Even just writing that sentence, I had to knock on wood (does drywall or IKEA desk count as wood? Close enough.) because there are so many different ways things could go wrong. But, every day that Trump veers off message and Joe Biden simply stays alive, we get closer to ending the nightmare that is this Trump presidency. As of this writing, per FiveThirtyEight, Biden has an 87% chance of winning, though that fluctuates mildly here and there. More likely than not, there will be a slight reversion to the mean in the remaining three weeks, but it’s undeniably a good position to be in if you’re Joe Biden.
I have often wryly commented that, as a straight, employed, white guy with health insurance, I have relatively little to complain about regarding this Administration. I assure you that’s entirely sarcastic, as I’m not a sociopath, and so the idea of Black people being unfairly targeted by police, rich people getting tax cuts, and our democracy being handily eroded all cause me great anxiety too. But, anxieties aside, my personal well-being is just fine in Trump’s America. He poses no more threat to me than he does the nation as a whole, which is to say, he poses a great threat to both me and the nation.
This is all (a very confusing way) to say that the Trump Administration and the Trump campaign still routinely find ways to offend me, almost daily. As someone who both worked in the federal government and on presidential campaigns, I’ve seen up close what “right” looks like.
So when, to use an older example, the White House puts out a Muslim-countries travel ban, yes, I’m offended at the policy itself, because it’s obviously hateful (if there’s any doubt, remember what Trump first said on the issue during his campaign). But I’m also offended at the botched process. The lack of considering policy alternatives, interagency reviews, barely cursory legal reviews (and even then, only by partisan hack lawyers), no messaging plan to accompany the roll-out, no surrogates lined up to defend it– these are all the basics of blocking and tackling in the public policy process. Hell, just their pathetic, hyper-reliance on EOs instead of, you know, actual laws shows how inept they are. The level to which the Trump team ignores these absolute basics is, to me, offensive. Make no mistake, leading the most powerful country in the world is a serious business, and a privilege that every occupant prior to Trump has taken seriously.
Long ago, I had considered keeping a running log of all of the campaign and administration’s laughable failures. I’m not talking about things that just ‘went wrong’– every team has that here and there. Nor am I talking about things I disagree with– that list would probably be too unwieldy. I mean the sort of stuff that any half-serious person who works in public administration or electoral campaigns would roll their eyes at, drop their jaw, or spit out their coffee.
If I get that up and running soon, great. Otherwise, for the time being, suffice to say that Donald Trump’s campaign and Administration are complete aberrations. Setting aside my own partisan tilt, these guys are objectively bad at their jobs. Remember that Trump prizes loyalty over everything else. And also remember that at the outset of the 2016 presidential campaign, there were upwards of 17 candidates at one point in time or another, all of whom were more qualified than Donald Trump, if only slightly. That means that he got the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel talent. Guys who didn’t have enough experience to hack it on the Carly Fiorina or Jim Gilmore campaigns ended up on the Trump team. And then, horrifically, those same people entered the Administration, given levers of power they never thought they’d touch, and with no respect for steering the ship of state in anything other than a reckless, nihilistic manner. Yes, obviously they won a presidential campaign, but 1) they lost the popular vote handily, winning the Electoral College due to demographic flukes; and 2) their success largely pulled from the candidate’s own ability to dominate the media, along with some latent racism in the Midwest.
This explains why the morons who would put Trump in front of a pile of garbage for a press conference are the same morons promising a healthcare plan “within two weeks” for four years. The bright spot is probably Jared Kushner, who is just smart enough to know he’s not meant for this line of work (“I’m not a fucking speechwriter. I am a real-estate guy.”), but not smart enough to graciously bow out of attempting a Middle East peace deal. The fact that three Trump campaign managers and three other senior advisers have ended up arrested for mostly unrelated charges tells you all you need to know about the caliber of individual drawn to Donald Trump’s orbit.
Remember, if you’ve never paid for sex, you’re a better negotiator than Donald Trump.