Boy oh boy do we all have egg on our faces today! It turns out Jared Kushner was right all along. Victory is ours! The Feds DID check off all the medical boxes, and lo and behold we are celebrating the great success of the Administration. Let’s go back to work!!! The reason we know it’s over is they are dismantling the Covid-19 task force. The Vice President did such an amazing job we don’t need them any more. They solved it! Closing up shop, nothin’ left to see here.
Only one small part of that paragraph is true.
Since the press simply won’t cooperate and toss softballs, the Covid-19 daily briefings will be discontinued and the Task Force dismantled. They are not serving the purpose they were intended to serve, which wasn’t to keep the public informed of the latest information that would impact them during the pandemic. That was the premise, but not the purpose. Had they been following the science and reacting to the realities that were being discovered these briefings would have been a very valuable service to millions of vulnerable Americans. Invaluable. But they were not devised for that. They were a way for the President to take all of the media air out of the campaign, to create a believable need for him to be in front of the public on a daily basis and have complete control of the narrative while his adversary was trying to figure out how to navigate the most challenging election in history.
The strategic mistake that the President made was that he thought of it in terms of a campaign stop, and he used all his usual shtick. After a brief statement that would update any information pertinent to the virus since the previous day, the rest of the time was his to riff with, and he railed against fake news, made up new disparaging nicknames for his foes, talked about Space Force or The Wall, and pounded the narrative of the great success of the Administration in this fight against “The Plague”.
This was not the time for this. It was so discordant with the times, with the unstable zeitgeist of a population looking for answers, for hope, for a way through to the other side. For serious support, even if it was with simple honesty. He had no talent for this, no personal traits that would lead him to, or even allow him to, exhibit empathy. Truth had always been the enemy, and this time it had the upper hand.
It soon became apparent that this was not a rally. There were journalists in the room, and they had questions. Good ones. The next day they would have more, and the day after that. No highly edited promotional videos played for the assemblies would change the plain vision of what was happening. He was lying, getting caught in his lies, compounding them with more. He was losing his control, first of the events and then of himself. He would have unhinged outbursts at journalists.
Then one day he just walked out on one.
He knew what was coming. He knew he had gone off script once too often. He had been made aware, having not figured it out on his own, that injecting household cleaners was risky at best. There was no answer that was going to work. The idiocy was so extreme, there was no walk-back, so he walked out. They cancelled the weekend briefings, then tried one more time, but that was it. The well was poisoned.
He had seen this as the ultimate political cudgel, a game changer that Joe would never recover from, an advantage so great as to be decisive. It should have been. The political impulse was cynical genius.
He may be partially right in the end. These appearances have been deeply influential to the public. He has revealed himself in ways that refuse any plausible deniability. He has lost poll points in places he can least afford to, like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and when the inevitable second wave of this disaster hits because of his misplaced need to have an economy to run on, his miscalculations will cost tens of thousands of lives. But more importantly to him, it will cost him votes. Votes he can’t afford to lose.
It seems that the damage has been done, that he finally revealed himself even to those that seemed immune to what seemed to be so obvious for so long. Some passed a line where it was just too humiliating to try to make a defense for this man. It made you look foolish, and suddenly you knew it.
Not everyone suddenly changed sides, but a few had to, and a few is enough. That’s all the difference that is needed to swing the election. I think there are more than a few, but I’m absolutely certain there are a few.
But it is a long way to November. This is a snapshot in time. How is it possible to imagine a reversal in public sentiment back toward the President after all that we have seen? It may very well be impossible to imagine.
That don’t make it impossible.