Six months to election day and things feel sort of fatalistic. There seems little to discover and nothing new to say about each of the candidates. It’s not going to dawn on you suddenly that Joe Biden is too old and infirm or Donald Trump too crazy. You’ve factored that in. You know what you think of both and have a sense of what compromises you’ll make within yourself to vote for either.
Voters can still be nudged, it’s not over, but Mr. Trump is ahead in most if not all of the battleground states, and I’m struck by the number of political operatives, veterans and thinkers now asking, honestly, if there is anything the president can do to pull it out.
Someone will suggest a “Sister Souljah moment” in which the president distances himself from the cultural left. Then they’ll shake their heads: too late, and who would believe it?
A veteran Democratic officeholder gives the bottom line: “A pro-Biden coalition does not exist, but an anti-Trump one does.” Mr. Biden must stop making the election a referendum on his record. “Instead make it a referendum on Trump’s. When people are this negative, make it about your opponent.”
The past month’s campus demonstrations will hurt Mr. Biden, at least marginally. They reveal his party’s split. People don’t like violence and screaming and the antisemitism bubbling up from the universities. The veteran political consultant Alex Castellanos said the other night, on Mark Halperin’s “Wide World of News,” that for parents with kids in high school and college, what’s happening on campus isn’t abstract and faraway, it’s personal. Afterward he elaborated: parents have seen their children not only radicalized but left unfit and unprepared for a productive future. Parents are “stunned to see that trusted educational institutions have captured their children and engrossed them in naive fantasies about the world.” When voters object to a situation, they kick against the incumbents who reign over them.
The Trump criminal cases seem a bust. The stolen-documents case is delayed; the Georgia election-tampering case done in by the arrogance and ill-judgement of prosecutors. The one that’s gone ahead, in New York, is the case of least national significance and no news: Donald Trump is a pig with women and a financial finagler. Stormy Daniels, on the stand, was more descriptive than required, and it actually isn’t nice to see a former president embarrassed in this way. On the other hand news reports reminded me of Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell: One would have to have a heart of stone to read it and not laugh.
I begin most days with John Ellis’s reliably brilliant daily newsletter, Political News Items. Six months ago he sensed that voters weren’t sold on the idea that what stands between them and the end of democracy was Joe Biden. He advised Democrats to offer “a variation on the theme”: “Trump is a one-man anxiety-creation machine.” He all but promises chaos with his late-night Truth Social screeds and menacing behavior. “Chaos is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s idea of his re-election campaign. It will continue because he enjoys it; enjoys testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior and seeing what happens when he does.” Democrats should hit hard there. “If the issue is Biden, defeat is certain.”
This week Mr. Ellis advanced the idea that Democrats home in not on Mr. Trump or his supporters but on MAGA-world. He may be half mad, but there’s often method to his madness. MAGA-world is just crazy, and dumb. Highlight the clown car with its “three stooges—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.” Not many people want them in the driver’s seat.
Mr. Ellis sees Mr. Biden struggling because “the two pillars” of his re-election effort are “tenuous at best.” The first is abortion. Mr. Ellis cites a CNN poll showing only 23% of voters say that a candidate must share their views on abortion. Abortion polled way down at 5% when respondents were asked the nation’s most urgent issues. The issue helps him, but not decisively.
As for the second pillar: “Is there anyone who believes that defending democracy can only be entrusted to an 82-year-old man of halting gait and declining ‘mental acuity,’ whom three-quarters of the American electorate view as incapable of serving effectively as president if re-elected?” That issue too can help him in November, but not decisively. “The Biden campaign needs a larger argument.”
Mr. Ellis writes that for Mr. Trump, his choice of vice president could be decisive.
My read on that question is that Mr. Trump tends to do what Mr. Trump does. In 2016 he picked Gov. Mike Pence because he needed a veteran officeholder who was demonstrably sane. Mr. Trump has since acquired his own political experience but still needs sane. He is said to want someone who would put personal loyalty over other loyalties, which limits the list. And as Mr. Biden has more donor money, Mr. Trump would want someone with lots of cash.
I saw the vice presidential choice as important but not crucial. Mr. Ellis sees otherwise. “One of the strongest (implicit) arguments for voting for Trump is the not unimaginable possibility that Biden will have a stroke or be otherwise brain-damaged (or dead) and thus be replaced by . . . Vice President Harris.” People regardless of political affiliation see her as not competent. She is far less a liability to Biden if Trump picks a running mate such as Gov. Kristi Noem, “a dog murdering nitwit.”
Mr. Trump needs someone with gravitas and stature.
Mr. Ellis puts forward Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, “a proven vote-getter in a blue-ish state,” who became wealthy in the private sector. “He’s personable and untainted by scandal. He’s not crazy but “steady and sturdy as they come.” This might impress those among “the roughly 300,000 voters in the seven or eight battlegrounds who’ll swing the election.”
I end with a word to Trump foes who hope he’ll be found guilty in the New York case and sentenced to prison time. They think this will finish him off. It will not.
Donald Trump doesn’t know it, but he will love prison. He’ll be the most specially treated convict in American history, better than the mob bosses in “Goodfellas.” He’ll be in his cell with his phone—he’ll get one—live-streaming and live-Truthing; he’ll be posing thumbs up in his uniform surrounded by gangbangers and white collar hoodlums. He’ll philosophize about how a lot of people in prison don’t deserve to be there, the system’s rigged, he’ll consider pardons. All convicts tell you that they were railroaded, but this will be new to Trump, he’ll believe them.
He’ll be the king of Rikers. He’ll say he’s learned a lot and the guards are all for Trump and he’s going to get out and reform the justice system. It will be fabulous for him. He’ll put himself as Martin Luther King and he’ll be writing Truths From the Birmingham Jail.
People forget: He loves this, loves the game, the drama, and the devil takes care of his own.