It could have been so easy for Trump

Obsessed with loyalty and the grift, Trump missed his chance to borrow his way to reelection

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He started off on day one with the unquestioning support and adulation of his base, and if he had played things right, that would have been enough.

Remember when he bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”?  He said that during the campaign.  He was right then, and he was even more right after he won in 2016.  He had everything it took to win in 2020 the day he took the oath of office.  In fact, he declared for re-election the day after his inauguration and started raising money, which flooded his campaign coffers to overflowing. 

All Donald Trump had to do was sit back and do what he had always done best:  borrow money and waste it on crap that didn’t matter and didn’t work because his base didn’t care.  They would have been happy if all he did for the next four years was own the libs, because that’s all they elected him for anyway.

He got a good start with his lopsided tax cut that gave away billions to the very wealthy while convincing his base that because the tax cut didn’t benefit the poor, it didn’t matter, because the Blacks would be hurt by it.  And cutting taxes owned the libs.

In foreign affairs, all he had to do was go along with the boring, do-nothing, hawkish Republican establishment, because all that stuff overseas was their bailiwick, and he didn’t give a damn about any of it anyway.  Nothing would have happened.  “Putting America first” could have meant “let Russia be Russia,” or “let the European Union stew in its own juices.”  Who cared?  He didn’t.  Neither did his base.  Everyone would have been happy.  Plus:  own the libs.

All he had to do when it came to domestic stuff was do what he did, but with half-way competent people.  He could have done even more damage to the environment if he hadn’t put that corrupt nincompoop Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA.  Even fewer Black and Brown people would have been educated and given the tools necessary to compete with Trump’s low-intelligence, low-income base if he had put someone who could accurately recite the ABC’s at the Department of Education rather than that gold-plated ignorant fool, Betsy DeVos.  He could have turned over even more national monuments to the big oil and gas companies if he hadn’t appointed that corrupt idiot Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior.  He flubbed so many moves to privatize federal lands and turn Native American burial grounds into toxic waste dumps, it left him vulnerable to lawsuits that got them overturned in court. 

But Trump’s cabinet secretaries kept chartering Gulfstreams on the tax payers’ dime and running up thousand dollar tabs at Georgetown eateries and taking overseas trips on “official business” that included stops in Paris and the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.  So Trump’s cabinet was  investigated and indicted and fired, and he ended up with an entire government run by acting deputy assistant coffee boys like Ken Cuccinelli and even lower forms of administrative life. They were of course even more incompetent than the empty suits with mail-order degrees they replaced.  None of them could ruin things fast enough or competently enough to keep out of trouble and get the job done.  Trump’s base thought they were going to see an Exxon sign on the Bears Ears Monument.  Now that would have owned the libs!  When it didn’t happen, they started to wonder why. 

When COVID came calling, all Trump had to do was turn the whole mess over to the pointy-headed intellectuals and scientists and keep his hands away from the inevitable disaster that ensued.  Instead, he put himself in charge and dominated the news cycle as PPE and ventilators were sold to the highest bidder and the bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks parked outside overwhelmed hospitals.  By the time he decided it was time to start blaming everyone else and “open up,” he was so desperate that he was hawking needles filled with bleach and the My Pillow Guy’s magic cure that was boiled down from a poison plant.

But like the luck of any grifter, he had one last chance to turn a card and win the election.  He could have waited until the pain from the COVID disaster had taken hold a second time, which conveniently enough was right after the grim summer surge, right in time for the campaign to heat up in the Fall.  Then he could have used his clout with the base to force the Congress to print about $5 trillion, and then start throwing borrowed money away like a drunken real estate mogul, which he was, except for the drunken part.  Fill people’s bank accounts with Trump stimulus checks, Trump unemployment, and Trump small business grants and loans, cancel income and payroll taxes, have a few rallies, and golf his way into another four years of fleecing the treasury and owning the libs.

Instead, like he did with the people he appointed to run his government, he picked people just like himself to run his campaign – corrupt, grasping grifters like Brad Parscale, because they were the only people he understood and wasn’t threatened by.  He thought he could depend on them to be loyal to him and to no one else.  Screw all those senators and their campaigns out there in the sticks!  Screw the national party! The thing that would win for Trump was loyalty – the loyalty of his MAGA worshiping base, the loyalty of his factotums like Hope Hicks and Mark Meadows and his obedient little son-in-law, Jared.

Paranoid, resentful, obsessed with loyalty, Trump learned a bitter lesson.  It turns out that the kind of loyalty you can buy is so cheap, the paint flakes off and the wheels go flat just when you're about to turn into the driveway of a second term in the White House. He may have owned the libs, but in the White House, he was just a renter.

As it turned out, there were more of the disloyal than there were of the loyal, and in the end, their anger and disloyalty was stronger than the adulation of Trump’s base and their loyalty.  The base was so pleased with the monster they had created and devoted themselves to that they mistook the image of themselves they saw in the mirror for a real president, when all he was was Donald Trump.