Trump botched America’s pandemic response. His second term would be even more disastrous

I think it’s important to remind yourself of the basics. In the case of Donald Trump’s campaign, the basic good-faith question is: why does he want his old job back? Indeed, he wants the job from which he was fired. What’s he going to do right this time that he did wrong last time?

Why was Trump fired? That’s debatable, but I don’t think there’s any question that his mismanagement of the covid pandemic was the deciding factor in why a majority of the electorate chose his opponent.

More than a million Americans got sick and died. Many of those deaths were preventable. Unemployment soared. So did rates of crime, including murder. The economy seemed to come close to collapse, as did society generally. Everyone was miserable from being in isolation.

That wasn’t the problem. All presidents need grace from the public while facing national emergencies. The problem was Trump’s lying about how bad it was, covering up his incompetence, negligence and harmful choices, his scapegoating of others to mask his deficiencies and refusing on every level to be held accountable democratically.

“I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said in March 2020.

Incumbents are almost always reelected. They have to do something pretty bad to get axed. In Trump’s case, voters were spoiled for choice, but it was the covid that sealed his fate. He botched it. He was fired.

And now he wants his job back.

You would think, as a man who committed a firing offense, that Trump would come to the American people with his (red maga) hat in hand to acknowledge what he did wrong, take responsibility, and promise to do everything in his power to make things right if given a second chance.

I’m going to pause while I wait for you to stop laughing.

Feel better?

Trump could do all that while changing virtually nothing about his current campaign objectives, which is to turn the president into the Great Satan of America. He could ask for forgiveness while accusing Joe Biden of stealing the 2020 election, rigging his felony conviction and otherwise sending the country down the road to perdition.

Admittedly, this would be a giant act of cognitive dissonance. How could he be contrite while also vindictive? This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. What’s a little more cognitive dissonance going to do?

Trump isn’t doing that, obviously. What’s not obvious, however, is he seems to be going in the opposite direction of someone who made a mistake, was punished for it and is now seeking redemption. Indeed, I haven’t seen press coverage that fully reflects just how deranged his bid for a second chance has become. Instead of promising to succeed where he failed last time, Trump is, well, um, promising to fail again.

"I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

Trump said that Tuesday in Wisconsin. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. According to Steve Benen, “the line was familiar. After all, the Republican recently peddled the identical line in Michigan. And Florida. And Washington, D.C. And Texas, Minnesota, and New Jersey. And Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia. And that's just recently.”

He’s said the same thing “word for word, for over a year,” Benen added. “Every time, his base applauds, offering timely reminders that Trump often takes his cues from his followers, as opposed to the other way around. Far-right voters oppose life-saving vaccines, so the Republican candidate is only too pleased to tell them what they want to hear.”

Expect more of this, because, with vaccines, Trump is most vulnerable to Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent presidential candidate who regularly draws about 9 percent of the public’s attention. Kennedy is a well-known vaccine conspiracist. If Trump doesn’t come out hard and harder on vaccines, all vaccines, he risks Kennedy eating into his base.

If Trump loses even a fraction of his base, he’s in trouble, because he has done nothing – stress on nothing – to expand his base, and he’s done nothing – stress on nothing – to expand his base, because he refuses to take responsibility for botching the covid pandemic.

Trump can’t or won’t concede that he’s anything less than perfect, practically a demi-god, to non-base voters who might see nobility in a man’s act of admitting when he’s wrong. To his base, he’s promising failure, because it wants failure, and he’s eager to promise failure, even if that alienates non-base voters, whom he needs to win and who will recoil at the notion of renewed pandemic, because, as a child, his dad didn’t love him enough and his need for attention is now sociopathic.

As I said, it’s important to remind yourself of the basics. In the case of Trump’s base, these are people who love the idea of stripping federal funding from schools that require life-saving vaccines for students but who were themselves saved from the pandemic, that their nominee mismanaged, by life-saving vaccines. They love the idea of making perceived enemies suffer, though it risks their own suffering.

A normal candidate would promise success.

Trump is promising failure.

If that sounds crazy, it is.