www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21303547/donald-trump-2020-polls-coronavirus-biden-reelection-losing
...“Ignore the polls,” Biden tweeted on Wednesday. “Register to vote.”
There’s something to that attitude. Polling, at this point, should be taken as information, not as prediction. But the information it offers is real: Trump’s political position is collapsing. Biden has doubled his lead since the beginning of February, and it’s not because he’s been dominating the airwaves. It’s because Trump has betrayed the first commandment of running for reelection: First, govern well.
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In 2016, Trump ran as an outsider because he was an outsider. He had never been a mayor, a member of Congress, or a governor; there was no record of governance for him to defend. He experienced politics as many Americans do — as televised entertainment — and brought the skills of a television reality star to the campaign. It was enough.
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Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president.
Every insider account of Trump’s presidency — from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to Bob Woodward’s Fear to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s A Very Stable Genius to Anonymous’s A Warning to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged to John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened — has painted fundamentally the same picture: a chaotic, lawless administration orbiting around a reckless, distractible, corrupt, overmatched, and disinterested chief executive.
There is no secret being revealed here. These insider accounts match what is on display, daily, for the public.
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...Trump is holding rallies maskless and settling old scores on social media. It is, to put it generously, a strategy against self-interest. And it suggests that what Trump did in 2016 was not a strategy at all: It was his sole way of being in the world, a mode that happened to match that moment, even as it’s failing him in this one.
“What does the dog do when it catches the car?” asks Levin. “Turns out the dog just keeps running and barking. I had this thought in the Lafayette Square madness. Trump puts on this show. And then he gets there and has nothing to do. He’s just standing there. His whole presidency is like that.”