Donald Trump’s collapse
It’s easy to fall into the paradoxical trap of simultaneously believing your adversary is a complete idiot, and believing your adversary has something brilliant up his sleeve. For instance, we’ve spent four years watching Trump and his underlings ineptly botch nearly everything they’ve tried to do. Not only did they tragically botch the pandemic, they’ve botched most of their own corrupt schemes as well. Yet because Trump hadn’t yet taken a fall, we were convinced that there must have been a secret evil genius plan in place keeping him afloat.
Now that Trump has run a massively incompetent reelection campaign and lost in a blowout accordingly, only to turn around and blow the “contesting the election” thing even more ineptly, it should be sinking in that there never was a plan. Trump is a fading doofus surrounded by bumbling doofuses, all of whom are evil, none of whom are particularly savvy. There, obviously, never was a viable plan to get reelected or to remain in power.
It’s a reminder that being evil and highly motivated isn’t enough on its own to get you where you want to go; you still have to figure out how to pull it off. Trump and his people bet all their chips on the Post Office shutdown and the Hunter Biden laptop, and when those two plans predictably went nowhere, it turned out they didn’t have a Plan C. They just aren’t very good at this.
The real kicker is when you step back and realize that the inept idiots who ran the Trump 2020 campaign into the ground are largely the same inept idiots that Trump kept close while he was in office. In other words, they were never really doing anything to keep Trump afloat all that time. There was no master plan at work. Trump accidentally tripped his way into the White House thanks to the last minute Comey letter, and then he spent four years just barely limping by while the protections built into the office kept him from falling through a trap door.
Donald Trump has done extraordinary damage in office. He’s gotten a quarter million Americans killed. He’s tanked the economy. He’s broken up families. He’s harmed America’s standing around the world. And so on. But it’s time we look back and acknowledge that this guy never did have some master plan. If he did, he’d have won reelection. But he missed that by about six million votes. In the end, we defeated him – both because we’re savvier and we wanted it more, and because he never really did have a coherent gameplan one way or the other. Now he’s facing prison and bankruptcy, as we look to rebuild our country.
