A campaign with no ideas, and little hope for winning the conventional way, resorts to skulduggery.
One year ago, the dominant slogan of the 2020 presidential campaign was Elizabeth Warren’s wonky “I have a plan for that.”
For Donald Trump’s reelection effort it’s “I got nothing.”
I’m not exaggerating. Trump’s campaign website features not one policy objective or proposal for a second term. Instead, it offers a litany of promises that the president has allegedly kept, including the boast that under Trump’s watch “U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has soared” and “the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest point in 50 years.”
I’m guessing the website hasn’t been updated in a few months.
When asked in June by Trump whisperer Sean Hannity about his second-term plans, the president drew a blank.
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At least back in 2016, Trump had a platform, however awful: building a wall, banning Muslims from entering the country, and renegotiating trade deals. This time he’s not even wasting his time with (mostly) empty promises.
And it’s not just Trump who has no ideas. It’s his whole party.
In the midst of the worst public health and economic crisis since the 1930s, the GOP is largely sitting this one out. Senate Republicans, who have spent the past year and a half padding the federal bench with conservative judges and doing little else, haven’t even managed to bring the latest proposed round of coronavirus relief to a vote. Indeed, the Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t participating in the talks between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and White House officials.
A party that 25 years ago claimed the mantle of the “party of ideas” has become the party of no ideas. So what is the Trump-GOP plan? Rather than run for election this fall, they are trying to steal it.
For months now Trump has attempted to delegitimize mail-in voting, worried that if more people have a chance to exercise their franchise, it will be bad for him and his party. On Tuesday, his campaign actually sued the state of Nevada over plans to mail an absentee ballot to every voter in the state.
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On top of all this, the president’s newly appointed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy (a wealthy Trump campaign donor), is operating with an apparent mandate to cripple the post office, just as the largest mail-in election in American history approaches. Over the last several weeks, DeJoy has put in place cost-saving measures that have led to significant delays in mail delivery. If mail is delayed, it means that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots could arrive after Election Day. And in many swing states that don’t accept ballots after Election Day, that means they won’t be counted. One almost has to respect the brazenness of the effort: Trump can’t stop mail-in voting, so now his minions are simply trying to slow the mail down.
The irony of Trump’s war on mail-in voting is that it seems to be having its greatest effect on, of all voters, Republicans. GOP officials in battleground states are reporting that their own supporters are unwilling to vote by mail, in part because of Trump’s denunciations.
Republicans have been enacting voter ID laws and curtailing early voting efforts for years in a bid to keep Democratic-leaning voters away from the polls. This year, they’re getting even more creative. There is growing evidence that Republican operatives, including a lawyer who previously worked for the Trump campaign, are doing all they can to boost the nascent presidential campaign of rapper Kanye West. If the GOP can’t convince Black voters to support the party, getting a high-profile Black entertainer on the ballot to try to siphon votes away from Joe Biden is apparently the next best thing.
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These efforts at electoral skulduggery underscore the Republican Party’s larger problem: If more people voting means your party is less likely to win, and if creative policy-making has been replaced by crafty vote-rigging, it would suggest that as a political party, the GOP may not have its finger on the pulse of the electorate — or have any idea how to apply it.
It was only a few weeks ago that Trump mused about delaying the election (an idea that was quickly, and thankfully, rejected by other Republican leaders). But who knows what else he might try to do between now and Election Day? Station ICE agents at polling locales to intimidate some Latino voters into staying home? Claim that if there is no declared winner on election night, state legislators — particularly those in the majority in red states — should pick their own electors to send to the Electoral College? Order the Department of Homeland Security to seize mail-in ballots because of alleged irregularities?
All of this may sound far-fetched. But with the president seemingly engineering a slowdown of the mail to aid his reelection, would you bet against further escalation? The polls suggest Trump is unlikely to win reelection in November. But it’s increasingly clear that he has one plan left: Burn the country down trying.
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Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.
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Trump’s plan for reelection: thievery - The Boston Globe
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