President Trump's relentless focus on the most dire public health and economic crises in modern U.S. history must be excruciatingly stressful to him, which is surely why he took a short break Monday night to unleash an insane rant about a digital ad.
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That rant comes as new reporting indicates that Trump is rebooting his reelection strategy, to move past the coronavirus and on to his plans to rebuild our economy in spectacular fashion.
But if you unpack the argument in Trump's rant — yes, there really is an argument there — it actually points to profound weaknesses in his new reelection message, in a way that makes a real statement about the past decade of the U.S. politics.
Trump's Twitter explosion was directed at a brutal new ad created by the Never Trump Republicans at the Lincoln Project. Trump hurled childish insults at the group, which includes George Conway, husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
Trump raged that he is a winner, while they are “LOSERS" who represented the GOP that Barack Obama beat in 2008 and 2012. In the 2016 primaries, Trump saw it, they “got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer.”
In contrast to those losers, Trump smoked, he delivered for the GOP: two Supreme Court justices and the “biggest EVER Tax & Regulation cuts.”
But this very boast on taxes and regulations shows why Trump's reelection case is so weak. It's a reminder that as president, he fully embraced GOP plutocracy and sold out on the sham economic populism that, by his own mythology, enabled him to outdo all those Republicans. He is revealing the corrupt bargain he has since made with conservative economic elites.
The original idea was that Trump would win reelection in spite of that enormous betrayal. He would coast on the good economy he largely inherited, and falsely give his policies credit for it, thus obscuring their true plutocratic nature, paving the way for more plutocracy to come.