What the last four years have proven is that if you listen closely enough to President Donald Trump, he often accidentally reveals a deeper truth about his time in the White House — and his campaign for a second term, which, win or lose, ends today.
Which is exactly what happened on Monday night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in Trump’s penultimate campaign rally of the 2020 race.
“This isn’t about — yeah, it is about me, I guess, when you think about it,” Trump mused to the packed crowd.
You can see what happened here. Trump likely had prepared remarks that said something like “This election isn’t about me — it’s about you and what kind of future you will have.”
Which is a line politicians use all the time because they believe that it conveys that their run for president isn’t solely about their own personal ambition or desires, but rather about what’s best for the country.
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Except that Trump can’t a) stick to the script or b) avoid saying whatever happens to flash through his mind at that very moment. And so, he flips the script to make the exact opposite point that his speechwriter would have wanted: That the election is, in fact, all about him.
Which is 100% true. And if you believe national and swing-state polling, that is a very bad thing for the incumbent. A majority of Americans neither like Donald Trump personally nor approve of the job he is doing. And the way in which Trump has conducted himself as president as well as the way he has positioned himself in his reelection campaign have made it clear that this is — and always has been — about him and him alone.
Remember that when he accepted the party’s nomination at the 2016 GOP convention, Trump uttered these now-infamous words: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
Which is a bold statement! Out of the 330-plus million people in the United States, Trump offered himself up as the only person able to fix what ails not just Washington, DC, but the country at large.
That titanic level of self-regard has carried over to how Trump has acted in the White House over these past four years. Trump refers to “my generals” and “my military.” He expresses exasperation that the Justice Department doesn’t do enough of his personal bidding — and that, when they do, they didn’t announce their findings on his timeline. (“Boy, the food in this place is terrible! And such small portions!“)
The point here is that Trump has made every moment of his time in the White House about himself. He has turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality rather than a group of people gathered around a set of shared ideological principles. He has weaponized race for his own political purposes.
In short: Every strand of the last four years in Washington connect directly back to Donald Trump. That’s the way he wanted it. But it may well be the root of his political demise, too.
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