A Complete Analysis Of Trump’s 197th Unpresidented Week As POTUS

Authoritarians strive to make people believe they are powerless. As much as Trump wants us to believe this, he's the one on the ropes.
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by: Ahmed Baba on November 1, 2020

Left: President Donald Trump – May 30, 2018, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci). Right: Protesters cheer at the Women’s March on Washington during the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Left: President Donald Trump – May 30, 2018, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci). Right: Protesters cheer at the Women’s March on Washington during the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Trump’s first major typo after winning the election was spelling Unprecedented incorrectly. He infamously tweeted “Unpresidented.” This typo is emblematic of his administration: An impulsive, frantically thrown together group of characters with virtually no oversight. After Trump was sworn in, I started writing the weekly “Unpresidented” column, analyzing every week of his presidency. This is week 197, the final week before election day.

If you’re anything like me, then you’ve spent the past few weeks doom-scrolling through Twitter. While we’ve all seen the promising polls, 2016 looms large in our psyche as well as the blatant voter intimidation and hundreds of Republican court cases seeking to undermine American democracy. Rather than come up with more popular policy stances, the GOP is doing everything they can to make it harder for you to vote. Their primary re-election strategy is opposition to democracy itself. But I’m writing this to tell you that in spite of all the obstacles Americans face, we can beat them.

It’s important to remember that a central strategy of authoritarians is to make the people believe they are powerless and their vote won’t count. So rather than use this piece to make a final case against President Trump, I thought I’d talk about why I think Joe Biden will win and Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the election will, like every other venture in his life, fail. We all need a little dose of optimism these days, right?

This weekend, Axios dropped a report that seemingly confirmed our worst fears: that President Trump plans to announce himself the victor on election night if he leads key swing states, even as votes are continuing to be counted. This raised alarms, as Americans took to social media to express their dismay. Trump’s strategy has been clear for months:

  1. Lie about voter fraud in mail-in ballots (there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud).
  2. Push his base to vote in person while Democrats vote by mail.
  3. Sabotage the USPS and slow down mail so fewer ballots are received by Election Day.
  4. Falsely declare victory on Election Day based on the in-person vote count.
  5. Challenge ballots counted after Election Day in the Supreme Court.

Here’s why I think it backfired. President Trump undermined this strategy by telling on himself like a comic book villain. Over the Summer, Trump openly announced his intent to sabotage the USPS in order to stop mail-in ballots. After RBG died, Trump openly said he wanted to fill the vacancy because he wanted someone to rule on his behalf at the Supreme Court. He’s gone as far as saying the Supreme Court will declare him the winner and he wants the counting of votes to stop on election night. Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

Democratic voters responded to this with huge early turnout, standing in lines from the moment early voting began. They’ve been getting mail ballots in early and voting in-person in larger numbers than expected, given Trump’s targeting of the USPS turned some away from mail-in voting. During October, Joe Biden has held a stead 8-10 point national lead in polling averages and leads in multiple swing states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Nevada, Nebraska’s 2nd district, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and more. Over 90 million Americans have already voted early during these polling leads. There was no Comey letter to erode Biden’s polling and Trump’s Hunter Biden smears failed, only highlighting his own corruption.

President Trump is also losing in a key demographic he won by huge margins in 2016: seniors. There’s also the fact Trump has continued to bleed support among suburban women that bolstered the blue wave in 2018. Of course, we all have a distrust of polling, but polling methodology has drastically improved since 2016 and was largely correct in 2018. Polls now weigh education levels and have made other tweaks in their sampling. Even if polling is as wrong as it was in 2016, as The New York Times’ Nate Cohn notes, Biden would still be ahead in enough states to make it well over 270 electoral votes. Even if Trump managed to win Pennsylvania, Biden has other paths to 270 in Nebraska’s 2nd with Arizona or even North Carolina.

Wide Democratic margins, early Biden leads, or wins in early announced states like North Carolina would thwart any Trump attempts to announce himself the winner the night of the election. On top of that, the media won’t play ball. In 2000, Al Gore had to deal with the perception he lost because the media reversed their Florida projection and Fox News declared Bush the winner. That stench of loss hung over Gore’s recount efforts. That won’t happen this time. News orgs and social media companies are prepared for Trump’s false declaration of victory and have already been making contingency plans for this.

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If a challenge does make it up to the Supreme Court, Trump’s arguments are all predicated on pure lies. Would they really throw out legitimate ballots with zero evidence? Not likely. For the same reasons I believe Attorney General William Barr hasn’t falsely charged Biden, I don’t think SCOTUS would side with Trump based on lies. Chief Justice Roberts cares about his legacy. Trump’s public pressure taints any pro-Trump moves they could make. But again, if the margins are wide enough and in enough states, Trump would need to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots in multiple states to win. The decentralized nature of how America runs our state elections also makes this plot more difficult for him. He’s corrupted much of America, but enough of it.

I know all that sounds optimistic, but I think the most likely outcome is that Trump’s efforts to steal the election will fail, and his whining will ultimately just serve as an excuse for his loss. The real danger, in my opinion, comes from how his base will react to his loss. They’re already driving around the country blocking traffic and trying to drive a Biden campaign bus off the road, which Trump praised as “patriots.” There’s no telling what Trump’s base will do or what extremists like the white supremacist Proud Boys, who Trump asked to “stand by,” will do.

President Trump wants us to think he’s all-powerful but he’s not. If you want an indication of his growing weakness, look no further than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rebuffing Trump’s attempt to get a stimulus deal done, and instead opting to sabotage the incoming Biden admin’s economy. Their sudden re-embrace of “fiscal conservativism” speaks volumes and echoes 2008.

President Trump has been an incredibly incompetent wannabe autocrat. He doesn’t have the brains or popularity to pull off the feats required to steal this election unilaterally. Look no further than his closing message for evidence of his lack of intelligence. In this final week, Trump decided to focus on Hunter Biden and on trying to gaslight Americans about COVID-19. Trump repeatedly asserted that we are “rounding the turn,” despite the record high daily case count continuing to hover around 100,000. Donald Trump Jr. even said that the deaths were down to “almost nothing,” the same day that we hit 1,000 deaths. These COVID-19 surges were a flashing light reminder of the greatest failure of his presidency.

While they were downplaying the pandemic, we learned more about the scope of COVID-19 outbreaks Trump has sparked. Stanford University economists found that “President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies between June and September may have caused some 30,000 coronavirus infections and more than 700 deaths…” Those aren’t the only health threats Trump’s rallies have caused. In Omaha, Trump left hundreds of his supported stranded in the freezing cold, causing some to go to the hospital. In Tampa, multiple Trump supporters were hospitalized due to the heat. Trump is a public health risk.

President Trump also spent time this week smearing frontline health workers. Trump claimed that doctors are inflating COVID-19 deaths because they get more money. That’s an absolute lie.  Trump has been repeatedly smearing health workers and, at the same time, trying to erase those who died of COVID-19. The audacity. The shamelessness and indecency within Trump to so callously defame doctors and the dead… I still haven’t lost my capacity for shock in this administration.

President Trump’s closing weeks was a microcosm of his failed presidency. Trump was anti-science, indifferent to human suffering, calling for his political targets to be imprisoned, and being blatantly indecent. Trump needs to lose by such a historic landslide that the entire GOP has to soul-search, and the public can begin the process of shunning Trump and the depravity that he represents. That is entirely possible and in your hands. Get out there and vote.

Let’s dive into the final week before the election. Next time I write to you, we will be in a much different world. Godspeed.

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Unpresidented // 2020 / Authoritarianism / Donald Trump / Elections / Joe Biden
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by: Ahmed Baba

Ahmed Baba is the Co-Founder and President of Rantt. Writer of Unpresidented, Ahmed documented and analyzed every day of the Trump presidency. He's also a columnist at The Independent and his work has been cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Blavity, Newsweek, The Telegraph, and more. He can be reached at [email protected] or found on Twitter @AhmedBaba_.

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