One of the odd things about the Trump presidency is that a lot of his actions and words are so demonstrably stupid that there is really no need for further analysis. His intimation that the election needs to be moved back over concerns of fraudulent mail-in balloting is so bereft of any constitutional or legal legitimacy that there really is no need for a deep dive analysis. Senator Jim Lankford’s reply back to The Dispatch for comment on the story, which is also the title of this post, is really all that needs to be said.
The only thing to ponder is why? Why did President Trump tweet out those words? What was the master strategy?
Here’s the thing: there was no strategy other than perhaps distracting away from the terrible 2nd quarter GDP numbers. But if that was the strategy, it was an altogether bad strategy. The economic numbers are indeed terrible, but no intellectually honest person can really blame President Trump for them. On the other hand, going out and confirming some of the worst fears (which even those among some of his fiercest critics have dismissed) of his opponents strikes me as spectacularly unwise.
It’s incomprehensible that after five years his cheering section still thinks of Trump as some grand master strategist who is playing 100-dimensional (or more) chess. He’s really not. What he is is a lucky man who conned millions of Americans into thinking he actually cared about the things they cared about and would actually do something about those issues, who lucked into a divided GOP field that licked the will to unite behind a single anti-Trump candidate, and then lucked into a general election running against someone almost as despised as he was.
You keep looking for absolute bottoms with this presidency, and just when you think you’ve found it, he manages to dig another couple of layers.
Letters from Cato 