Editor’s Note: Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 and served as a counselor to Clinton in the White House. He is the author of the new book, “You’re Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.
Splitting the atom changed everything, Einstein reputedly said, except the way we think.
Covid-19 has changed nearly everything about America: how we live, work, learn, eat, vacation, entertain, interact. More than 4.6 million Americans infected, nearly 160,000 killed, millions of jobs lost. It’s changed everything – except the way President Donald Trump thinks. His lack of adaptability, and his presumptive rival Joe Biden’s openness to change, are fundamentally altering the contours of campaign 2020.
The novel coronavirus has robbed Trump of two of his greatest assets.
First, he can no longer convince people that politics is merely spectacle. Before the pandemic, his entertainment skills helped lead many Americans to conclude that politics was theater: an overhyped, cartoonish play in which a brutish lout gets to say rude things about people you dislike.
“Owning the libs” was enough of a goal for many Trump supporters. Trump’s theatrical talent, honed by years on television, lulled some folks into seeing politics as merely show business for ugly people. (I should know: I’m the guy who coined that phrase.)
No more. Trump picking a Twitter war with, say, Chrissy Teigen now comes with a cost: the sense that the President isn’t responding to the crisis.
People are dying. Morgues are overflowing. Small businesses are collapsing. There is less appetite for low burlesque at a time of high mortality.
Second, Trump has lost his ability to divert. It had been his superpower. He was the master of using division for diversion. When GDP numbers in July showed a catastrophic collapse, Trump mused on Twitter about postponing the election.
The tweet was shocking. But it didn’t work. The collapsing economy still led the news.
In fact, Trump’s move backfired on him. The co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, Steven Calabresi, who had supported Trump, called it “fascistic” and grounds for Trump’s impeachment and removal.
When you’ve failed to move the spotlight off the collapsing economy but succeeded in alienating the co-founder of the Federalist Society, you’ve got a problem.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, has shown impressive adaptability. He is a natural candidate, a glad-handing, back-slapping, high-fiving retail politician. But Covid-19 took him off the trail, robbed him of that asset and left him talking to the camera from his basement in Delaware.
He retooled his campaign.
Having faced more personal loss than any person should ever have to endure – he lost his first wife and daughter in a car crash, and one of his surviving sons later died from brain cancer – Biden tapped his vast reservoir of empathy, telling the families of those who’ve lost loved ones, “To all of you hurting so badly, I’m so sorry for your loss. This nation grieves with you.” In a video, he said, “I think I know what you’re feeling. You feel like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest. It’s suffocating.”
His message was heartfelt and heartbreaking. He knows to the depth of his marrow how painful this is.
Biden also released details last month about how he will, in his words, “Build back better.” His plan is a progressive version of Buy American – leveraging federal power to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, and investing heavily in research and development.
Standing in Dunmore, Pennsylvania – not far from his hometown of Scranton – Biden made a direct economic populist pitch: “If I’m fortunate enough to be elected president, I’ll be laser-focused on working families, the middle-class families that I came from.” He also pledged to raise corporate taxes, which were slashed radically under Trump.
“The days of Amazon paying nothing in federal income tax will be over,” he said.
Trump, on the other hand, could not offer a single policy goal for his second term when asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity in late June. Instead of talking about, ohhh, I dunno, fixing our damaged public health infrastructure, or putting people back to work, Trump produced a veritable cornucopia of blather.
Here is part of it, each word chasing the previous one to a destination visible only to the addle-brained: “Well, one of the things that will be really great, you know the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s an – a very important meaning.”
Get our free weekly newsletter
Perhaps pleased with this palaver, he went on: “I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our First Lady and I say, ‘This is great.’ But I didn’t know very many people in Washington. It wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration.”
Again, the question that produced this stream of idiocy was: “What are your top priority items for a second term?”. Nothing here about how he’ll help Americans. Nothing about health care. Nothing about jobs or the environment or education, or fighting racism. It was all about him. At a time when we’re seeking empathy, he gives us narcissism.
We have a long way to go in this election, but if Mr. Trump is to prevail, he will have to do something he has thus far been unable to do: stop being a reality TV host, and start adapting to the new reality. If he doesn’t, tens of millions of Americans will be only too glad to turn the channel and bid him goodbye with a famous TV catch phrase: “You’re fired.”