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If Trump loses tonight or in the coming weeks, there will be a lot of excuse-making from the right. Media didn’t cover him fairly. COVID was an insurmountable act of God. Etc. But the president owns his fate.
Weeks after taking the oath, he sacrificed a chance to triangulate/make his populist crossover agenda concrete by working on infrastructure. Instead, he pursued the travel ban debacle.
He latched onto every polarizing controversy he could, and he turned every gaffe or misstatement into a three-day news cycle. The guy went to the mats against his own Pentagon in defense of Confederate-named forts! How many people vote on that??
He backed dead-enders like Joe Arpaio for no reason other than they flattered his ego. And when his party lost control of Congress after one cycle, Trump didn’t pivot or rebrand—he doubled down.
Even when the pandemic hit, the president took the opportunity of the goodwill he was generating (apparent in a modest bounce in his job approval ratings), he blew it by overpromising and under-delivering.
And when the violence and rioting erupted—a lifeline that only the most maladroit politician could squander—he failed to capitalize on public apprehension over violent crime. He couldn’t even accurately restate the issue during the debate. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/noah-rothman/trump-lets-conservatives-down-again/
So, yes, there will be a strong desire on the right to absolve Trump of blame. And he got some bad breaks in 2020. But you make your own luck, and Trump’s GOP has had a lot of bad luck these last four years. The blame falls squarely on the principal.
