We, the people, are the Silent Majority
Most presidential elections are about issues: war, peace, the economy, race. The man who is more in touch with the greater body of the electorate on the issues wins.
This upcoming election is only tangentially about issues. Instead, more than any election in my lifetime, it is going to be about personality: and the personality of a single man, Donald J. Trump.
By November, the issues may be aligning favorably for Trump. The economy may well be sound: the stock markets seem remarkably resistant to the ravages of coronavirus so far, and as the country re-opens (let it be so!) unemployment will fall and people will be back at work, earning spending money.
The coronavirus will no doubt still be with us, but I have the feeling the country has gotten used to it, and I have to say that when Trump says, “We have to learn to live with it,” I largely agree. How could it be otherwise? We’ve been unable to tamp it out. It’s not going away anytime soon. So young people will continue to ignore it, by and large, while vulnerable populations—the elderly, mainly—will continue to socially distance and wear masks; and by November, I think that coronavirus will play little or no part in the electorate’s decision. Of course, Democrats will happily replay video of Trump saying cases will soon be down to zero, and Trump’s profound stupidity will impact a lot of people’s decision; but that has more to do with the “personality” issues I’m talking about than with the issue of coronavirus itself.
So, America could be in relatively good shape by November. Ordinarily that would redound to the benefit of the incumbent, but in this case, I don’t believe it will. Because all those extraordinary polls showing Trump losing to Biden, even in formerly red states, reflect a simple premise: the American people now know who Donald Trump is; they know what he is; they’re sickened by him, and want him out.
There’s nothing he can do about that. Lately, he’s seemed to acknowledge the fact that he’s widely loathed. The Supreme Court doesn’t like him, he whined, a startling admission from a narcissist who believes that everyone should love him. Trump reads the polls; he sees his numbers suffocating in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, even in red Ohio. Trump is not an intelligent man; he is not a reflective man; he doesn’t spend any time looking at himself in the mirror and trying to imagine how others see him. But Trump is a feral man, a calculating survivor who is governed by his reptilian brain, and he must know that, at this point, he would go down to ignominious defeat if the election were held tomorrow instead of Nov. 3. It is terribly difficult for Trump to grapple with a problem he cannot fix through his usual means of threats, bribes and lawsuits. Seldom in his life has he faced such defeat. True, he’s dealt with multiple bankruptcies, but painful as those must have been, they were but minor episodes in the greater catalog of his life. A casino here, a steak company there—what of it? The empire itself stood.
Not now. His empire totters like a Lego construction in an earthquake. And for the simplest reason: people do not like him. Not only do they dislike him, they loathe and pity him, and they want, more than anything else, for him to be gone. Conservatives know that a President Biden won’t be the worst thing that ever happened. He’s no Socialist; he’ll hold the line, which will be generally pro-business. But conservatives also know that, if Trump is re-elected, the Republican Party will have received its final nail in the coffin, and will be as dead as the Whig Party. This is why their thinking now goes like this: “Let Biden be elected. We’ll suffer a short-term defeat, but we’ll be able to rebuild the Republican Party post-Trump into the respectable organization it always used to be.”
After Trump’s defeat, we’ll have plenty of time to digest the whys and wherefores. Why did so many people who voted for him in 2016 turn against him? And it will come down to the simple question of his personality. Americans are sick and tired of the pathology that emanates from him constantly: the hatred and divisiveness, the megalomania, the lies, the corruption, and overt dog whistles to neo-nazis and white supremacists. Thirty-five or thirty-eight percent of the American people might like those dog whistles, but the rest of us don’t. We are the true “silent majority,” and We, the people, will throw Trump out of office in November.
Oh please, oh please, oh please be right.
I think I am. If enough young people vote, we’ll have a Democratic sweep.