And therein lies the main difference between us: I act logically, objectively and deal with facts--and occasionally even share them, as I'm about to do, even when I shouldn't--while you allow your emotions and biases to guide you into making ridiculous assumptions and statements like that above. And I'm going to prove it to you now. Today has been a very strange day. I was actually planning to post this here for you, personally, several hours ago, but then the news caused me all sorts of work.
About three hours before the news of Trump's diagnosis broke, I was on the phone with a longtime friend of mine in D.C. He's a former senior operative with the RNC (way above anything I ever was) and had a key titled role in Trump's 2016 campaign. He also passionately hates Trump. That's all I'll share about him. I will say that I trust his predictions absolutely, as he was one of the only operatives who was warning that Trump would win in 2016 and also predicted, to the percentage point, the midterm congressional elections and our losses in 2018. He'd heard through channels that I was involved last month in some ghostwriting efforts for anti-Trump op-eds encouraging GOP voters to dump Trump and reboot the party for 2022/2024 (which I was) and wanted to share what he recently learned. And believe me, you aren't going to get this information through your favored TDS networks like MSNBC or CNN.
1) Even before Tuesday's debates, the RNC's internal polling from September--which was not shared with anyone, even the Trump campaign until very recently--showed Trump had basically pissed away any momentum in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin and possibly Ohio, with Florida moving into toss-up category. Their models predict most of the key swing-states will go with Biden. That means it will be virtually impossible for Trump to get back to 270 electoral votes. That means he was done.
2) In the immediate aftermath of the debates and further internal polls, what little hope Trump had of pulling off a comeback vanished because his antics on Tuesday night effectively disintegrated what little support he still had with the extremely small slice of remaining undecideds and, more importantly, the independent, suburban, educated white (predominantly female) voters that propelled him to victory in the midwest four years ago. He was already done, but as was explained to me, it is now an absolute guarantee he will lose.
3) Far more troubling than Trump's political predicament, the latest RNC models also show the GOP losing their majority in the Senate. THAT, in my opinion, would be a fucking disaster because the Senate Democrats, still butthurt over Amy Barrett, will now have carte blanche to expand the bench (which RBG, herself, said was a horrible idea) and pack SCOTUS full of leftwing radicals. I've said it before, the presidential race doesn't mean shit compared to SCOTUS, and this, to me, is the most troubling news of all. On this, I sincerely hope my friend is wrong.
4) I'm told the atmosphere today at Trump HQ (before the diagnosis) was one of dead silent panic and quiet meltdown. All of the senior staff and advisers know the campaign is fucked and Trump is going to lose, but nobody wants to be the first person to utter the words and get blamed for the chaos. It's kinda like Clinton Campaign HQ on election night 2016, with all those pussy kids sobbing with their lips quivering but refusing to utter a single word for fear of the boogeyman appearing to inform them of the Trump victory.
Now, I don't pretend to know how Trump's COVID diagnosis will affect the race. To be perfectly honest, when the news came up on my screen the first thing I thought was that this was a bullshit campaign strategy to gin-up sympathy, buy Trump time to re-calibrate and, were I in charge of the hoax, I'd begin sending false updates about his conditioning worsening over the next few days, including a hospitalization, and then a miraculous recovery the week after and then Trump emerging victoriously from Walter Reed more energized and bombastic than ever. He gets sympathy, his COVID street cred goes through the roof, he proves he's a fighter. But that's just me being an old hack.
What I do think is that the few here who are celebrating over Trump's diagnosis should seriously do some soul-searching, because that puts you in the same class as the inbred degenerate southern sister-fuckers who were whooping it up when RBG was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Anyone shallow enough to let politics lead them to cheering because a 74yo man caught COVID in the middle of a pandemic has serious issues. It's like I've told every kid, intern or new staffer who ever worked for me on day one: "Don't let politics become personal. That clouds your judgment and then you're no good to me and then you're fucking fired." There were national-level political foes I worked against for years, writing some of the harshest, nastiest propaganda imaginable--some of my greatest work, honestly--but when a couple of them became seriously ill I still paid a visit to the hospital with the rest of my team, and when one of them passed I still attended the funeral. Be careful, because karma doesn't observe political affiliations and has a funny way of reappearing and at very inopportune times.
