Steve Benen is puzzled over the behavior of Trump towards the various 2017 special elections:
Over the holiday weekend, the president did it again.
“Remember, the Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional races this year. In Senate, I said Roy M would lose in Alabama and supported Big Luther Strange – and Roy lost. Virginia candidate was not a ‘Trumper,’ and he lost. Good Republican candidates will win BIG!”
To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, every assertion in that tweet was wrong. For example, Trump never predicted Moore’s defeat, at least not publicly. Virginia’s Ed Gillespie, who wasn’t a congressional candidate this year, went out of his way to run a Trump-style, anti-immigration campaign, which played a big role in his nine-point defeat. …
For those eager to argue that a 5-2 record in congressional special election is pretty good, that’s fine. Barack Obama’s Democratic Party actually went 5-0 in the first year of his presidency, the year before a Republican wave ended the Dems’ House majority, but GOP partisans looking for good news can find some if they look hard enough. (They should probably ignore how surprisingly competitive the Democratic candidates were in this year’s Republican victories.)
What they shouldn’t do, however, is put Democratic victories in some kind of blind spot. Responsible parties examine defeats and try to learn from them; they don’t pretend the losses never occurred.
Right. For those of us concerned with reality and truth, this doesn’t make sense. But that’s not Trump nor the GOP – although since this is a Trump Tweet, that’s who we should focus on. It’s been said many times Trump is a branding guy, and this is a branding effort.
A brand is a club, basically – and who wants to belong to a losing club? This is how you attract people to a brand, by being a winning club – or, in Trump’s world, making it seem like a winning club. This is what he does, he spreads a patina of success over everything he does, with no regard to its relationship to reality. He’s the worst caricature of the conscience-less marketeer, the patent-medicine huckster, the homeopathic vendor, who doesn’t care if you die of your mistaken allegiance – for him, it’s all about him and his success.
So he proclaims his brand is 5-0 in special elections. No surprise. Sounds better than 5-2. And for those voters who suckle at his Twitter nozzle, gulping down the President’s verified fake news with little regard to reality, this is what gets their dopamine levels up in their brains, the idea that their brand is WINNING!
But if you’re a Trump voter and want to know the truth, here it is:
- In the most conservative state in the union, Trump lost. He lost backing a candidate who is arguably even more Trumpian than Trump.
- The Democrats won a seat they already held, easily.
- And in this link Steve covers 4 of the 5 wins for the Republicans. The summary? Each victory was far closer than the previous election for each seat, even though each was considered a “safe” Republican seat. I expect at least three of the five to flip in the midterm elections.
If my reader is Trumpian, you may think the numbers are favorable, even if Trump is misstating the fact of the matter, but I think a peek behind the curtain shows another Trump club going up in flames, much like his Trump University. If being part of clubs is your thing, is this a good club to join?
