Trump fears the American people are about to tell him: ‘YOU’RE FIRED!’
The man who devotes every second of his waking life to the obsessive pursuit of winning is staring down the barrel of an election loss in four weeks that could be a total blow-out. A new CNN/SSR poll published yesterday revealed he’s 16 points behind his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. And the network’s poll of polls puts Biden’s lead at 11 points. He’s draining support from seniors and women in particularly alarming fashion and if things get much worse, Trump could even end up being the new Walter Mondale, who was obliterated in 49 out of 50 states by Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election. Of course, Trump was trailing badly in the polls before the 2016 election too. Then, I felt the polls were wrong. I was filming down in Texas and Florida at the time and could sense the Trump Train was steaming powerfully towards the White House, so repeatedly predicted a shock win. But this feels different. Very different. Trump’s not the renegade outsider now, promising to smash everything up and ‘Make America Great Again.’ He’s the incumbent President who’s smashed everything up… and made America a lot worse. The country is ravaged by coronavirus, suffering by far the worst death toll in the world and now experiencing a scary second wave in many states that threatens to send the current number of 210,000 fatalities much higher. It’s also been crippled by a devastating collapse in the US economy and jobs. And the death of George Floyd sparked huge and sometimes very violent protests, massively increased racial tensions and raging culture wars. The combined effect of all this is that America is on its knees and desperate for someone, anyone to save and revive them. But President Trump’s singularly failed to be that person. He’s never taken Covid-19 seriously – constantly downplaying its threat and encouraging a shockingly casual disregard among his staff and supporters for masks, social distancing, and other restrictive measures essential for suppressing the virus.
Inevitably, this woefully complacent attitude has now resulted in the President and numerous members of his White House team catching it turning the epicentre of American power into a virtual Covid-colony.
But even that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to treat the whole thing with shocking flippancy – including performing pathetic joyrides to wave to fans outside the hospital and ripping off his mask on the White House balcony, so he could pose like some ‘tough-guy’ dictator. Trump’s reprehensibly irresponsible chest-beating ‘I beat Covid and so can you!’ response to catching this killer disease will mean millions of Americans view it in the same dismissive way, and that will cost lives. His reckless disregard for the truth about this virus is so bad that Facebook had to delete a post yesterday in which Trump claimed Covid-19 was ‘less lethal’ than the flu, saying the US had ‘learned to live with’ flu season, ‘just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!’ This is completely untrue. The coronavirus is far more deadly and virulent than normal flu. In fact, Covid has killed more Americans in a few months this year than flu killed in the past five years combined.