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NICK CATOGGIO
Chatting with a relative last weekend, I felt a twinge of optimism about the presidential campaign.
Don’t worry, it was fleeting.
The relative in question voted for Donald Trump twice but her politics are anti-left, not MAGA. She worries about crime and inflation, as most of us do. She resents Joe Biden for not caring about the border. She loathes the pro-Hamas campus protesters.
But she was alarmed by what she heard on Saturday night.
She had Fox News on in the background as the network carried Trump’s latest rally live from New Jersey. And for the first time in years, she got to hear him speak at length, unfiltered. “He was ranting and raving!” she complained, taken aback.
Well, yes, I said. That’s sort of his thing.
But he really was in rare form that evening. And “his thing” is darker now than it used to be.
It’s strange to think of a Republican voter being surprised by Trump’s demagoguery, as it’s been the essence of the man and his movement for almost a decade. But he has gotten worse over time – angrier, obsessively vengeful, more blatantly authoritarian, and lately prone to praising fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter for God knows what reason. For a casual voter who hasn’t paid him much attention since early 2021, a long look at the former president in “retribution” mode is a bit of a revelation.
And so, for a moment, I felt optimistic. Millions of other casual voters will be having the same revelation this summer as they tune into the campaign. Trump being Trump, he probably won’t even feign normalcy during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention. The next six months will be a sustained advertisement by the Republican Party that its nominee is less fit for office than ever.
Then it occurred to me that … my relative is almost certainly going to vote for Trump anyway. And if she’s willing to put aside her horror at his mental decompensation in the name of ousting Biden, many other horrified casual voters are destined to do so as well.
Swing state polls look bleak for Biden
On that happy note, let’s look at the latest New York Times poll of six key battleground states. The results of that poll don’t guarantee a Trump victory in November, of course, but they do guarantee that a Trump defeat will be more destabilizing to the country than it was in 2020. Realistically, there’s no longer any “clean” outcome to this election for America.
There never is when one of the two major parties is led by a sore-loser manbaby. But this year is shaping up to be even messier than most of us fear.
Biden is probably going to lose this election.
Many of us realize that already, I suspect, but grief is a process. Anti-Trumpers who are momentarily stuck in denial still have more than five months to reach the acceptance stage, and naturally some are in no hurry to get there.
