An audience of one

by | Jun 10, 2020 | Editor's Blog | 4 comments

Political ad buys in recent weeks offer insight into the Trump White House and exposes Trump’s pathological dysfunction. They show a man with little self-control or self-awareness who is easily triggered, as the kids say. The whole episode is also hilarious. 

The Lincoln Project is a group of GOP political consultants and operatives who have abandoned Trump and are now trying to defeat him. With clearly deep-pocketed donors, they’ve been releasing a barrage of devastating ads portraying Trump as everything from a stooge to a failed president. While they are running the ads in swing states across the country, they are also placing significant ad buys on Fox News in the DC market. They have an audience of one: Trump.

One ad, “Mourning in America,” left Trump rage tweeting at the founders of the Lincoln Project in the middle of the night. His ire drove so many contributions to their cause they were able run even more ads. The latest ad was released on the anniversary of D-Day comparing Trump to Dwight Eisenhower who prepared to take full responsibility if the invasion failed. Trump in contrast, takes responsibility for nothing.  

The ads upset Trump so much that his campaign is now buying ads in the DC market on Fox News to calm him down. They are spending $400,000 on ads so the president can see himself on television in a positive light. Again, they have a target audience of one. 

Then, earlier this week, a CNN poll shows Joe Biden opening up a 14 point lead on Trump. The president got so agitated that the campaign had their pollster write a memo arguing that the poll is wrong. The amount of energy the White House is spending trying to keep Trump from throwing self-destructive temper tantrums is staggering. 

In the midst of a global pandemic, while cities across the country are exploding in anger over racial injustice, the President of the United States is obsessing over negative political ads and bad polls. A renegade group of GOP operatives are able to get under his skin so successfully, that his campaign is spending six figures to try to keep the president calm. It also exposes his bizarre addiction to television. Not only can’t he turn it off, he’s triggered by any criticism that he gets. What a snowflake. 

4 Comments

  1. Russ Becker

    I agree with Rick Gunter that Trump is a traitor. As Nancy Pelosi rightly said, “With you, all roads lead to Putin!”

    However, sadly, a large number of our fellow Americans have completely swallowed his lies and are now no more than cultists. That includes my brother and his wife. When I visited at the time of the impeachment hearings, they said that it did not matter what evidence was produced, they would be voting for Trump, and that he would win by a landslide. I certainly hope that these cultists are wrong!

  2. j bengel

    I had to invent a whole new word to describe my reaction to reading this story here and elsewhere; Schadengasm

  3. Mike Leonard

    Today Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 39% and falling, but in November the white supremacists who worship him will do everything they can to keep him right where he is. Vote like the country’s future depends on it.

  4. Rick Gunter

    I realize it is hard to put partisanship aside. But let’s get real. How could any American vote for Mr. Trump? More than 112,000 of our fellow citizens have died on this man’s watch. The economy is in shambles. We can’t go out in public without looking like Jesse James? We can go to a funeral, visit a relative in a hospital. The list goes on and on. Much of this utter chaos, which Trump’s good buddies the Russians surely are cheering, must be placed at Trump’s feet. He did not to prepare the country for or deal with the pandemic. This has to rank as the worst failure of presidential leadership in all of American history. Can you imagine how the spineless Republicans would be reacting if Obama were president at this point and had done nothing to deal with the virus? His tail would be on the curb, where Trump’s should be and could have been if the GOP Senate had honored its oath to do “imparial justice.”
    In my youth in the Carolina mountains, I got angry with LBJ, who was a truly great man, as Robert Caro documents in his four volumes. But Trump is a loser. He is ignorant. In the street vernacular if not the legal definition, Trump is a traitor to this country. Those who support him are contributing to the division in our country and to the ruin of our institutions and the collapse of democracy.

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