The Rose Garden free fall

by | Oct 8, 2020 | 2020 elections, coronavirus, Editor's Blog | 5 comments

The Rose Garden event was designed to be a brazen rebuke of the president’s critics. It would be a high-profile victory lap to celebrate Trump’s third nomination of a third Supreme Court Justice. The event planners intentionally ignored any effort to social distance. They packed chairs into a tight space and the attendees shunned masks, hugged other guests and shook hands with no thought of the virus. It was an act of hubris, defying the warnings of whining liberals and a chastising media while ignoring the overblown threat of the virus.

And then it blew up in their faces. Instead of showing the American public that the GOP wouldn’t be cowed by COVID, the Rose Garden fiasco laid bare the Republicans’ reckless rejection of science and experts. It proved that the virus is extremely contagious and that nobody is safe. It showed that the GOP’s call to lift restrictions puts lives at risk. And it highlighted what everybody knows: they have no plan to contain the virus or help Americans in the midst of a global pandemic.

The story only got worse. Three days after the Rose Garden event, the president’s entourage defiantly refused to wear masks at the debate between Trump and Joe Biden. Then, word leaked out that Hope Hicks, the president’s assistant, had tested positive. Within hours, word of positive tests from Trump’s inner circles began to spill out of the West Wing, eventually leading to Trump being airlifted to Walter Reed hospital.

Clearly, the White House was a COVID hot spot and the Rose Garden ceremony was a super-spreader event. A White House that routinely claims, despite plenty evidence to the contrary, that it’s the most transparent in history refused to say when the president was last tested. Then, they declined to do contract tracing to contain the spread. Instead of trying to protect the public, they tried to obscure the impact.

While the event was meant to flaunt the rules governing society in the age of COVID, it backfired spectacularly, instead highlighting the arrogance and recklessness of the administration and Congressional Republicans. The bottom dropped out. By Sunday morning, an NBC-WSJ poll showed Trump trailing nationally by 14 points. Then Reuters released a poll showing him down by 10 the same day. By Tuesday, CNN showed Biden with a 16 point lead and yesterday, Fox had Biden up by 10 and even Rasmussen gave Biden a 12 point lead. Now, the polling average is bumping up against double digits.

State polls are showing similar results. Biden is up substantially in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the three states that cost Clinton the election. According to 538 polling averages, Biden now leads in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and North Carolina. He trails Texas by only one point. It’s the makings of an electoral tsunami as well as a popular vote landslide.

And the damage to Republicans is trickling down. The Cook Political Report called the South Carolina U.S. Senate contest a toss-up. The DSCC is playing in Kansas. Mississippi remains close. Democrats are on verge of picking up seats in Iowa, Arizona, Maine, and Colorado. They have a shot at Georgia and Alaska as well. North Carolina is the unknown as the Cunningham sex scandal continues to play out.

The Rose Garden event did for Democrats what they have been unable to for the past four years. It made the American people see that this administration recklessly ignores science and experts while working hard to hide the truth. If it’s not willing to take the steps necessary to protect the President of the United States, it certainly won’t take the steps to protect the American people. The administration misleads and distorts important information for political purposes and avoids the transparency it claims to promote. The GOP is not just unraveling, as the Washington Post said, it’s in free fall. The bottom has fallen out and they have less than four weeks to fix it.

5 Comments

  1. j bengel

    I think the Senate pickup in NC is probably a better bet than SC or AK, probably GA as well (at least in the Special Election. Ossoff seems to be holding his own in a head to head with Purdue, but Warnock has a possible runoff to worry about, and when there’s only a single R on the opposite side, I like his chances at less.) I don’t think the background noise in either camp is going to move the needle noticeably in the NC race though. The bases are far too hardened, and the only undecideds that remains are people who have spent the last 6 years in a coma. Tillis isn’t going to lose support over a DV allegation and Cunningham’s supporters likely don’t find infidelity nearly as distasteful as they find Thom Tillis. So each may shed a few votes to a third party or a vote of “present”, but I don’t expect it to swing the race in either direction.

    As for Trump, the Branch Covidians will stand by him to the bitter end, but they’re about to find out how few of them there actually are. The nose-holding crowd broke for Agent Orange in 2016, and I don’t expect to see an encore presentation. He will carry the white nationalist bloc, and there’s no reason to think that the billionaire bloc (and the billionaire wannabes) will abandon him. But despite appearances, the former set is not as numerous as they like to think, and the latter is called “the 1%” for a reason — they’re a tiny fraction of the vote, and are only influential by virtue of Citizens United. Trump may pick up a majority of evangelicals, but he’s even managed to alienate some of that bloc too. But where he’s hemorrhaging votes is among the subset of voters who decided in 2016 that he, not Hillary Clinton, was the lesser of evils. And those who fell in that column 4 years ago are by now well aware that they were conned. There is no shame in that in and of itself; Don the Con has made a career of conning people, and his continued existence without incarceration is testimony to his skill in that area. But nobody likes being swindled, and the erosion of his market share among the working classes portends a long night on November 3 for him.

    Small wonder he’s making noises about faithless electors and massive invisible ballot fraud. He knows he’s losing, and since he can’t turn that around, his only other hope is to destabilize the process and hope when the music stops he’s not the one left without a chair.

    • Chester Vogel

      I wouldn’t write Tillis off. Remember how he won against Kay Hagan – got NC same sex only constitutional marriage amendment passed and attacked Obama care. Yes, his tax breaks for the rich, more taxes for the poor, and cuts in NC education are now being felt by more NC voters.

      We have a seriously flawed Senate candidate that we both are voting for who is more likely to loose In NC than Biden. The NC Democrat leaders should address this issue. I think they should firstly get Cal Cunningham to promise to resign if elected and secondly remind NC voters that its NY senators will kick him out of the Senate. I don’t envy Cooper, Stein et al on deciding on what to do or not do. Perhaps not mentioning NY

      • cocodog

        Vogel, I worked on the Hagan campaign, she was a genuinely nice and talented lady. Her ideas, dreams if you will, were exceptional. But unfortunately, in my opinion she played by classy rules and lost the advantage against a country boy approach taken by Tillis. She may not have been a scarper where her opponent stated plying shenanigans Moreover, to that was over 6 years ago. Tillis has not done the greatest job by playing shenanigans allocated to military families living in NC, plus voted against a pay raise for Military personal but went all in on a raise for himself. Cal appears to be well trained experienced and honed for the job. I am at a loss as to why NY would throw him out ???

        • Chester Vogel

          cocodog, The junior US senator Kirsten Gillibrand from NY convinced Al Franken to resign from the Senate for relatively minor discretions compared to Cunningham’s. Franken resigned because he would be replaced by a Democratic-Farmer-Labor governor. Minnesota’s senior senator also a female did not show much appreciation for his female replacement by helping her be eliminated surprisingly early in the Democratic Presidential primary. NY’s senior senator Chuck Schumer (Senate Minority Leader) and hopefully McConnell’s’ replacement did not stop Franken’s resignation.

          Democrat Bob Menendez (senior US senator from NJ) while being investigated for apparently more serious misconduct1 than Cunningham starting in 2012 didn’t resign while Republican Chris Christy was governor, and apparently no Democrat senator asked him to resign. He had to pay fines and is still the senior US senator from NJ. If Cooper is not reelected, everything that I said is in moot in this disaster. If Cunningham resigns or otherwise leaves office, vacancies are temporarily filled by gubernatorial appointment, a special election is then held coinciding with the next regularly scheduled election to replace the appointee; and the governor must appoint a person belonging to the same political party as the senator who vacated the seat.2 If Cunningham refuses to resign, the Senate majority leader will decide what action to take.
          1 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/robert_menendez/400272
          2 https://ballotpedia.org/Filling_vacancies_in_the_U.S._Senate

          I have great respect for Kay Hagan and regret she couldn’t seek reelection

  2. Chester Vogel

    My thoughts too, but your write-up is so much more eloquent. However, I think Nancy Pelosi should be congratulated for goading Trump into this blunder that he couldn’t hide and might not recover from.

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