Eugene Robinson: Trump is running scared, and he has good reason
President Trump’s decision to put away his racist dog whistle and bring out his racist bullhorn has just one plausible explanation: desperation.
Disregard, as usual, what Trump claims about his political standing and his prospects for winning a second term. He is acting as if he knows he is likely to lose the election, perhaps by a humiliating margin; and fears what will happen to him and his dodgy business empire once he’s out of office.
Hence Trump’s undisguised appeals to white racial resentment and anger: the vicious and absurd demand that four House members of color “go back” to other countries; the unprovoked and sustained Twitter screed against well-liked veteran Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, and, unbelievably, the entire city of Baltimore; the gratuitous and slanderous claim that the Rev. Al Sharpton “Hates Whites & Cops!” Nothing subtle in any of this.
It overly flatters Trump to fear he’s playing three-dimensional chess or employing some kind of exotic political jiu jitsu. What we’re hearing in his harangues and reading in his tweets is naked fear. And he has reason to be very afraid.
Some traumatized Democrats may have lost all faith in polls following the 2016 election, but Trump hasn’t. We know he pays close attention to the numbers. We also know he watches Fox News obsessively, not as a way to follow current events but as a barometer of his support among his base. So it’s no wonder he sounded so hurt Friday in a tweet about the latest Fox poll:
“@FoxNews is at it again. So different from what they used to be during the 2016 Primaries, & before — Proud Warriors! Now new Fox Polls, which have always been terrible to me (they had me losing BIG to Crooked Hillary), have me down to Sleepy Joe.”
Indeed, the Fox national poll of registered voters showed Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden by 10 points, 49 percent to 39 percent. It also showed him losing to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont., by 6 points and edging the other top-tier Democratic candidates, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and Kamala Harris, D-California, by a 1 point each.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/robinson-trump-is-running-scared-and-he-has-good-reason/
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