Trump's Addiction To Losing

Once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory the Trump campaign continues to lose altitude and hand the presidency to a candiate that was deemed unelectable just two months ago

Despite being a notoriously terrible loser Trump really seems to have a thing for it… A humiliation fetish maybe, which initially seems absurd but then again they say the wealthy seek out the things that their opulent lives insulate them from. The then presidential candidate said in 2015 that his supporters would have so much winning that they’d “get bored” of winning. As we head into 2024’s election, no matter what the opposite side hysterically shrieks, the American political right has been so starved of victories that they are on course for an agonising reappraisal of their whole movement in 2025.

The myth of Trump being a winner is a curious one given all we’ve seen since November 2015. His rise through the primaries and then winning an election as the biggest underdog in US political history are solid foundational components for the myth to foment but it is a spectacular exception. For conservatives his securing of the Supreme Court majority is also presented as his most significant win but even that was serendipity over strategy. Democrats could have avoided this reality by imploring Ginsburg to retire with the same force they did for the cognitively impaired Biden just weeks ago. They didn’t and her decision to die in the saddle while very American gave Trump an easy win and made the Democrats look crazy to independents as they spent the subsequent four years labelling the Supreme Court is illegitimate, demanding sanctions against justices over flags and pledging to “pack the court.”

Whether they want to cherish that as a victory or not it has proven largely to be a Pyrrhic one. The “red tsunami” the right’s favourite YouTubers told you was a certainty in the 2022 mid-terms never came for two reasons both of which lead back to Trump. First is the insanity of putting abortion on the ballot with the Supreme Court’s repealing of the admittedly constitutionally unsound Roe vs Wade ruling. Women went and voted in their droves not along lines of party affiliation but simply in a manner befitting their own desire for bodily autonomy. The decision to not ignore all the legal problems with the ruling over the protections it provided may very well be the technically correct use of the court’s time. In practical terms it has made Republicans look like they are made up of a majority of idiots who cannot discern the difference between a developing foetus and a fully conscious child. It makes them look like they are adjacent to the maniacs who in order to “preserve life” go out and shoot abortionists. For the libertarian part of the coalition who simply cannot tolerate the sanctimonious progressives that hijacked liberalism a decade ago this is actually a dealbreaker.

The second major reason Republicans find themselves in this mess is the fact that candidate quality matters and Trump’s endorsements have been especially awful. Mehmet Oz lost in Pennsylvania to a stroke victim who opened up their televised debate by telling the audience “good night.” Herschel Walker lost in Georgia politically crippled by his history of domestic violence, secret abortions, stolen valour and threatening police. Blake Masters, a first time candidate seemingly only picked due to his now disavowed belief that the 2020 election was rigged and an anti-abortion stance he has since purged from his social media, got smoked in Arizona. He simply has no political eye for these things at all.

Even now, with winning Georgia critical to his electoral chances, Trump attacks the state governor Brian Kemp, a candidate who won in 2022 by 7.5% over election denier Stacey Abrams. Considering how close it was in 2018 this points to his growing popularity and yet Trump, walking back the endorsement he begrudgingly gave in 2022 after Kemp beat Trump’s primary pick by 52 points, is now attacking him at a time when the governor will be his boots on the ground in a key battleground state. Remember Trump lost Georgia by 12,000 votes in 2020 and ask yourself how many Kemp supporters might just stay at home after these comments.

The JD Vance pick for Vice President is also historically bad by any conceivable metric. Any long standing political junky can tell you that all data suggests veep picks don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things but if the pick is a dreadful one it can be the lethal injection administered to the campaign’s lifeblood. There’s no doubt that Dan Quayle, famously told “you’re no Jack Kennedy” on national television, was a millstone around Bush Sr.’s neck. This was a man who misspelled potato in front of a crowd, attacked a television character for their life choices and crucially, at a time when gay rights were making huge strides in America, went on record in 1992 saying that not only was being gay a choice but it was “the wrong choice.”

That was nothing compared to the John McCain’s inexplicable pick of Sarah Palin. Selected due to favourable polling numbers the McCain campaign never quite seemed to grasp she was assessed not on her record of governorship, not even on her suitability to be VP but on whether or not she was presidential material. The reason for that was had he been inaugurated in 2009 he’d have been 72, the oldest person to have become president in the country’s history. Back then people were concerned about such things and the prospect he could die in office and suddenly the world wakes up to Palin – someone who once said “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke” – being sworn in. This was absolutely not going to go over well with independents and her extensive media campaigning served up gaffe after gaffe to the point where an uncannily accurate impersonation by comedian Tina Fey was indistinguishable from the real thing. Obama and Biden, unquestionably politically vulnerable heading into their first term, should have a shrine to whoever selected her somewhere.

That brings us to Vance. Quite possibly the most unqualified VP selection in my lifetime having only just been sworn into office for the first time in January 2023, it’s hard to see what he brings to the table beyond being Trump’s equivalent of Mini-Me. Yes, if you like Trump you’ll probably like Vance but a huge factor in the unlikeliest of wins in 2016 was the selection of Mike Pence on the ticket. He wasn’t there to impress independents and he was never going to win over any Democrats. That was meant to be Trump’s wheelhouse. What Pence offered was the sense of security that there was an adult in the room, someone who could reign in Trump’s baser instincts and ensure that it was OK for the Republican apparatus to back him. Vance represents the complaint opposite, a 40 year old jellyfish who has walked back every negative statement he ever made about Trump in order to be on the ticket. He has almost no campaign experience, let alone for an office this prominent. He is hardly astute at handling the media having already stepped on a few rakes laid down by Democrat operatives in the fugazi fourth estate. He is liked by neither party and is easy to dislike in general. His selection has almost certainly doomed Trump’s campaign which was unlosable just a month ago.

Thepick was clearly contingent on running against Biden under which circumstances it simply wouldn’t have mattered. Given Biden’s current rate of mental deterioration it was highly likely he’d not remember his own name by October. There’s only so much the party could do and there’s only so much the American people would take. Now Trump’s the geriatric candidate… Overweight, in his late  seventies and universally despised to a point where his own secret service seem disinterested in protecting him. Under these circumstances who he picked as his running mate was of vital importance because, as with McCain, there is that outside chance that something happens that would see Vance sworn in. President Vance? No, no-one is coming along for that.

The modern day Republican party is filled with and orbited by dingbats but it would have been incredibly difficult to make a worse choice. Sure, there’s Majorie “space lasers” Taylor Greene or dog-murderer Kristi Noem but ponder for a moment what could have been. Whether De Santis would have accepted or not that would have been a winning ticket. Tim Scott probably doesn’t have the political chops but he would fill a similar role to Pence and would appeal to a lot of black voters. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, who has all the manic energy of a Batman villain, showed he is an effective campaigner even if there’d be similar concerns about him ever pushing back on Trump’s desires.

Instead Republicans now have to walk around with that rictus grin they’ve gotten all too used to since hitching their entire party to the whims of a celebrity. “Look how unified we are, look how we’re winning” but they know… There’s a secret bottle of whiskey in that draw, right next to the loaded revolver, that they’ve started to take nips out of in the mornings because they can sense it’s happening again and this time will be the most embarrassing of all.

Make no mistake about Harris is a long way from her uniquely awful primary campaign of 2019 where she dropped out before Iowa joint sixth with Andrew Yang. It isn’t because she’s changed but rather the Biden years have made a candidate that can read of a teleprompter seem competent enough to run the country. She also craves power enough to shelve the ego. So far she has yet to take questions at a press conference or do an interview with the press. She’s stayed on message, has avoided cackling and has walked back every contentious position she campaigned on in 2019. And the media are going to let her do it while Trump and Vance continue to take the bait and call her a DEI hire while simultaneously stating she isn’t black. Make no mistake about it the media has shifted from stating she was hurting Biden’s re-electability to now making her an Obama-esque figure, a historic candidate that if elected shows what America can be when it is unburdened by what has been. For Republicans they’re about 87 days away from wishing they were unburdened by Trump.