During the debate, Trump tried to play "outsider" and suggest "politician" was a dirty word. It largely fell flat and here is why.
At final debate, Biden shows Trump what it means to be a politician
Analysis: Four years have diminished the value of Trump's framing that it's better to have an outsider as president.
"NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In the final two weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump is placing an awfully big bet on the premise that casting his opponent as an insider has the same value it did four years ago.
He repeatedly hurled the "politician" charge at Democratic nominee Joe Biden in their final debate Thursday night. Biden's entire campaign is a celebration of the virtues of old-school politics.
"We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about," Biden said from the debate stage here at Belmont University. It was, as Trump noted, the pivot of a practiced politician away from personal invective and toward the public's needs.
"I ran because of you," an agitated Trump said. "I’m looking at you now, you’re a politician."
At another point, he undermined his own allegations that Biden and his family have enriched themselves — no modern president has done more of that than Trump — by conditioning them.
"If this stuff is true about Russia, Ukraine, China, other countries, Iraq," Trump said. "If this is true, then he’s a corrupt politician." If this stuff is true? Some politicians might fabricate an hour's worth of supposed dirt on an opponent, but they would be reluctant to then admit it was all unsubstantiated. Typical politicians believe they have to hew close enough to the truth to avoid losing the honesty battle that Trump has forfeited to Biden.
In 2016, playing the untainted outsider to Hillary Clinton's veteran insider worked well enough for Trump. But four years later, the idea that it's bad to be a politician seems fundamentally less resonant. Refusing to even pay lip service to the idea that candidates "should be talking about your families" in a time of deep crisis is the take of someone who misunderstands the electoral process"
ITS WORTH READING BUT IN CASE YOU DO NOT . . THIS IS KEY
"The American system was designed to create an incentive — elections — for officials to cater to the sentiments and will of the voting public. Many voters are more than ready for a president whose self-interest is tied to knowing how government works best to serve them, who tempers his instinct for self-promotion with an understanding of the line between that and deceit, and who seeks to heal societal divisions rather than exploiting them.
These are the things a politician does. There should seldom be conflict between a president's self-interest and the broader public interest. To the extent that voters are divided, a typical politician seeks to unite them in common purpose and explain why he or she follows one approach to reaching their goals over others.
Some voters who don't approve of Trump's presidency agree with him that he is not responsible for the coronavirus. But the large majority of voters — including many who support him — believe he mishandled the coronavirus crisis. His unwillingness to publicly acknowledge a threat that he privately said was brutal has contributed to a failed administration response to the pandemic.
A typical politician knows that it's folly to argue with voters about what they believe to be true. In the case of the pandemic, it's that a better response would have protected more of the nearly quarter of a million Americans who have died since the end of February, cost less than the trillions of dollars taxpayers have had to pour into the economy and mitigated an impact on commerce that has led to tens of millions of lost jobs and tens of thousands of closed businesses.
THE ARTICLE GOES ON AND SHOULD BE READ, BUT THAT LAST PART IS THE TRUMP PROBLEM.
AMERICAN INSTICTIVELY UNDERSTAND that . . . " a better response [to the pandemic] would have protected more of the nearly quarter of a million Americans who have died since the end of February, cost less than the trillions of dollars taxpayers have had to pour into the economy and mitigated an impact on commerce that has led to tens of millions of lost jobs and tens of thousands of closed businesses."
TRUMP DENIES THAT
