Trump's presidency is falling apart rapidly. It seems that the president has failed to master or comprehend the governance and the state that he had inherited. This is a hard concept to grasp in an age when non-stop media coverage leads us to focus on the president's communication skills and when presidents themselves value spin more than expertise. But in the end, presidential failure is about reality, not words—no matter how lofty and inspiring or how crude and insulting.
The 15-point lead for former vice president Joe Biden in the Quinnipiac poll released in mid-July seemed to many Democrats too good to be true. Then an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll dropped, showing an 11-point lead for Biden.
Even if you think the polls will narrow as the election gets closer (a good bet) or that President Trump will start acting like a normal president (a bad bet), it is instructive to see why Biden has these big margins and how they correlate with Trump's increasingly bizarre antics and fractured rhetoric.
Trump's failed policies on handling coronavirus
Coronavirus cases across the United States have crossed the six million mark, with the country marking the maximum number of infections so far. But the government hasn't been able to take any effective measure to control the menace rather Republicans have been calling for opening the economy which has suffered the biggest fallout owing to the pandemic since the Great Depression of 1930s.
Trump's failures to address the test of time run the gamut from the rhetorical to the organizational. Every time the president speaks he seems to add to the fear and chaos surrounding the situation:
- telling Americans it was not serious by asserting his "hunches" about data, assuring people that everyone would be tested even when there were very few tests available
- telling people that we are very close to a vaccine when it is anywhere from 12 to 18 months away
- mistakenly asserting that goods, as well as people from Europe, would be forbidden from entering the United States
- announcing that Google had a website for testing while the initiative was merely an unimplemented idea
Meanwhile, Trump's uniqueness of giving a national address meant to calm the country that had the effect of taking the stock market down over 1,000 points further creates a mirage of verbal imprecision and outright lies.
Trump's ignorance of country-wide riots and championing of state policing
Trump and Biden have taken starkly divergent approaches to protests and outbreaks of violence in American cities. But gauging the former vice president's messaging is more effective has proved challenging for pollsters. Trump, as expected, has focused on his support for law enforcement while criticizing rioters as "anti-American," hoping to stir fear among swing voters about unruly demonstrations. The president has also threatened to defund Democrat states who are unable to curb the violence.
Biden, for his part, has hit back hard, insisting that right-wing vigilantes are also a big part of the problem — and that systemic racism must be rooted out of law enforcement to help heal the country. The two sides were clear when Biden, on Thursday, met the Blake family during his visit to Kenosha, while Trump, being a president who should have addressed the grievous situation personally, made himself busy assessing the damage caused by the rioters in Wisconsin on Tuesday.
A failing US healthcare system
"Strengthen healthcare so it provides insurance for everybody." Trump vowed in a September 2015 interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" that he would create a universal healthcare system.
I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not," he said, adding, "the government is going to pay for it."
He doubled down on the pledge in a January 2017 interview with The Washington Post before his inauguration. Trump said at the time he was about to finish designing a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, aiming to provide "insurance for everybody." While now, it's just two months to go for the elections and Trump has gone in an entirely opposite direction in his drive to scrap the 'Obamacare'. He has supported the GOP legislation that would have left an estimated 22 million Americans without health insurance, per a Congressional Budget Office estimate at the time. The GOP-led lawsuit to undo Obamacare entirely is headed to the Supreme Court next year.
Inability of the Trump administration to save DACA
On September 2, a group of young immigrants in New York filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration's attempt to again rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that has allowed more than 825,000 people to seek protection from deportation.
For nearly three years, the Trump administration has attempted to undermine DACA, but that effort was rebuffed in June this year when the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the administration's decision to end DACA was "arbitrary and capricious." However, nearly six weeks later, the Trump administration officials again moved to alter the program, even as the agency considers a complete dismantling of DACA.
While DACA recipients came to this country as children, on average around age 7, in the intervening years, they have grown up and begun to have children of their own. In 2017, a report from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service noted that the average age of DACA recipient was around 24-years-old, and now around 254,000 US-born children have parents who are DACA recipients, and about 1.5 million people live in households with at least one DACA recipient.
Trump's impeachment
Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives on December 18. The House approved two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of power over his dealings with Ukraine and one for obstruction of Congress over his efforts to stonewall the impeachment inquiry.
Trump had urged Ukraine to launch investigations into his political rivals as he simultaneously withheld about $400 million in congressionally-approved military aid from the country, which is fighting an ongoing war against pro-Russian separatists. The president is likely to be acquitted in a Senate trial, but will still go down as just the third president in US history to be impeached.
