Trump is *Almost* There

 

He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more! https://t.co/Exb3C1mAPg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

Take a look at the first two words, because they are the only ones that count: He won. Trump is pretty close to the epiphany that Biden is surely going to be president, but pretty much everything else in the tweet is absolute discountable nonsense. There were observers. The votes weren't all tabulated by Trump's new "villian of the day". He's implying that red state Texas has been using "bum" equipment and he won by "a lot" there, which definitely is eyebrow-raising. And he thinks the rigged Fake News media was against him...pfft! If anything they liked to play him down to avoid a panic (don't know where I heard something like that before, but you're welcome.)

 But the "Watters' World" segment he re-tweets hammers home for me the dopiest thing about Trump's re-election campaign, which started in January of 2017. That's right. He campaigned on his own behalf, in rallies and with selling Trump-logoed swag, for the last four years. 

This constant campaigning obviously cut into his golf time, and his television-watching time. It made his Twitter-game a bit more boring. It took away from the time that he had to defend himself against the FBI's Russia investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 campaign and the subsequent Mueller investigation. It certainly led to his impeachment for trying to get unfavorable information on former Vice-President Joe Biden from Ukraine. And, if you wander out on that very stable (and genius!) limb, you might become persuaded that it really took away from doing the one thing that might have helped the campaign the most--

Being an actual full-time president.

Trump obsessed over ratings, loyalty, boat parades, and crowd-size. Things he did not obsess over: competence. COVID-19 response. Acting like a full-grown man. Joe Biden didn't need big crowds, boat parades, loyalty oaths or whatever Trump was about to get a win--he had competence on his side. The ability to be a mature adult, and bring about coalition and not spin out like a toddler when things didn't go his way. He ran a responsible adult campaign for responsible adults. And adults responded.

Now, that might sound a little like I'm calling Trump's fans less-than mature people as well, and I want to get this straight--um, yes? If you watched the last four years of Trump and the excitable, indictable yeggs that have rotated in and out of his inner circle and think "These are the best people doing the best job for our country", I do have to question your judgment, but more than that, the distrust for mainstream media that has taken hold and the propaganda that has taken its toll from Fox News (lately derided by Trump's MAGA marchers) , OANN, Breitbart, etc. More people turned out for Trump this year than 2016. (That worries the hell out of me.) Only so many more people turning out for Biden, despite his more low-key campaign, spared us a Trump win.

No one has ever campaigned harder than Trump did. In a conclusion that shocks me to my core, if Trump even did a half-assed better job as president and steered us through COVID and avoided the worst of this economic downturn, he would have won. All he needed was to be half-assed good. 

And he didn't do it.