Donald
Trump’s Worst Enemy Should Not Be Joe Biden’s Only Campaign Tactic
All my life, I’ve had to deal with... let’s just say “difficult people”. Family, neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, even a few that pretended to be my friend. People that are able to bully, intimidate, dominate, and they’re able to do so with impunity. I know I’m far from being the only one with this problem, but it certainly feels that way, especially when said “difficult people” have friends or family in positions of respect and/or authority.
In these instances, my mom had the universal advice for me: do nothing. Sit there, take it, “turn the other cheek” (she really loves that one), and they would supposedly do themselves in. “Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves with it,” is what she always told me.
I won’t say that it didn’t work. Sometimes it did. For certain people, it did. But it would take a long time for it to happen, and the payoffs were never worth the aggravation and abuse endured while waiting for it to happen. And for the majority of those “difficult people”, it never worked. At all. Because for those with friends or family in positions of respect and/or authority, you can give them all the world’s rope and they’ll never let themselves be hanged by it. The “system” that enables them – social, political, institutional – will never let that happen.
And when it comes to “difficult people”, America is facing the worst kind in the form of the orange-skinned narcissist, President Donald John Trump. A petty, vain, thin-skinned, self-centered, self-serving, self-promoting, hypocritical man-child who has used the White House and the power of the presidency to enrich himself and his friends in ways that make even the late Spiro Agnew look like a rank amateur. He is just one shaved-head away from being Lex Luthor; that is, if Luthor was an inept idiot addicted to spray tans.
Every fear concerning his presidency short of all-out nuclear war has been realized in the nearly four years since he took office. America is in the midst of an economic collapse the likes of which has never been seen. Millions unemployed. Millions at risk of losing their homes and being forced to the streets. America is in the grip of a global pandemic that has no measure of being contained because of the gross ineptitude and ignorance of said orange-skinned narcissist. We are in a trade war with China, which is further aggravating our economy. This man has abandoned our allies, embraced our enemies, and pandered to worst of humanity through division and strife. He has even employed his own goon squad to go after people he deems a threat.
Needless to say, he needs to be removed. He cannot be impeached as required in the U.S. Constitution given his enablers in the United States Senate and his cronies in the judicial system. The only legitimate way left is through the ballot box and the Electoral College.
So it’s up to the Democrats and their chosen champion, Joe Biden, to make sure that Narcissist Trump is removed from office.
Not an easy task given the extremist hyper-partisan division in America today.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that former Vice-President and former U.S. Senator Joe Biden is a nice guy. Certainly nicer than the abrasive egomaniac in the White House right now. But that niceness is not going to be enough to win the vote and the electoral college.
As of this column’s posting, it appears that Joe Biden’s tactic is to let Narcissist Trump do himself in. Donald Trump is, after all, his own worst enemy. He lies all the time. He exaggerates almost as often as he lies. He makes inflammatory statements, then lies about ever making them even when there is audio and video and Twitter posts of him making them. He hypes up snake-oil remedies and conspiracy theories and even make up a few of his own. Any of these things alone would do in the campaign of anyone not named Trump.
Unfortunately, we are not dealing with a normal person, or even a politician with even the tiniest set of ethics and morals and scruples. We are dealing with a malignant and malicious narcissist with a team of enablers and an army of extremists willing to wage – and some are already waging – a literal war on the rest of America. He has no real sense of ethics or morality or scruples. He has never really been held to account for his actions. He has no understanding of consequence for what he says or does. If he says something that really pisses people off, he either doubles down on it and his followers back him up, or he denies ever saying it and attacks the people who bring it up, and then his enablers back him up.
I know from experience that if you give a person like this any kind of rope, they will never hang themselves with it. Ever. Rather, they will use that rope to strangle you. And they will have help to do it. They always do.
Understand that ever since Biden eked out his victory in the primaries and caucuses, the Narcissist Trump propaganda machine started in on ads all over the country and all over the Internet and streaming media. And they’ve been playing all their favorite lies about Biden, calling him weak, an extremist, an anarchist, an atheist, and proclaiming that cities will burn under his watch. All of it being nothing but projections of Narcissist Trump’s own failures and faults today.
And the Biden camp... has pretty much done nothing in response.
Sure, Biden makes press conferences and releases statements, and that gets on the nightly news. So, for a couple of minutes out of 24 hours, Biden gets his say on network news programs that people say they barely watch anymore. Meanwhile, he is trashed on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and talk radio and in every TV commercial segment 24-7.
Yes, there are special interest groups like VoteVets and Republicans Against Trump and The Lincoln Project that do post their own videos to go after Narcissist Trump. But those aren’t seen on broadcast TV or streaming media. Rather, they’re YouTube videos that people have to search for. Worse yet, those YouTube videos are intentionally sandwiched between Narcissist Trump’s ads that in some cases you cannot shut off or skip. This has the effect of minimizing or even neutering whatever message you want to convey. It’s like going to McDonald’s and getting hit with negative ads from Burger King at both the entrance and exit.
It does appear from their passivity that the Biden camp expects the voters to simply “know” that Narcissist Trump is scum and that Biden is the much better person to be President of the United States. And if that is what their strategy is... then, let’s get brutally honest here... Biden will fail, and the country soon after.
This is pretty much the same mistake Hillary Clinton made in 2016. She assumed that voters would choose her en masse over Narcissist Trump, especially after the “grab ‘em” tape came out. They didn’t. She didn’t put too much of an effort into going after Narcissist Trump, or to campaign in several states that ended up turning around and voting for Narcissist Trump. She presumed that those votes were hers, and they weren’t. She presumed that she would win, and she didn’t. And if Joe Biden makes the same mistakes as Hillary did, then not only will we all lose in November, but he will owe the American people an apology for not wanting the job bad enough to fight for it.
Understand this: at least one-third of the active voters in America will vote for Narcissist Trump in November. That is not speculative. That is not hypothetical. That is guaranteed. There is nothing that Joe Biden can do to sway them from either voting for him or to not vote. They will be there, and they will vote for Narcissist Trump.
Biden’s game needs to be different from any other political game he has played in the past. He needs to win over *all* of those other votes out there. He needs to fight for every vote not guaranteed to Narcissist Trump. He can’t chase them into not voting like previous campaigns have done. He can’t afford to do that. Because it is not enough to simply “win” against someone like Narcissist Trump and his legions of myrmidons and corrupt conspirators and enablers. He needs to win with a majority that is so overwhelming and so absolute that it cannot be rigged and cannot be discounted. And to do that, he needs to go after Narcissist Trump with a vengeance. Expose every mistake. Every failure. Every shameful act and inept decision and outlandish statement. Every denial. Every incompetence. Not just in debates. Not just through press statements that get thirty seconds of airtime once every 24-hours on network programs people don’t watch as much as they used to. He needs to do it in YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and streaming media. Biden needs to meet Narcissist Trump’s media army with his own. He has the money. He has the supporters. He needs to make it happen. Not in October and November. It needs to happen today.
If Joe Biden truly thinks that this election is a fight for the soul of America, then he needs to actually fight for it. At every corner, and through every media and every medium. That is the only way that he can, not just prevail, but to also defeat the corruption and fascism that grips this nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment