The disastrous Donald Trump acceptance speech may, counterintuitively, be the worst thing down the road for Democrats’ chances in November.
Because now the Biden camp is going to think that the door just reopened for their hopelessly out-of-touch old guy to be able to beat the other side’s hopelessly out-of-touch old guy.
The pressure has been ratcheting up on the president and his insulated inner circle to make a move, as soon as this weekend, to start the process for getting a new nominee in place, with Democrats set to begin a virtual roll-call vote on the presidential and vice-presidential nominations on Aug. 1, to beat the Aug. 7 deadline for the party to have a nominee in place set by Ohio.
Throughout the day on Thursday, at that point two weeks out from the beginning of that roll call, published reports far and wide had sources from inside the Biden campaign and the White House quietly conceding that it was time for the 81-year-old president to step aside.
But that was before Trump, whose handlers had been promising a “new Trump” in the wake of the attempt on his life last weekend, went off-script in his rambling 90-minute acceptance speech Thursday night at the Republican National Convention, driving straight through the promised unity theme into incoherent musings about the “stollen” 2020 election, “107 percent” of the jobs created under Biden going to illegal immigrants, and whatever the recurring bit about Hannibal Lecter is supposed to be.
Now we’re back to a race of two listless, doddering grandpas duking it out around taking shots of Metamucil, which is where we were before the June 27 CNN debate that started Democrats on their very public reckoning about what to do about their old guy who has no business being anywhere near the nuclear codes.
It was never going to be the case that Republicans were going to do anything about their old guy, whose team has been able to reshape the party in his pasty-orange-faced image, but Democrats had a chance.
Had the Biden inner circle been up front with themselves and with the outside world about the Big Guy’s obvious limitations, the Democratic Party could have had a real nomination process, to be able to spend the past couple of years vetting the top contenders, winnowing them down to the point that, by now, we’d have a clear direction on where to go.
Instead, the inner-circle types prioritized their own job security, and the issues with Biden emerged way too late for us to have any kind of thorough vetting, and now they’re using the excuse of a process that they themselves subverted as the reason to keep the doddering old guy on the ticket, because now it’s too late in the game.
If Trump had stuck to the acceptance speech that his people had put in his teleprompter, the sense that he was unbeatable might have forced the Democrats’ hand.
You might be inclined to think, reading this, that I’m suggesting Trump is playing multidimensional chess, like some on his side want us to think they think, but, no.
As is usual with a guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, and has been able, despite multiple bankruptcies, half a billion dollars in civil judgments and 34 felony fraud convictions, to convince the world that he is some kind of genius, and use that imagery to get elected president, he just keeps failing up.
And it looks like that might be happening again.