Report: Team trump knows it’s going to have its ass handed to it november 3

[Boats]

REPORT: TEAM TRUMP KNOWS IT’S GOING TO HAVE ITS ASS HANDED TO IT NOVEMBER 3
By: Bess Levin - Vanity Fair News 10-19-20
Re: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020...2020-prospects

If you’d ignored every single poll that’s come out over the last several months predicting the outcome of the 2020 election, and only listened to Donald Trump, you might think the president had a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Joe Biden on November 3. In reality, the outlook for Trump is grim: The latest polls show Biden ahead by double digits and leading in battleground states. What’s more, Trump is down with white voters, who he won by a whopping 20 points in 2016. And while the president talks a big, delusional game at rallies, even his campaign staffers apparently know that come November 3, they’re all going to be unemployed.

The New York Times reports that “away from their candidate and the television cameras, some of Mr. Trump’s aides are quietly conceding just how dire his political predicament appears to be.” Midlevel aides are reportedly asking around about postelection jobs on Capitol Hill, aware that there is unlikely to be a second Trump administration for them to work in. In what may be the saddest internal reflection of the president’s prospects, some of his lieutenants are said to be resigned to lose and believe that the best thing they can do in the final two weeks is to “keep the president occupied, happy, and off Twitter as much as possible,” like he’s a dog they’re trying to keep comfortable in the final days of his life. But of course, staying off of Twitter and on message is something Trump is constitutionally incapable of, even if it would be to his benefit:

Instead of delivering a focused closing message aimed at changing people’s perceptions about his handling of the coronavirus, or making a case for why he can revive the economy better than Mr. Biden can, Mr. Trump is spending the remaining days on a familiar mix of personal grievances, attacks on his opponents and obfuscations. He has portrayed himself as a victim, dodged questions about his own coronavirus testing, attacked his attorney general and the F.B.I. director, and equivocated on the benefits of mask-wearing.

Rather than drawing a consistent contrast with Mr. Biden on the economy, strategists say, the president’s preference is to attack Mr. Biden’s son Hunter over his business dealings and to hurl personal insults like “Sleepy Joe” against a candidate whose favorability ratings are much higher than Mr. Trump’s.

“A lot of Republican consultants are frustrated because we want the president’s campaign to be laser-focused on the economy,” David Kochel, a Republican strategist in Iowa told the Times. “Their best message is: Trump built a great economy” and that the coronavirus damaged it, and Trump will do a better job restoring it than Biden. Instead, the president apparently thinks he’s going to win over voters by refusing to denounce a conspiracy theory that claims Democrats are running a Satanic, child sex-trafficking cult and another that accuses Biden of having Seal Team Six killed to cover up the fact that Osama Bin Laden is alive and the Obama administration took out his body double. Or blathering on at length about his opponent’s son and claiming, without a hint of irony, that Biden’s family is a “criminal enterprise.” The base “loves the stuff about Hunter Biden, laptops and Mayor Giuliani,” Kochel said. “But they’re already voting for Trump.”

The problem with having an unhinged, disturbed candidate like Trump running for office is that he’s not just the candidate, he’s also basically running the campaign—and he’s really bad at it!

From the start, the campaign has never had a dominant strategist—that role has always been played by a president with a dim view of the political professional class. In an interview in July with the New York Times, Jared Kushner, a White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law, was candid about who was in charge of the 2020 race: Mr. Trump, he said, was “really the campaign manager at the end of the day.”

Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager, Brad Parscale, focused heavily on building online infrastructure and using it to raise money, while Mr. Kushner oversaw his work. [Bill] Stepien, who replaced Mr. Parscale in July, is regarded in Washington as a capable nuts-and-bolts tactician. But with a small window of time left before the election, he has not attempted to redraw Mr. Trump’s playbook.

While Stepien and campaign adviser Jason Miller insist that their internal polls show the race is a lot closer than those conducted by news organizations, a number of Republicans aren‘t buying it. Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said last week at the Amy Coney Barrett hearings that Democrats have “a good chance of winning the White House,” while Senator Ben Sasse predicted that Trump isn’t going to just lose the White House, he’s going to take down the party in a November 3 “blood bath.”

“The reality is they are probably out of time,” said Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican strategist. “They desperately needed the [second] debate to have a larger audience and to have an opportunity to provide some kind of contrast that would change the race trajectory, meaning a different Trump or an opportunity for a Biden gaffe. That was their best hope for a Hail Mary.”

By: Bess Levin is a politics correspondent at Vanity Fair.