Trump's hour-plus long rally in Pennsylvania last night for GOP candidate Rick Saccone Donald Trump went as how all the other Trump rallies go here in the era of permanent cult of personality.
The trip was ostensibly an effort to help Republicans stave off a deflating defeat in a western Pennsylvania congressional district that President Trump won by 20 points.
And in a rally at Pittsburgh’s airport on Saturday evening, Mr. Trump did mention the Republican running in Tuesday’s special election, Rick Saccone, a handful of times. A good man, he called him.
But for almost all of his 75-minute performance in front of a raucous crowd packed into a hangar, it was in-his-element Trump, vintage 2016: rambling and fiery, boastful and jocular — the part of being president that he loves perhaps the most.
Ricocheting off the teleprompter, the president showed the kind of free-flowing attitude that his aides have said they expect to see this year. He ticked off what he said were his achievements — some coming just in recent days — on a laundry list of issues like North Korea, trade and the economy, and attacked his predecessors for their failures on the same.
He spoke admiringly of foreign laws imposing the death penalty on drug dealers, and seemed to brush aside the notion of due process as he spoke of American officers grabbing gang members “by the neck” and throwing them in the paddy wagon.
He derided past presidents as stiffs and lousy entertainers. He pummeled his favorite targets: Democrats and the “fake” news media. And, always the showman, he dropped a bit of news, revealing the slogan for his 2020 re-election campaign:
Keep America Great. With an exclamation mark, he said.
Trump loves running for president. He hates actually having to do the job.
Steve M. argues (successfully, in my opinion) that if Clinton had won in 2016, Trump would have spent the last sixteen months on the trail for 2020.
The GOP/right-wing media complex would have gone into a stance of maximum resistance to Clinton -- or maybe just short of maximum. (Would Republicans in Congress have refused to certify her election? I think they'd have stopped just short of that.) She'd be the subject of multiple investigations and a lot of impeachment talk. Republicans might not want Trump as a figurehead, but he'd simply designate himself as the key player in this effort, and the media would lavish attention on his efforts.
He'd hold rally after rally. Hillary-hating Republicans would join him. Even non-Fox news organizations would be obsessed with Clinton's alleged misdeeds, while ignoring most other news. The Trump rallies would play unedited on cable. They'd ensure that Trump remained the most popular politician in America among Republican voters.
And since there'd never be a good reason to impeach Clinton, or 67 votes to convict her in the Senate, and since incumbents are routinely renominated even when they're struggling in the polls, it's likely that the 2020 election would have been a contest between the incumbent and the Republican base's favorite candidate, a man so fond if campaigning he'd be in the process of doing it nonstop for more than five years.
We could have had an electoral rerun in 2020. And given the likelihood that Clinton would have had four years of bad press, while Trump would have been, in an awful way, a media darling, I think he could have won outright the second time.
We'll never know if that would have been the case, but I honestly believe the urge by Trump voters to not just punish but to completely obliterate the Obama/Clinton coalition in 2020 would be, in this scenario, absolute.
And yes, our lovely media would have made sure that the Trump Show would be playing in 2020.
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