Trump Abandoned by His Own Voters

Incompetence is not even the main allegation against the president that his former national security advisor makes in his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

In November 1999, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, George W. Bush, was ridiculed because he could not name Pervez Musharraf, the general who had just seized control of Pakistan, a nuclear power, in a coup d’etat, a nuclear power. This gap in knowledge did not prevent him from winning the 2000 election. Twenty years later, the presumptive Republican nominee, showing marvelous progress in knowledge of trans-Atlantic affairs, does not know that Great Britain, an ally of the United States if ever there was one, is a nuclear power and that Finland is an independent nation. Making matters worse, Donald Trump has been in the Oval Office since 2017. Is he in a position to win the Nov. 3 election?

Incompetence is not even the main allegation against the president that his former national security advisor makes in his book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

John Bolton, a “sick puppy” according to Trump, accuses his former boss of having bargained with Xi Jinping, during a June 2019 summit, about China buying American agricultural products in order to benefit a portion of his base and thus his reelection. The blackmail involved in withholding aid to Ukraine in order to get his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to open an investigation into Democratic rival Joe Biden’s son set a precedent for weaponizing foreign policy. Nevertheless, in the middle of a trade war with China, it still required going out on a limb to beg for the help of his archrival of the moment. Trump did it anyway.

American voters will obviously be the only ones to decide whether or not the former real estate developer will remain in the White House. There is hope that some of his unconditional supporters will finally realize just how dependent their leader has made the country by lowering himself to such behavior – a far cry from “Make America Great Again,” the slogan he has harped on for four years. The failure of candidate Trump’s campaign kick-off at a rally in Tulsa, where the room was not filled, might have supported the theory that there is diminished enthusiasm if the low turnout were not due, in part, to the creative and punishing action by young Korean Pop fans. The story behind the latest ordeal facing the president after the public health crisis, an economic depression and anti-racist protests tells us much more about diminished enthusiasm. Bolton represents the most conservative wing of voters who elected Trump in 2016. Beyond the settling of personal accounts that his book represents, the former U.N. ambassador’s attack means that a portion of neoconservative Americans have resigned themselves to a Biden victory. The relentless erosion of his support, the refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court – a court that Trump has carefully remade – to end the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, and the resistance by scientists to his crazy ideas for fighting the coronavirus mean that the populist wave Trump rode to the White House has reached its limit. It also means that, barring any of the surprises that are always plausible in an American election cycle, we are experiencing an atmosphere that is the end of a reign in Washington.