The Best Thing for Trump

Underestimating him, as in the 2016 election, does nothing but benefit Donald Trump

Two weeks before the United States’ presidential election, Donald Trump has started speaking publicly about the prospect of being defeated on Nov. 3. During a rally in Georgia — a crucial state — on Friday night, the president asked his die-hard supporters: “Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, ‘I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.’ I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.”

As far as is known, spontaneous bursts of honesty are not among the many side effects suffered by those infected with COVID-19. And certainly, Trump has not lost the extraordinary political instincts that distinguish him. He knows perfectly well that the best thing that could happen to him in the final stretch of the campaign is being underestimated again, as in 2016. After a constant dosage of Trumpism for five years, it is clear that the populist leader thrives whenever he feels cornered and whenever he is not taken seriously. That is what his underdog strategy is all about, and he is reviving it in order to secure four more years in the White House and once more disprove every prediction against him.

Trump may be many things, but he is not irrelevant. In essence, he has little, if anything, to do with the American right, with conservatism, the libertarian Tea Party, Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. Nor is he the last defender of the West or a bastion of traditional values. Trump mainly belongs to Trump. That is to say, a compulsive liar who has managed to make himself comfortable among issues that are as real as they are painful. His political career is built on settling the score with the U.S. elites and the frustration of social sectors like white blue-collar workers.

That is why it is striking to see that there are those who insist on echoing Steve Bannon’s fallacies about Trumpism as the unavoidable and revolutionary culmination of a crucial cycle in American history. Bannon is a crook, not Nostradamus.