(Nov. 16) Wafting out from Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, pungent as a three-day-dead rat in a basement closet, came the unmistakable stench of a loser.
Yes, in 2016, Donald Trump pulled an inside straight, with FBI Director James Comey’s unintentional help, to become president over the most emotionally unattractive major party nominee in modern history. (Even then, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.) He has won almost nothing since.
Trump lost when trying to overturn Obamacare, torpedoing the House effort when it had a real chance by calling it “mean, mean, mean” and “a piece of s***.” He lost when trying to build the wall, somehow coming away from a government-shutdown fight with less wall funding than the Democrats themselves had first offered to support. He lost when trying to get a “better deal” on trade with China, which predictably failed to abide even by the minor “deal” Trump unconvincingly announced as a victory. And he hindered U.S. efforts to prosecute Huawei’s intellectual property theft while basically giving China carte blanche to oppress the Uyghurs and destroy Hong Kong’s freedom.
Trump lost plenty of this nation’s international prestige when he said he had “fallen in love” with North Korea’s tinpot totalitarian and when he repeatedly threw verbal roses to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and when he abandoned an air base and tons of equipment in Syria that Russia predictably snatched up. Trump lost badly when he made a big public deal of backing the electorally legitimate eviction of communists from power in Venezuela, only to dither at numerous key moments and watch the eviction effort fail. Trump laid the groundwork for a major U.S. debacle in Afghanistan by negotiating directly with the terroristic Taliban behind the back of the Afghan government.
He lost for Republicans all pretense of being the party of fiscal sanity by eagerly presiding over the biggest spending, most-indebted peacetime U.S. government in history, even before the pandemic hit…. Trump is a tired, bitter, sociopathic old grifter. He’s the biggest loser — he should exit the stage. [The full column is here.]
