After Romney lost in 2012, the Republican Party did a "post-mortem" on the campaign. There were two competing theories as to why Romney lost. One was insufficient inroads with non-white voters, the other was "missing" white voters, mostly working class whites who understandably were not impressed with Mr. Hedge Fund.
The authors of the postmortem warned that the GOP really needed to do more "minority outreach" as America's demographics were changing in ways that were potentially cataclysmic for Republican hopes for the presidency. Then Trump comes along and mines those "missing" white voters, all while winning a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did.
Trump's surprise win in 2016 has led more than a few people to assume he's broken the normal rules of politics. That's simply not true. He drew an inside straight by winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with under 48.2% of the vote in all three states. In other words, he still didn't win majorities in the Blue Wall. (FWIW, he didn't win majorities in North Carolina, Nebraska's 2nd district, Florida or Arizona.) Trump's victory has been ascribed to anger with the political status quo, that was directed at Hillary Clinton, who represented a political dynasty. Much less has been made of those voters who went to Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Ironically, Joe Biden will probably do better with the Johnson voters than the Stein voters.
Anyway, the path for Trump's re-election was always going to be as narrow as his path to getting elected in the first place. What has transpired since his victory is that the GOP has bought into his myth of being a "game changing" politician. He's not. He benefited from some unique circumstances in 2016 and now he's looking at the worst economy since the Great Depression. The last time this happened, it led to almost 40 years of dominance by the Democratic Party.
But it goes beyond Trump's performance in office, it strikes at what an absolute shitshow of a "human being" he is. Has been a disastrous chief executive? Yes. But has he also been a terrible politician? Also, yes.
Just the past few days we have seen two of Trump's worst political impulses on display. First, his pandering to the shambolic remnants of the Tea Party and astroturfed protests shows his inability to see beyond Fox News and OANN. Wide swaths of America including a majority of Republicans think this is nuts. But the mouth breathing base - best typified by the "Karen" screaming at a mask-clad nurse counterprotesting in the streets - is all he sees or cares about.
Secondly, he has absolutely no sense of loyalty to anyone. Look at what he did to Brian Kemp. Kemp is a moron, to be fair. But he followed Hair Furor's edict at that moment in time and started to re-open the economy (mostly to save from spending on UI payments). For whatever reason, Trump throws him under the bus a day later. If you're a Republican politician, why in the name of Tax Cut Jesus would you trust this man? He is a narcissist and a pathological liar. He has absolutely no sense of reciprocal loyalty.
The GOP's decision to look at Trump's 2016 upset victory as some sort of roadmap to electoral success SHOULD be the death knell of their party. They should become a rump minority party of a few of Trump's "poorly educated." They probably won't, but that's a post for another time.
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