Like most of you, I didn’t start Monday wondering what it would feel like to be the target of a long string of Donald Trump’s dick-size-compensation insults, but since my friends and I in the Lincoln Project are now living very much rent-free in Donald Trump's tiny brain, I thought I might give you a little insight on “Mourning In America,” the ad that launched a thousand tweets.
The president had nothing better to do, because the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror, the death count has dropped to zero, our economy has bounced back so that we’re not saddled with massive debt and deficit driven by his corrupt son-in-law’s divide-the-spoils seizure of drugs and PPE, and the states can fling wide the doors of every business now that there are clear skies ahead.
Oh. Wait.
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We called the ad that shook Trump so badly “Mourning In America” as both a homage to and a flip of the classic 1984 Hal Riney ad, “Morning In America.” That brilliant, evocative minute caught a moment of uplift in the minds and hearts of American voters in that rarest of political spots; it was true in the audience’s gut.
We told a darker story, one that reflects the painful reality of what Americans both know and feel today: that with the COVID death toll mounting and the president’s attention to the crisis—never quite as intense as it should have been—wavering, we’re a nation locked in a problem largely of Trump’s making. That sting he felt watching the ad—and watching it, and watching it, and watching it—was knowing the deaths and the economic destruction are being laid at his feet, and rightly so.
Watching him completely melt down—and Donald, we heard about your hissy-fit on Air Force One today; so did a lot of reporters in the back of the plane—was, I freely admit, very satisfying.
While Trump delivers happy-talk lies, it was his choice to delay, deny, and deceive the American people for two months even when the scope and danger of the virus was readily apparent. It was his choice not to begin the preparations to protect both Americans’ health and the American economy.
Unlike Reagan, who was a tremendous salesman for America and for the American dream, Donald Trump is a salesman only for his own line of tiresome bullshit. In the darkest days in the last two months, he’s cared about little but his vaunted “ratings” and his own political prospects. There’s never been a secret heart of goodness in Trump, never a moment of munificence or compassion.
Reagan believed in more than himself. Trump believes in nothing but himself. The Gipper was an avatar of America’s dreams. The Donald’s brand is American weakness and decline, and the preposterous idea that he alone can fix it.
From the very start of Donald Trump's campaign in 2015, he occupied the most negative messaging space imaginable. His infamous American Carnage inauguration speech led to possibly the greatest five words ever spoken by a retired president on the inaugural stage when George W. Bush said, “That was some weird shit.”
Trump and Trumpism are fundamentally negative and reductive. Far from the conservative doctrine of personal agency and responsibility, Trumpism always has a scapegoat, someone or something to blame. There's always a conspiracy against Trump and his followers from some imagined constellation of enemies: the deep state, the wily caravan dwellers, the insidious Yellow Peril, some perfidious scoundrel lurking in the wings unnamed and unbelievable but always there. He’s never responsible. The buck stops nowhere.
Trump constantly describes America as tricked, used, abused, fooled, and beaten on the world stage by wily brown people, insidious oriental masterminds, or whatever other random racist trope emerges from his lie hole. Far from Reagan, Trump is a small, negative whiner. Reagan was in better spirits after being shot than Trump is even on his best day.
We couldn’t cover all the damage he’s done in just 60 seconds.
As Republicans wake up day after day looking at Senate polls in states where they should be comfortably ahead and not have to mount even a significant challenge, they recognize that Donald Trump is dragging them deeper and deeper down into the polling abyss and a political hole from which few scenarios see them emerging victorious in November. The House is beyond a lost cause of the GOP, and no serious person in the donor community on K Street or beyond is willing to kick in meaningful resources to an enterprise filled with fuckwits like Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and their fellow travelers.
Washington’s most powerful enabler of Donald Trump has always been Mitch McConnell, and Cocaine Mitch may be out of tricks soon. He thought he would have to mount a serious defensive effort for three or at most four members of his caucus. Now, that number is up to at least six, and even though Kentucky is one of the reddest red states McConnell has an eye on his own pulling against upstart Amy McGrath, and he's clearly wondering whether he should pull a million here or million there for his own efforts.
Our Mourning in America ad isn’t an exaggeration or hyperbolic description of this country. It enraged Trump because it caught what Americans are feeling, right now as he flails against an adversary that can’t be spun away with rage tweeting, frantic lies, or the rest of his bullshit.
Listen to Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson’s podcast, The New Abnormal, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
