Dear Donald: Geniuses don't choose whining over winning

Stephen H. Provost is the author of three books on the Trump presidency, including his latest, Jesus, You’re Fired!, available now on Amazon.

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I’m fascinated by Republicans’ outrage over the results of the 2020 election.

By all accounts, everything went better than they should have hoped. The presidential election was twice as close as pollsters, who had forecast an 8-point win for Biden, had predicted. But more than that, they gained a lot of ground in the House and can hold the Senate by winning one of the two runoff races in Georgia.

But many Republicans don’t seem pleased. Instead, they seem outraged that Donald Trump lost the presidency. In part, this is because of Trump’s sledgehammer approach to messaging, insisting he got robbed by a “rigged” election.

It also speaks, however, to a disturbing tendency to view the presidency as the be-all and end-all in American politics — so much so that some Trump allies are calling for Georgia Republicans to boycott the Senate runoff elections there as a way of protesting Trump’s loss. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

It’s as if nothing matters except the presidential election — which of course it doesn’t to Trump, so it’s no surprise that his allies would buy in. But what is concerning is that so many Republicans at large have, too.

Nothing else matters

The founders created a system with three co-equal branches of government, but because of the executive branch’s focus on a single person (and its role in “executing” policy), there’s a natural tendency to put the president on a pedestal. That tendency is only magnified by the nature of this particular president: an egotist whose outsized personality has overshadowed the office itself.

It’s come down to this for many of Trump’s followers: If he can’t win, nothing else matters. Not the country, not the Constitution, not even the Republican Party. (Trump has accused his opponents of being RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — but his followers, who are willing to throw the party under the bus for his sake, fit that description far better.)

Trump appeared at a rally Saturday, his first since losing the election, ostensibly to campaign for the two GOP runoff candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Predictably, he took up most of the time himself. Loeffler and Perdue spoke briefly, but when they did, many in the crowd didn’t care about what they had to say, drowning them out with chants of “Fight for Trump!”

This is, of course, exactly what Trump wants to hear. It won’t, however, do Republicans any good, and it won’t help him, either. (Even Trump-appointed judges don’t make rulings based on crowd chants.)

Missed opportunities

Here’s the thing, though: Trump could have done Republicans some good by putting the spotlight on Loeffler and Perdue. Unfortunately for them, he can’t stand to share the spotlight, and he’s apparently not very good at math: The Republicans just need to win one of those two Senate races to hold the Senate, but Trump would need to flip several states that have already certified he’s lost to “win” the election. One task is feasible. The other isn’t.

But Trump cares a lot more about the one that isn’t, so that’s the one he’s focused on. Just like he focused on the election rather than dealing with COVID-19 during the summer — when he could have made a difference. Even if he hadn’t been able to help contain the virus, he would have helped his own election chances by showing some concern for the people who were dying. This is something he refused to do, and according to his former campaign manager, it cost him the election.

In fact, Trump had so successfully locked up his base, all he needed to do was shave a few more percentage points off the undecided crowd to win. But he refused to try to do that. He was like a ball-carrier who, having broken free and run the length of the field to the 5-yard line, stops and refuses to go the rest of the way.

These aren’t the actions of a “very stable genius.” It’s the behavior of a fool.

Two talents

Trump is brilliant at two things: marketing and brainwashing. The latter is defined as “any method of controlled systematic indoctrination, especially one based on repetition or confusion.” In order to brainwash someone, you have to convince them to ignore evidence, and Trump has effectively done that with his supporters: There’s no evidence he’s won the election, but he continues to insist he has, anyway.

Yet in the process of persuading his base to accept falsehoods, he’s ignored truth that could actually help him. Had he been as persistent about touting the economy and progress toward a vaccine as he had about broadcasting his own sense of victimhood, he might have won the election. Perpetuating falsehoods instead of touting truths that benefit you is just plain stupid. It’s like driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a dirt road by way of Montana instead of just hopping on Interstate 5.

But Trump cares more about whining than he does about winning. Now, he’s threatening to undercut the message about Loeffler and Perdue with his own continued grievance messaging.

He contends the Georgia election was rigged because he lost, even though Perdue came within an eyelash of winning outright in the general election. If his supporters buy that argument — and a lot of them appear to be — what’s to motivate them to vote in January? Why waste your time if the system is “rigged”?

Contradictions

Trump insisted Saturday that “we can fight for the presidency and fight to elect our two great senators, and we can do it at the same time.”

But he can’t. You can’t rely on a system to empower you and seek to discredit it at the same time. Well, you can, but it’s not a very smart thing to do. Contradictory messaging doesn’t work, even on supporters who are “all in.” If you ask someone to pick something up at the store, then immediately return it, they won’t bother to make the trip at all.

Trump is essentially trying to tell people that voting is fair for everyone else except him, and even then, it’s only unfair if he loses. The American obsession with the presidency and the cult of personality that goes with it has allowed him to perpetuate this absurdity. Trump isn’t the first president to bask in hero-worship. Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama all did to some extent. He’s just the first to exploit it for his own selfish ends.

He’s also the least widely adored of those four. His highest approval rating has been 49%. Set that side-by-side with Kennedy’s (83%), Reagan’s (68%), and Obama’s (69%), and there’s no comparison.

He’s not the most popular president. He’s not the most successful. And he’s nowhere near smart enough to be a genius. But that doesn’t stop him from doing what he does best: trying to brainwash us into thinking he’s all of the above.