Matt Bai’s post at Yahoo News yesterday, Tired of winning yet? You're not alone., was hilarious. His low approval numbers can be attributed to the public being tired of so much winning. He asks you to remember all the payback to 2016 when “Trump, like a real-life Music Man with a truckload of fetching red hats [vowed that] if he became president, America would all of a sudden start winning again. Our rural areas and small cities would bounce back. Our borders would be safe. Our government would work for everyone. There was just one catch. We’d win so much, Trump said, that we’d eventually grow tired of winning. He knew what he was talking about. Because Trump had been winning all his life.”
He was born a winner, with a dad who made a small fortune in real estate. He gambled that fortune on big-city skyscrapers and faux-classic casinos and exclusive golf courses the color of money, and he won again and again, if you don’t count a couple of nettlesome bankruptcies and a huge payout to victims of his scam university. (And, you know, the frozen steaks.)So Trump understood how empty winning can be. How you think it’s going to soothe all your demons and wipe away all your cares, how you assume that once your team finally wins the championship you will wake up every morning with a smile on your face, but in the end it just leads to a void of disappointment and self-doubt.And here we are.Trump’s been pretty much the president he said he would be, even before he seized control of his own administration a few weeks ago and started replacing milquetoast policymakers with like-minded TV celebrities.He’s told the Europeans and other allies who relied on our leadership for the last century to go figure things out for themselves.He’s done his damnedest to discredit the entire idea of America as a nation of immigrants who share common values.He’s responded to the Russian czar’s threat to nuke Florida by congratulating him on his hard-fought fake-election win and suggesting he visit Washington.Thanks to Trump’s tax cuts and military buildup, we’re now rocketing toward an economic calamity in which just servicing the interest on our spiraling debt, coupled with our other obligations, will push interest rates higher and crowd out almost everything else the federal government does.Oh, I know what you’re saying: This doesn’t sound like winning at all. But that’s only because you misunderstood what Trump was trying to say.Trump doesn’t define winning the way you and I do. It’s not about giving back or improving people’s lives; as I’ve written before, Trump has never done that anywhere, unless you count remodeling a skating rink.Winning, in Trump’s mind, wasn’t about us. It was about him.It’s about ratings and primacy. Trump wants more than anything to exist outside of himself, to occupy your screens and your emotions. He always has.Losing, to Trump, is receding from center stage. Winning is finding one way after another to keep us riveted to the show.So Trump is absolutely delivering on his promise. He’s winning and winning and winning. Every day, it seems, he taps some new well of audacity, willing himself to become the overarching story of our time.Even the reimagining of an old TV sitcom becomes a national conversation not because of anything that happens on the show itself, but because of what its star says about Trump, in the script and in real life. They should call it “Roseanne in Trumpland.”Another win for the president.Of course Trump’s idea of winning feels deflating to most of us. It’s exhausting. It’s disorienting. It’s like putting your face up to an industrial fan every hour of the day.It seeps into our dreams-- all this dissembling and smallness and provocation bursting onto our TV crawls and iPhone screens-- and when we wake up, we’re not an inch closer to giving our kids the America we promised them.But you can’t really blame the president. He told us right from the start that we’d get tired of the whole noisy routine.We were just too busy gawking to listen.
And, if a new MTSU poll his to be believed, Trump is about to win again-- big-- in Tennessee. Former Governor Phil Bredesen is going to crush GOP nut case Marsha Blackburn in the Senate race in one of the country’s reddest states. Tennessee’s PVI is a daunting R+14. Trump won the state’s 11 electoral votes in a landslide-- 1,522,925 (60.7%) to 870,695 (34.7%), biggest margin any presidential candidate had since 1972. Bredesen leads Blackburn 45-35% and even manages to take 20% of the Republican electorate! Tennessee’s voters know Bredesen is a conservative and Trump will be able to pull out the self-congratulatory speech he have when Conor Lamb beat Saccone in Pennsylvania underscoring that Lamb won because he ran on Trump’s platform. He’ll say the same thing about Bredesen. While the Tennessee Republicans wage war against Bredesen in the same way the Polish army attacked German panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe-- with calvary charges. “Blackburn's campaign spokesman Abbi Sigler said Bredesen was trying to convince voters he's a moderate but he's more in line with Democrats like U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” That’s not going to work. [The poll also showed Trump with a 50% approval rating and just 41% disapproving.]And just ask yourself... if the House impeaches Trump in 2019, how will Senator Bredesen (and Senator Doug Jones) vote when the Senate has to decide if he's guilty or not? You know.
