Trump seeks revival as virus undercuts second-term bid

Bloomberg

Donald Trump’s re-nomination for president this week was supposed to be the celebration of what he considers a storybook political career.
With a booming US economy at his back, the president would bask in the adulation of thousands of supporters at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, as he contemplated a glide path to re-election.
But that wasn’t how things looked at a meeting in late May, when Trump was presented with poll numbers showing Democratic rival Joe Biden had the edge, according to people familiar with the meeting. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — the “blue wall” that Trump toppled to win in 2016 — had Biden looking strong. The former vice president was even up in Florida, as close to a must-win as there is on the map for Trump.
A politician known for bluster and bravado, Trump showed a glimmer of recognition of his own political mortality,
assessing his fortunes with an expletive.
Between the dream and the reality came coronavirus, which has come to define Trump for many voters better than any political strategist ever could. Instead of the raucous party he expected, Trump will appear before a crowd of only a few hundred socially distant Republican delegates gathered to formally nominate him. The diminished event is practically its own metaphor for the toll the pandemic has taken on the US, where more than 176,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 since February, and on Trump’s political standing.
“Without the plague from China, this thing was over,” Trump lamented in a speech Friday to the Council for National Policy, a conservative group. “We were sailing.”
For the past three years, Trump relied on the strength of the US economy to paper over any unease voters may have felt about the tumult in his administration. For the past three months, the White House has performed little more than damage control in the face of the virus.
The outlook was so bad at one point that Trump told Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, that he would sue him, according to people familiar with the matter.
Consulting firms connected to Parscale have made millions of dollars from Trump’s campaigns, and the president asked his son Eric and son-in-law Jared Kushner to review those expenditures, according to one of the people. They found no wrongdoing.
Trump personally asked Parscale’s replacement, Bill Stepien, to keep Parscale in a key role in the campaign after he was demoted, two people familiar with the situation said.
One person said Trump was being sarcastic when he threatened to sue Parscale. Others didn’t think so.
After the meeting in May, the recriminations that mark a faltering political campaign began to seep in. Trump changed convention venues before eventually abandoning his hopes for a large, in-person event. A Tulsa rally in June meant to be his resurrection became instead a humbling reality check when the arena wound up half-empty.
One person close to the campaign said that in July, coronavirus was the real fight, and it didn’t seem at the time like Trump and his top political and policy advisers had a plan to win it.
The president channeled the anxieties and concerns of Rust Belt working class White voters into victory in 2016. But his combative first term, beset by investigations of his campaign’s connections to Russia and his conduct in Ukraine, has left Trump consumed with his political enemies even as the nation reels from the coronavirus outbreak.
Meanwhile, the racial appeals to White voters that helped him win in 2016 seem to be falling flat or backfiring in 2020.