7/2/20
As Mr. Trump heads to Mount Rushmore on Friday to spend the Independence Day holiday in the carved presence of presidential greatness, he is suffering through the most trying stretch of his administration thanks in large part to his self-inflicted wounds. June represented the political nadir of his three and a half years in the Oval Office, when a race in which he had been steadily trailing, but faring respectably, broke open and left him facing the possibility of not just defeat but humiliation this fall. In addition to public surveys showing him losing decisively to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a number of battleground states, private Republican polls in recent weeks show the president struggling even in conservative states. Last month’s convergence of crises, and the president’s missteps in responding to them, have been well chronicled: his inflammatory response to racial justice protesters and his ill-considered rally in Tulsa, his refusal to acknowledge the resurgent virus or seriously address detailed reports about Russian operatives’ putting a cash bounty on American soldiers. It’s this kind of behavior, polls indicate, that has alienated swaths of swing voters. “People are making judgments about the president’s performance there and how he’s handling it,” said John Thune of South Dakota making no attempt to sugarcoat what he acknowledged has become a referendum on Mr. Trump’s performance.
One Republican official who is in frequent contact with the campaign expressed incredulity at how some aides willfully distort the electoral landscape to mollify Mr. Trump, recalling one conversation in which they assured him he was faring well in Maine, a state where private polling shows he’s losing. Mr. Trump continues to hope for an economic recovery he can run on in the final four months of the campaign, and on Thursday he trumpeted as a sign of progress the employment report showing 4.8 million jobs gained in June. But it is not clear that Mr. Trump will get much credit for a partial — and possibly fleeting — rebound when coronavirus cases are soaring. People close to the White House said that Mr. Trump remained stubbornly determined to feed the appetites of his hard-right base. In an interview, Mr. Kushner, whose influence in the administration is exceeded only by Mr. Trump, said his strategy amounted to letting the president dictate his own re-election. Letting Trump be Trump will delight some of his most committed supporters, but it is likely to dishearten Republicans who are already nervous about losing the Senate and yielding further ground in the House.
