Don’t be fooled…

Trump’s egomaniacal rants do sometimes achieve political goals, no matter the damage to the Republic, and we in the media fall prey to their trap.

Last Thursday, the president also ruminated on the very fear which Joe Biden expressed just a few months ago – that Donald Trump will attempt to delay the election. After pshawing the ridiculousness of the notion just a few short weeks ago, the president effectively tweeted his support for the idea.

Even the conservative stalwart National Review called Trump’s proposal to delay the election to “be Grotesque and Un-American.”

“It is a tribute,” the magazine’s editors wrote, “to our commitment to self-government that elections have occurred as scheduled on this day during the worst crises of American history – when federal troops were in the field against rebel troops who sought to destroy the nation, when the unemployment rate was 25 percent, when U.S. forces were engaged in an epic struggle to save the West from the depredations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Trump doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t care. It is another indication of how little he’s let the institution of the presidency shape him, and how selfishly he approaches his duties.”

And this is what his allies were saying. Comments from Democrats were unprintable in a family newspaper. However, the controversy concealed the president’s true objective. Trump predicated his call for a delay upon the potential for irregularities in a postal vote. He complained that “months would go by” and no one would know who won the election.

In other words, the president just telegraphed to the nation that he intends to suppress the vote, and most reporters in the country seemingly missed the point. According to some estimates, 2/3 of mail-in ballots will come from Democrats, and will constitute the go-to voting method employed by many minority groups ravaged by the coronavirus. While septuagenarian Republicans, in the fashion of the deceased Herman Cain, will instead still turn out to the polls on Trump’s orders.

Therefore, the GOP – at the president’s command – will seek to invalidate hundreds of thousands of these postal votes, while Trump’s loyal electors brave the infectious polling stations. The president just revealed the audacity of his electoral strategy, and the media focused on the sensationally, legally impossible chance of a postponement rather than the consequential likelihood of the disenfranchisement of thousands.

Of course, we also ignored, on that very day, that the American economy had contracted by almost a third, the worst economic news to befall the country since the Great Depression. Yet again everyone lasered in on Donald Trump wanting to delay the election. Nobody paid attention to what mattered.

This article originally published in the August 3, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.