Reading a number of articles lately about Trump and how he hates to be perceived as a loser (including
this one in the NYT today) I've been wondering... then why didn't he try to win?
When he won the Presidency, everyone was expecting him to pivot to a more presidential person, but he didn't. At no point in his term did he try to win over people who voted against him. At no point in the recent campaign did he try to appeal to those voters. During the debates and the campaign, he never put forward any policies that might appeal to them. Instead he kept up his divisive tactics.
The obvious answer is that he's a blithering idiot (despite what the one person on here claims) who surrounded himself with blithering idiots, but it seems like such a basic tactic of elections. If you want to win the election, you have to gain more votes than your opponent and so you should offer something to everyone. That thought seems to never have occurred to him. He barely eked out a win last time and must've known that he would need more votes this time. It's kind of mindblowing how much he botched his four years. The pandemic was a perfect opportunity to rally citizens together with a patriotic "we can beat this together" attitude but he had zero intuition on how to do that.
I hate him, but I find him to be a fascinating creature. This part in the aforementioned article is hysterical.
Quote:
Appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in April 1990, Mr. Trump said the only problem with the Taj Mahal’s opening day was too much success. Gamblers were playing the slots with such ferocity that the machines almost burst into flames.
“We had machines that — they were virtually on fire,” Mr. Trump said. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
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