A total wipeout’: Former senior Trump officials see no path to victory in November
Tom Boggioni
According to a report at Politico, former officials who held senior positions in Donald Trump’s White House are privately — and not so privately — stating that they don’t see him winning re-election in November, with one going so far as to say the president may be facing a “total wipeout.”
With the Republican convention now in the rearview mirror, both the Trump and Democratic presidential Joe Biden’s campaigns will now go into overdrive but some conservatives who worked for Trump claim there is a strong undercurrent of Republicans who have already abandoned the president.
Noting, “At least 19 former top Trump administration officials in total have broken publicly with their former boss in one form or another,” Politico’s Daniel Lippman wrote, “It amounts to a never-before-seen wave of defections of people who have denounced him or his policies or criticized his character in other ways.”
Speaking with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, the ex-White House aide stated that he knows of at least 20 officials tied to the administration who are voting for Joe Biden “but don’t want to speak publicly to avoid getting hit by Trump on Twitter.”
“Anybody of substance is voting for Biden,” Scaramucci explained. “Anybody who has an IQ of over 100 and has worked for Donald Trump, with the exception of Steve Bannon, is not voting for him.”
According to Lippman, there is a widely-held belief among the Trump defectors that the president won’t be able to escape from his own record and that the public has reached a point where they are ready to move on from the president.
“What unites them all is shared skepticism that Trump can overcome the public’s harsh assessment of his management of the pandemic, which has now killed more than 180,000 Americans and has driven millions into poverty and deprivation,” the report states. “One word that repeatedly came up when Trump alums were asked to describe his reelection prospects: ‘pessimistic.'”
“I think people are starting to worry,” explained one former White House official while another warned to prepare for “a total wipeout.”
One factor that is dogging the president is his most potent weapon — the ability to hold MAGA rallies — has been stripped away from him due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The lack of trademark Trump rallies has also put a severe damper on his campaign, which relied on the massive events to drive free and largely unfiltered local media coverage, to stoke Trump’s loyal base of supporters, to inspire them to volunteer and donate — and to siphon up their personal data,” the report states with a former senior White House official elaborating, “The virus has redefined everything, and he has not defined his management of it in a successful way.”
“Seventy-five percent of the questions are going to be, ‘Hey, Mr. President, many thousands of Americans have died from a virus that you’ve downplayed, you haven’t gotten a supply chain working, you haven’t reassured the public, you haven’t given clear guidance to wear a mask, you haven’t done all these things on your watch in the last 6 months well enough,’” another ex-White House aide explained. “If the virus and the handling of it is the core set of questions when it comes to the debates, he’s not going to be talking about trade, about defeating ISIS, or cutting regulations or energy policy or the lowest unemployment rate among African-Americans. All those talking points and accomplishments have been kind of lit on fire.”
