Cartoon by Marian Kamensky

Trump’s delay-the-election tweet was just a distraction

By Jonah Goldberg

Boston Herald: On Thursday morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the U.S. GDP had the biggest drop in a single quarter in U.S. history. From April through June, the economy contracted by 9.5%, with the GDP falling at an annualized rate of 32.9%.

President Trump, who tweets about many topics, said nothing about it. But some 16 minutes after the news broke, he did tweet the following:

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

While I think this tweet was a profound error for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, my strong suspicion is that it accomplished precisely what Trump wanted. By floating the idea that we should postpone the election, suddenly no one was talking about the disastrous economic data. Instead, just about everyone took the bait and started talking about this grotesquely irresponsible trial balloon for a terrible idea. Including yours truly.

The president places outsized importance on numbers — stock market numbers, COVID-19 numbers, whatever — and racking up the single worst quarterly economic number ever recorded probably bothered him more than it should. After all, 32.9% was actually better than expected. Moreover, Trump wasn’t responsible for the pandemic that caused the economy to grind to a halt in the spring. And even though his handling of the crisis has been spotty at best, a similar number would probably be inevitable under any president.

Trump’s tweet was a terrible error politically for more reasons that I can list here. But here are four:

First, it makes Trump look desperate. If he were up 10 points in the polls, he wouldn’t be asking for an extension.

Second, Joe Biden is beating Trump badly by promising a return to normalcy. Floating the idea that the election should be postponed — something Biden predicted Trump might try, to the outrage of Trump defenders — only fuels a sense of chaos and presidential unsteadiness.

Third, it forced other Republicans to distance themselves from the president. “Never in the history of the country, through wars, depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time. We’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview with a Kentucky TV station.

And finally, it’s a futile idea that will go nowhere, even as it galvanizes Trump’s opponents and divides his supporters, because the president of the United States cannot unilaterally delay an election. All elections are run by the states, and the timetable for all federal elections are set by Congress.

It’s this last point that we should all be grateful for, and progressives in particular should take note >>>