This guy is beside himself.

One would never know from looking at the data that Trump is the defendant in a criminal trial in New York City that’s been going on for weeks, where testimony has implicated him in cheating on his wife with a porn star and planting sleazy smears of his political opponents in national tabloids.

 

Trump critics have spent nine years waiting for Americans to have a “eureka” moment that he’s unfit for office. But the problem has never been getting voters to recognize that he’s unfit; the problem has been getting them to agree that he’s less fit than his opponent.

 

Between persistent inflation, left-wing wedge issues like the war in Gaza and of course his very advanced age, Biden is less qualified now than he was four years ago to make the case that he’s the fitter of the two candidates. Despite his best efforts to turn the race into another referendum on Trump, the data suggests that for most voters it’s more of a referendum on the incumbent, as reelection bids tend to be.

 

For cripes sake, he’s at 33% in the Times swing-state poll when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West are included as options for respondents.

 

In fact, despite Biden trailing Trump in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the same Times poll finds the Democratic candidates for Senate in all three states leading their Republican opponents.

 

Democrats likewise lead in the generic ballot average nationally even though Biden consistently trails Trump head-to-head. The president’s the weak link in the Democratic Party, plainly; a meaningful share of swing voters who are open to voting for Democrats in principle really do not want to vote for him again.

It took me a while to get Trump’s appeal in 2016, but I think I get it now. I can understand this columnist not getting it. What continues to flummox me is liberals’ inability to see Biden’s failures. His term has been an utter disaster on the domestic and foreign fronts. Americans are significantly less well off in terms of their economic well-being and physical security since Biden took office. And yet, liberals seem to keep thinking that it’s a messaging problem. It’s not. It’s a performance problem. And even though Trump is a mess of a man, he was a helluva a president. Americans get that.