With Donald Trump expected to be acquited by the GOP-majority Senate in an impeachment trial being manipulated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Democrats are setting their sights on the 2020 election where they feel the president is vulnerable on a host of other issues that can be piled on his House impeachment.
According to a report from the Daily Beast, democratic strategists who will be helping direct the 2020 campaign against Trump by the eventual Democratic nominee are licking their chops at the prospect of highlighting the president's poor stewardship of the country.
"As the president finds himself embroiled in impeachment, several of the biggest vulnerabilities for his 2020 re-election campaign are popping up elsewhere," the Beast's Hanna Trudo reports. "Earlier this month, Trump made an abrupt claim that he was a defender of protections for pre-existing conditions, in direct contrast to the legal and legislative actions his administration has taken. Then, reports surfaced showing him blowing up at his own cabinet secretary over the administration’s inability to get prescription drug prices under control. Most recently, he appeared to declare that entitlements were on the chopping block in his second term, before quickly moving to try and clean up the political mess he’d created."
According to Jim Manley, a longtime top Democratic Senate aide, "Trump’s inability to govern is a target-rich environment for Democrats. The guy’s smart enough to realize he needs to run on a domestic agenda. The problem he’s having is he has no filter, he’s saying this stuff publicly that he’s supposed to keep private.”
What should be worrying the president is plans by Democratic presidential nomination contenders to hit the president on those domestic issues where he has fallen down on the job -- if he ever tried at all in the first place.
"Democrats have signaled that they intend to put a heavy focus on prescription drug prices, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), having campaigned on lowering prices for months," Trudo explained. "And top party officials have been open about their desire to return to the playbook that worked so well for them in the 2018 elections, which was premised on the promise to protect the ACA, and lower prescription drug costs. A national poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation released in September found that 70 percent of Americans wanted members of Congress to make lowering drug prices their top priority."
Noting a series of miscues and unforced errors by a president who speaks first and thinks afterward, Democratic campaign consultants expect every utterance of the president to become fodder for a brutal take-no-prisoners campaign where Trump himself will be the centerpiece of attacks.
“The election is going to be all about Donald Trump and this is going to be part of the mosaic,” Manley suggested. “He’s going to sit there and lie about it.”
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