Ex-GOP insider explains how Trump's 3-point re-election plan has crumbled before his very eyes

The fact that President Donald Trump has been trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in poll after poll — sometimes by double digits — doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t be reelected. Trump still has three and one-half months to turn things around, and his Republican allies won’t hesitate to resort to sleazy tricks like voter suppression. But at the moment, things aren’t looking good for Trump’s reelection campaign — which, Never Trump conservative Tim Miller emphasizes in a July 20 article for The Bulwark, has been desperately searching for a new strategy.

Trump, Miller notes, “had a plan to defeat Sleepy Joe Biden” earlier this year: attack the former VP’s “mental acuity,” defame him over Ukraine, and brag about the state of the U.S. economy. But that was before the coronavirus crisis went from bad to worse and Trump’s 2020 campaign, as Miller puts it, “got punched in the mouth.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic crumpled the economy that Trump was taking credit for,” explains Miller, who served as communications director for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. “Suddenly, Trump’s plans were moot. No longer did he have merely to run a smear campaign against an opponent who has lost a step, feed red meat to his rabid crowds, and take credit for good things that other people were doing — three tactics that make up his core skill set…. He would have to manage a real-life crisis that was directly affecting people’s lives, rather than just a PR crisis. And he was going to be judged on his performance.”

The anti-Biden line of attack that Trump had in mind earlier this year, according to Miller, was “cut from under him.”

Miller notes, “With unemployment at 11% and over 140,000 Americans dead from the virus, Keep America Great no longer rings true…. Sleepy Joe is starting to sound like a compliment, and President Trump’s own performance is not bolstering the contrast with Biden on the issue of mental acuity.”

For Trump’s troubled 2020 campaign, Miller adds, “a new approach is necessary” — and the “three-point plan” that Trump has been trying to use against Biden isn’t working. Coronavirus, according to Miller, is a crisis that Trump’s campaign is showing no signs of recovering from, and voters aren’t buying Trump’s efforts to paint Biden as “Antifa Joe.”

“The president has been punched,” Miller argues. “And the new three-point plan is as follows: (1) Ignore the thing that is punching you in the mouth over and over again, causing death and economic destruction throughout the country. (2) Pray that someone else fixes the problem for you. (3) Depict yourself as the law-and-order president by sending federal cops in camo to clash with protesters and convince the world that Average Joe Biden is the leader of MS-13.”

Miller adds, “In short, Trump has got just over 100 days left to get bailed out by the vaccine gods or come up with a new plan. Otherwise, it’s gonna be a TKO.”