Trump's Big CON: Be Afraid (of That "Retiree Strolling Around the Woods")

"There is a specter haunting the United States, or at least the Republican Party and its friendly news outlets. You may think it’s just a former government official who holds no office and won’t be running for anything again, but they know the truth. America needs to get worried and, more important, angry at Hillary Clinton. . .

President Trump himself seems to be practically obsessed with Clinton, as Philip Bump explains:

    Whatever Trump does or doesn’t do, he’s always willing to point out what Clinton did or didn’t do that’s worse.

    So she comes up in his interviews a lot. In fact, in 19 interviews that he’s conducted since becoming president, we found that Clinton tended to be mentioned much earlier than a number of Trump’s other favorite topics: The 2016 election, the votes he received, the electoral college and Barack Obama. …

    In 17 of 19 of his interviews, Clinton came up, on average about 36 percent of the way in. . .

Without going back and checking, I’m pretty sure Obama didn’t bring up how he beat John McCain in 90 percent of the interviews he conducted during his first six months in office. I don’t recall George W. Bush talking about Al Gore at all after he became president. So what’s going on here?

For Trump personally, I think it’s mostly about the deep insecurity that comes through every time he opens his mouth. It’s why he’s always telling everyone how smart and knowledgeable and accomplished he is, something that people who are actually smart and knowledgeable and accomplished don’t do. He feels a need to remind everyone that he won the election, usually embellishing the story by characterizing it as bigger and more emphatic a victory than it actually was. As his vanquished opponent, Clinton is a symbol of his potency and dominance. . .

Trump got elected in large part by getting his voters mad — at immigrants, at Muslims, at politicians and at a supposedly rigged political system. But as president, he’s had a hard time sustaining that anger and constructing that story of himself as a warrior fighting against a threatening enemy.

Other Republican presidents had it much easier. President Ronald Reagan had a natural counterpoint in the Russians, an enemy Americans had hated for decades. The Cold War provided opportunities for threat and confrontation — invade a tiny island country here, make a speech in Berlin there, and you have a drama that never gets old. President George W. Bush spent eight years telling Americans they were about to be annihilated by villainous Middle Easterners, first al-Qaeda, then Saddam Hussein. By the end of his tenure the story had lost its punch, but it did get him reelected.

Trump, on the other hand, has no villain to fight. So he and his allies are left looking backward to the person who was supposed to be the villain of the moment but now is just a retiree strolling around the woods in Westchester County. No wonder they seem so dispirited."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump and the conservative media are still obsessed with Hillary Clinton.