On Wednesday afternoon, the latest batch of polls in the Presidential campaign were released, and they showed an increasingly grim picture for Donald Trump. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey had Joe Biden up by eleven points. Fifty per cent of those surveyed said that there was “no chance” they would support Trump. The Quinnipiac University poll showed an even wider national lead for Biden, of fifteen points. Trump’s job-approval rating had sunk to thirty-six per cent, and a daunting sixty per cent of Americans disapproved of his performance in office. “There is no upside, no silver lining, no encouraging trend hidden somewhere in this survey for the President,” Tim Malloy, the Quinnipiac polling analyst who oversaw the study, said. A few hours later, Trump ousted his campaign manager, Brad Parscale—or, rather, had his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, do so. His new campaign manager is Bill Stepien, a New Jersey operative and former Trump White House political director best known for his role in former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal. “I look forward to having a big and very important second win together,” the President tweeted, shortly before 9 p.m. Reaction was swift, and withering. “Brad’s not the one going off-message. Brad’s not the one refusing to wear a mask,” a senior White House official told CNN, lambasting Trump. “He’s not focussed. Everyone has told him that. Nothing has changed.” The political analyst Amy Walter said, “The campaign manager isn’t the problem. The problem is the candidate.” Of course, she was right: Trump’s summer slump is real, and it is his own fault. Parscale did not tell Trump to downplay the threat of the coronavirus, or to deny its deadliness. He did not force Trump to undercut America’s scientists and public-health officials. He did not demand that America open back up for business in the midst of an untreatable plague. He was merely an extremely well-compensated cheerleader for the President’s reckless actions. Now, with cases rising in forty-one states, the country has come to a new awareness that there will be no return to normalcy this fall. Many of America’s largest school districts announced this week that they will not welcome students back to classrooms in September. Trump’s own head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, said this week that this fall may be “one of the most difficult times” that the country has ever confronted. With little more than a hundred days left until the election, no amount of Trumpian rage, denial, bluster, or attacks has been able to obliterate this unpleasant reality of the President’s making. Read more https://www.newyorker.com/news/lett...m_brand=the-new-yorker&utm_social-type=earned
