Trump Is Acting as If He Wants to Lose

President Donald Trump began a week in which the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, with devastating consequences for public health and for the economy, by bashing Nascar for banning Confederate symbols and Black Nascar driver Bubba Wallace for not apologizing for … well, it wasn’t exactly clear what he thought Wallace should apologize for. At any rate, it put Trump squarely on the other side of the issue from Nascar, and from (for example) most White state legislators in Mississippi, who recently voted to remove Confederate symbolism from their state flag.

My immediate reaction over on Twitter was to question whether Trump would be behaving any differently if he had given up on winning re-election and was instead trying to cultivate a fanatical group of loyal customers for future business endeavors. I then saw that smart political scientists in the Eastern time zone had beaten me to it: