re: #50 Dr Lizardo

Look like that “rally ‘round the flag” bounce Trump was enjoying is ebbing away. It’ll be interesting to see what polling numbers look like in, let’s say, 30 days from today.

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It was always inevitable that the “rally” bump would fade for three reasons:

1. The newness of his “change in tone” would wear off as it became obvious that words were not matching deeds. And when I say the “tone,” I’m talking about that sudden change in mid-March from “This is a Dem hoax!” to “This is a war and I’m gonna lead us to victory!” The whole “This is gonna be a bad time” BS from the other day? That was Donny play-acting, a con-man reading the room and changing his approach in order to keep the marks from being turned off. As we’ve seen in the past two days, it didn’t last because it never could.

2. His need for attention turning people off as he kept hijacking the “briefings” and using them as a substitute for the rallies he can’t attend anymore. The idea of holding daily briefings is nothing new and might have actually gotten some brownie points with voters had they stayed the domain of Pence and the other soulless husks. But that was never going to happen, so instead we have Donny out there day after day, what few new bits of info he might have to tell us turned into a 2 hour stream of consciousness that’s just making him look more and more absurd.

3. The “shit got real” effect, which really seemed to start kicking in within the last week or so as the “This is no worse than the flu” bit died an ignoble death in the face of rapidly rising hospitalization and death rates. See, in past epidemics and even the few pandemics, swift government intervention and international cooperation to find and isolate cases meant the media coverage looked like “scaremongering” and people responded negatively. But when you have a federal response that moves with all the speed of a dead dog nailed to an armchair (h/t Yahtzee), an approach to international cooperation that is wrapped around wads of cash, and partisan warfare between the Oval Office and the states, whatever public confidence there was that this would short-lived and minor withered like a slug under a mountain of salt.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for that dead cat bounce to begin fading.