While he was cleared of criminal conspiracy charges for his eagerness to accept help from the Russian government in 2016, only a month ago he was impeached for trying to extort another government into doing the same thing for him in 2020. We know Trump will cheat again, in an even more insidious way, because he already did. But with the help of the right-wing propaganda media, he's managed to convince his followers that everything good in their lives is directly attributable to him. He has actually accomplished almost nothing during his term aside from tax cuts for the wealthy. The entire premise of his "promises made, promises kept" mantra is built on the most bald-faced flagrant lie. And of course he says the nation is making vast sums of money from his trade war when, in reality, it's Americans who pay for the tariffs while Trump is handing out millions of dollars in bailouts to farmers who are hurt by them. He says he's passed numerous bills - and was the only one who could do it! - which were actually passed by his predecessors. He says he's built hundreds of miles of new wall along the Mexican border when he's actually only replaced existing barriers and added one new mile. Trump claims he will protect Medicare and Medicaid ("and the Democrats won't") when his budget actually cut them. He says he is "saving pre-existing conditions" when his administration, as we speak, is arguing in federal court to end Obamacare, which is the law that bans insurance companies from denying insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. He lies about everything, but the lies that will have the greatest effect on his chances of re-election are the bold and blatant lies about his record. On the most mundane level, his incessant lying is a form of cheating. Vote-suppression tactics have been a conservative mainstay, of course, from the Jim Crow era through "Operation Eagle Eye" in the 1960s to today's voter-roll purges. Nonetheless, there isn't a Democrat in the land, no matter who he or she supports for president, who isn't worried on some level that Trump will somehow pull it off again. He was impeached for doing something that his supporters knew perfectly well was wrong, but now see as a legitimate form of partisan warfare. Despite the fact that people give him credit for the good economic numbers, that doesn't help his overall favorability. He's been the subject of one scandal after another, to the point that the nation is exhausted with the drama. His approval ratings have been mired in the low 40s his entire term. On the surface, Trump is not in a good position to win re-election. Because of the nature of his implausible victory in 2016 and the surreal character of the last three years, they have lost confidence in their ability to understand politics at all. This isn't unusual but it is especially intense this time because most Democrats understand that Donald Trump is an existential crisis. Pundits have talked themselves in circles while strategists try to figure out which demographic mixture and turnout models will lead to victory as the number-crunchers slice and dice the polls to discover the most likely path to 270 votes in the Electoral College. The presidential campaign is heating up and Democratic voters are wringing their hands trying to figure out which of their candidates is more likely to beat President Trump.
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