It's always difficult to say with reasonable certainty which Trump-induced crisis he is distracting from by creating another crisis, such as his comment to Fox News' Chris Wallace last Sunday that he might reject the election's results: "I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election."
That unpresidential bit of lunacy seemed a species of what we might call generic distraction. Polls showed Joe Biden thumping Trump throughout most of the nation and, most ominously for the incumbent, in battleground states. That, along with Trump's increasingly wretched economy and his steady-handed, stay-the-course negligent homicide of tens of thousands of Americans had all conspired in his mind to spark the perfect moment for an utterly unsubstantiated "rigged-election" accusation. No particular catastrophe among the three seemed to stand out.
But this morning?
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020
That lunatic distraction came just minutes after the Commerce Department reported that the G.D.P. had fallen at a staggering annualized rate of 32.9 percent during the second quarter — the "second worst" in recorded history, observes the NY Times. (And the Labor Department announced this morning that another 1.43 million new unemployment claims were filed last week.)
"Kids can go to school, but we can't vote?" responded the Lincoln Project to Trump on Twitter. Then there are the little matters of a federal statute requiring a presidential vote on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November and the U.S. Constitution's amended provision that a president's four-year tenure begin on 20 January — leaving even an illegal postponement in an insurmountable time-crunch (short of a coup, which won't happen).
What is just as expected as another of Trump's outrageous distractions? "So far, no major Republican figures [are] criticizing the president [for his tweet]," reports the Times. "Republican state chairmen said they have not seen it" and "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ignored questions about it."
And so it goes. For another three months.