Finally, a post-mortem on Trump's loss

Tal Bachman writes,

if conservatives ever hope to get back into the Power Game again, they need to know exactly what mistakes Trump made, and then, never repeat them.

Trump hired people he should never have hired, then didn't fire them when he should have. Sessions. Bolton. Nielsen. Barr. Tillerson. Mattis. Milley. Esper. Scaramucci. Omarosa. Haley. Pruitt. Wray. He even seriously considered hiring the soulless snake Mitt Romney as his secretary of state. On and on the list could go. Trump began by claiming he was only going to hire "the best people". In the end, it was Trump himself who concluded he only hired the worst people, since he so often went on social media to trash the very peop

le he had hired.

That in so doing Trump only made himself look foolish and incompetent to undecided and swing voters didn't seem to occur to him. He also didn't seem concerned that this grating, repetitive process lowered morale among people still serving, each of whom thereafter wondered if Trump would one day trash them publicly, too.

Here's another thing. Over and over, Trump achieved something great, only to then erase the forthcoming positive headline announcing the achievement by shooting his mouth off on social media...which then became the headline, and a negative one at that. Trump would then complain that the media hadn't covered his achievement. The Twitter outbursts were often attempts at settling petty personal squabbles almost no voter cared about. Result: Most voters never heard about his great achievement, only that he was yelling at someone again. And again, this couldn't help but alienate all sorts of swing and independent voters—especially suburban women.

Trump also wasted hours yakking with inveterate Trump-hater Bob Woodward in the vain hope he could charm Woodward into liking him. He did the same with Chris Wallace and other Trump-hating reporters. He never seemed able to accept that no matter what he did, the DC Swamp Monsters were always going to hate his guts. He was an outsider, he wanted to blow up their cozy little world, he was a Republican, and the old Dale Carnegie techniques about charming people into liking you are just never going to work on DC Swamp Monsters. So why bother trying? Why bother boosting the credibility of media goons who are just going to go out and turn more voters against you?

It might be objected that these are fairly superficial errors, so let me turn to something more serious. In the two years prior to election day, Trump repeatedly announced that Democrats were going to try to rig the 2020 election against him. He said it at rallies. He said it in interviews and tweets. If we take him at his word, he knew perfectly well an attempt was coming.

And so I ask: What was Team Trump's fraud prevention plan? What did he actually do to reduce the chances of ballot-stuffing, voting machine manipulation, fraudulent mail-in ballots, Chinese election-tampering, etc.? From what anyone can tell, the answer is: nothing. There was no fraud prevention plan. Most conservatives continue to give Trump a pass on this on grounds it is the states, not the federal government, who run the election process. But the fact is, Trump and the RNC could easily have helped coordinate anti-fraud measures among Republican Party machines (and Republican governors and state legislatures) in swing states. Yet they didn't.

That effort could have, and should have, coordinated legislative and lawfare swing state countermeasures against last minute changes to voting processes designed to make fraud easier. It should have initiated legislative efforts to make voting methods more secure overall. It should have sent RNC money to anti-fraud squads. It should have organized and scheduled designated poll watchers (and local media) at high-risk polling stations. It should have pushed for the abolition of computerized vote-counting machines altogether, since their vulnerability to error has been amply documented for decades. It should have organized state law enforcement supervision at all polling stations. It should have organized federal law enforcement attendance at various polling stations under the rationale they were enforcing federal voting and civil rights laws. And last, but not least: Trump should have had a top-tier team of legal experts standing by on election night to challenge any dubious results, just in case that national anti-fraud effort failed.

Read much more here.