Josh Marshall: ‘For the First Time Trump Faces Crises Not of His Own Making’

Josh Marshall, writing at TPM:

But the biggest difference can be obscure even as it stares us in the face. Every crisis President Trump faced until this year was a crisis purely of his own making. That meant that he could more or less stop them at will. Whenever things got hot enough and his advisors could convince him to stop being weird for a while it would go away. Because it was all about him, all of his own making.

This is what makes 2020 different. Each of today’s overlapping crises are ones for which Trump bears significant personal responsibility. But they are not crises of his own making and they are real quite apart from whatever actions he might choose to take. Donald Trump could turn magically into the perfect President and there would still be a COVID epidemic and tens of millions out of work. He could go through the motions on racism, police killings and criminal justice reform and those issues would remain only slightly less intractable.

None of this means Trump can’t recover. It does show how 2020 is different.

★ Monday, 8 June 2020