SIMPLE & QUICK: There is no message; Team Trump has lost its message, its cause, and probably its cohort

Whether they are proud or poor, what is for sure is that days before the 2020 general election, the Trump campaign are lost boys. In the closing days of the 2016 general election, the MAGA message was 1. Cut taxes & regulations. 2. “Build the Wall” and 3. Put conservatives in the courts.

This message was hammered into the electorate. Despite the outrageous that accompanies the Trump personality and brand, the usual Republican rank-and-file, conservative white suburban women, and disaffected, male blue collar voters all took a chance. Many enthusiastically; many while holding their nose. With its historically low turnout, collectively, the unlikely cohort elected Donald John Trump as the 45th President of the United States.

Alongside the rank-and-file, the MAGA ideology captured the imagination of self-identifying forgotten Americans. These are the undereducated white rural conservatives struggling to make rent, let alone get ahead in life. It is men and women from what they feel is now forever set-aside small town America. This message resound louder amidst a rapidly accelerating liberal political landscape that left once moderate America wondering if the future included them.

Promises of explosive growth in American manufacturing, extensive middle class tax cuts, regulation reversals, and easy fixes to immigration and foreign policy won the cycle. But after four years of “winning” according to President Donald Trump, and the onset of a global pandemic, the MAGA message is now proving a mega disappointment.

Four years later, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan’s 2016 tax bill is all but forgotten by the forgotten American as much as Speaker Ryan is an all but forgotten title and name. Sure, the tax bill put billions into billionaire pockets and those with accumulated wealth, but most Americans never received any help with their tax burden. Team Trump forgot Main Street. And Main Street cannot help but notice.

“Factories will come roaring back” under Trump was a mainstay MAGA campaign promise. The Trump Administration did rollback most of the Obama era EPA and other workplace safety and safer climate regulatory measures, but this did not save any coal mining jobs. It did not solve any kitchen table issues. In fact, Under Trump, “Big Coal” is now a gag gift stocking stuffer. American manufacturing has taken a hit as well. Trump’s trade war with China has only cemented trade confusion, inciting dropped deals and frustrating future trade contracts. This has hurt American blue collar workers and farmers alike, possibly setting both back decades, or permanently.

“Build the Wall” may still be chanted at Trump rallies, but there has been no progress made on this promise. In fact, the entirety of the Trump Administration immigration policy is an American embarrassment. There are still 545 children whom are separated from their parents at the US Border as a policy action with no recourse for later familial reunification. And there is no wall other than what was constructed for photo opportunities and has since literally blown over.

The Federal courts are packed with Trump-appointed judges and SCOTUS is newly 6-3 conservative. The Donald can clarion McConnell’s impressive chess playing that solidified a generation of conservative rulings— maybe. The majority of Americans in poll after poll favor abortion access, civil rights era human rights protections, and equity for LGBTQ+ people in the workplace, in public spaces, and in contractual arrangements such as marriage.

So much so, that the posed threat of Democrats expanding the courts or their radical reformation of the courts is not gaining traction with America’s majority middle-of-the-road voters. Instead, the Republican obsession with using the courts to maintain a strangle hold on societal and governance progress is now in the national spotlight and may likely be reviewed historically as the final nail in the 2020 MAGA coffin, and the GOP for following decades. Mitch McConnell’s Team Trump’s unceremonious rush to confirm Amy Coney Barrett— instead of working to ensure American families and small businesses financially upended by a pandemic are able to maintain— has caused a quake that has propelled the intensity of 2018’s blue wave— now inciting 2020’s blue tsunami.

Donald Trump came back from his coronavirus diagnosis with a revived vigor to heap everything, including a random suitcase, at his opponent, true. POTUS is criss-crossing the 2020 battleground map, throwing 2016-style pre-pandemic rallies with his supporters in Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, and Florida, this is also true. But what is the incumbent’s message? There is none.

President Trump won suburban white women in 2016. Since then, the President has separated children from their mothers at our Southern border and sanctioned violent police brutality against mother’s peacefully protesting. Donald Trump’s administration has failed to provide Ivanka’s promised workplace benefits for new parents and has also failed to provide universal childcare. The President has politicized vaccines amidst a pandemic that has turned millions of once working moms into stay-at-home substitute school teachers.

Instead of re-imagining his unlikely 2016 cohort, the President doubled-down on his toxic MAGA masculinity. The Donald has a core base of about 43% of voters. And what remains of the 45th Administration are lost boys. Lost boys, whose four years of grifting from the People’s Purse and off of Donald Trump’s MAGA message is now landing them under investigation after investigation and arrest after arrest for stealing over $24 million in Trump voter donations, as has happened to MAGA Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

Or they are taking a little time out to rehabilitate their lives, as is happening to Brad Parscale after his psychotic episode and alleged suicide attempt inside his heavily fortified home. Parscale’s arrest was after it became publically known that he is being investigated because may have been using Trump supporter donations to fund his nouveau riche lifestyle in South Florida.

And meeting par for a Trump course, Elliott Broidy, the mega MAGA fundraiser, just pleaded guilty to conspiring to influence the Trump administration on behalf of China and Malaysia.