Susan Glasser: “It was not supposed to be a trick question, or even all that tricky. For any other candidate, it would have been the softest of softballs, the slowest of pitches. But when the Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt asked Donald Trump the other morning, ‘Mr. President, what is your second-term agenda? What are your top priorities?,’ his inability to answer was one of the most revealing moments of his reëlection campaign so far. ‘I want to take where we left,’ Trump said. ‘We were better than we were ever,’ he added, wistfully conjuring the booming pre-pandemic America of his fantasies, where everybody had a job and the stock market was great. Facing uncontrolled death from the coronavirus and an economy that is cratering because of it, Trump is desperate for a do-over. Other than that, he had pretty much nothing to say about why he should be elected to a second term, although he took more than three hundred words to say it. The bottom line seemed to be that Trump is promising four more years of ‘jobs’ and of stopping U.S. allies, especially Germany, from ‘ripping us off.’ And that’s it.”

“Trump’s struggle to answer such an important and straightforward question about what he would do in a second term should not be overlooked, because it goes to the heart of why his campaign— and the country that he nominally governs—is in such trouble. As an incumbent, Trump is certainly in a bind: he can hardly campaign on his record, when the United States is in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and close to a hundred and sixty thousand Americans are dead of the coronavirus. There’s only so much blame that Trump can deflect; this is a catastrophe that happened on his watch, and—no matter how many times he calls it the ‘China virus’ or warns Americans that Joe Biden will turn the country into a godless hellscape—he knows it.”