Don’t look now, but President Trump may finally be realizing, with creeping dread, that there may be limits to his magical lying and reality-bending powers. He may be grasping that his capacity to mesmerize his supporters into disbelieving what their own eyes and ears are telling them is not absolute after all.
The iconic image of a modern president realizing he has lost control of events and of his public image is Lyndon Johnson, holed up inside the White House with advisers in March of 1968 as antiwar protesters chanted outside: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Trump may have just experienced a moment that could prove similarly iconic.
While the parallel is inexact — and while Trump could still very well get reelected — something telling and new appears to have happened inside his head as he realized that his Saturday rally in Tulsa was far more sparsely attended than he and his advisers had expected.
The New York Times brings us new details from behind the curtain, reporting that Trump and several staffers “stood backstage” and gazed at the sea of empty seats in the Bank of Oklahoma Center “in horror”:
The president, who had been warned aboard Air Force One that the crowds at the arena were smaller than expected, was stunned, and he yelled at aides backstage while looking at the endless rows of empty blue seats in the upper bowl of the stadium, according to four people familiar with what took place.
What’s even more interesting, though, is what Trump’s advisers took away from what happened:
Exactly what went wrong was still being dissected on Sunday. But a broad group of advisers and associates acknowledged to one another that Mr. Trump had not been able to will public opinion away from fears about the spread of the coronavirus in an indoor space. And they conceded that myriad polls showing Mr. Trump’s eroded standing were not fake, and that he might be on course to lose to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Trump’s advisers are conceding to each other that deception and manipulation have failed him — even with his own supporters. It isn’t just that Trump was unable to persuade would-be rallygoers that the novel coronavirus doesn’t still pose a serious threat.