What did Donald Trump do today?
He said he'd never heard of an election he was flogging the day before.
Yesterday, in a runoff special election for a deeply Republican state Senate seat in Texas, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won by 14 points, an enormous margin in a race that normally wouldn't even have been competitive. He did this in spite of having been outspent by a massive margin, and the runoff saw Republican voters crossing party lines to support him.
Special elections are not always perfect predictors of how candidates or parties will perform in general elections—although they certainly show which way the wind is blowing,. This one, however, is especially chilling to Congressional Republicans from Texas, who saw their district lines redrawn by the state legislature at Trump's specific command in a desperate attempt to stave off a wave election in the midterms. But gerrymanders can backfire, because they involve making the average seat less dominated by voters of the majority party. Many of the "safe" seats occupied by Texas Republicans have only a 6-8% Republican "lean." This means that if the electorate swings that much, not only will Republicans not gain any House seats, they might lose quite a few.
Rehmet's district swung 31 points.
On that subject, Trump had this exchange with a reporter today:
Q: Mr. President, in Texas, a Democrat won a special election in an area that you had won by 17 points. What is your reaction to that?
TRUMP: I don't know, I didn't hear about it. Somebody ran — where?Q: In Texas, a special election for a legislative seat.
TRUMP: I'm not involved in that, that's a local Texas race. You mean I won by 17 and this person lost?
Q: Yes.
TRUMP: Things like that happen.
Q: Does it worry you—
TRUMP: Well you don't know whether or not it's transferable. You know, I'm not on the ballot, so you don't know whether or not it's transferable. …No, I don't know a thing about it. I didn't know — I mean I know there's a race going there, and, uh, it's too bad. What can I say?
In reality, Trump was very well aware of the race—or so he claimed on Friday and Saturday, when he posted about it three times to his private microblogging service.
That leaves three possible explanations for the discrepancy:
- Trump remembered his involvement in the race he'd posted about repeatedly in the previous 48 hours, and was simply lying.
- Trump had already forgotten about something he'd done several times in the past two days.
- Someone on Trump's staff used Trump's account, and even "signed" it as a genuine post directly from him, and didn't bother to tell him about it.
Why does this matter?
- It's a problem when "lying, senile, or manipulated?" is a question that comes up so often with the President of the United States.