Everyone's an Idiot, Except Donald Trump

Gail Collins: Bret, I spent last weekend alternating between worrying about the rathole into which the president is plunging our country and worrying about whether the lights in New York City would go out again. Do you think the national power grid could be hacked, or just explode from the stress of … being a national power grid? If so, can we blame it on the president?

Bret: These days I blame everything on the president, Gail. So do my kids, by the way. Whenever I tell them to clean up their rooms, they reply that the state of the nation is far worse.

On the power-grid front, I did just buy a wearable, rechargeable head fan … .

Gail: Back to the topic of whether our president is a super-evil plotter of villainy or just a raving imbecile who screws everything up: When Trump told four, young, Democratic, female, minority members of Congress to go back where they came from, was it a calculated plan to rally his base or just acting on impulse because that’s the way he thinks?

Bret: Honestly, the former.

Gail: I kinda wish I believed it was a preorganized plot. That would mean there was somebody rational, albeit evil, at the top. But I basically think he’s just impulsively spewing from his awful soul.

Bret: If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Trump since he won the presidency it’s that he’s ignorant and vile, but not stupid. The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats were in the midst of a civil war between Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi and the four congresswomen, the so-called squad, and that the smartest thing Trump could do was let it play out to the benefit of Republicans.

Gail: You know I get depressed when I think you’re going to tell me Trump did the smartest possible thing …

Bret: The civil war would have resolved itself, probably in Pelosi’s favor, if Trump hadn’t intervened with his racist tweets. And it was the very awfulness of the tweets that forced Democrats to rally around the four congresswomen, defend them and put them at the emotional and even moral heart of the party. Which is exactly where Trump wants them, because they are his ideal foil, and he plans to run against them next year no matter who the Democrats nominate.

Of course, whether it works out in his favor is another question. Has he harmed himself, politically speaking?

Gail: It does seem as if our president is bent on proving that he won the last race on racism. Do you watch his rallies? They usually start off with a recounting of how surprised the world was when he won Wisconsin — or some other 2016 triumph — then he brags about the size of the crowd. He moves on, sometimes rather briefly, to the greatness of the Trump economy. And then it’s off to the immigration rant-a-thon.

Bret: The immigrant bashing is dearest to his heart and central to his demagogic appeal. It’s what keeps his base faithful. Politically, his calculation is that a maximally polarized electorate works in his favor. And as our colleague Nate Cohn noted last week, he might be right: Trump can win the Electoral College vote again, even if he loses by as many as 5 million votes.

The question for me is whether the Democrats will play into his hands, as I fear they might, by moving too far to the left. George McGovern’s Democrats got tagged as the party of “Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion.” Today’s Democrats risk being seen as the party of open borders, socialism and all-around wokeness.

Gail: Many of the Democratic candidates seem ready to swing to the middle once the primaries are over. They often started out with minimal experience, but I think everybody’s figured out that it’s not a good idea to have debates where the moderator says something like: “All those who think illegal immigrants have a right to free health care, raise your hands.”

But right now they’re a little bit trapped between the agenda of the primary election base and their need to appeal to the vast populace who’ll vote in the fall of 2020. Actually, not the vast populace. Just that tiny special populace residing in a handful of swing states.

Bret: They’re the ones who’ll decide the election. Please go on.

Gail: All this reminds me of a funk I fall into every presidential season. Our system is a mess. Thanks to the Electoral College, it’s very possible the person with the most votes won’t win. And Americans sure aren’t guaranteed equality of attention. In the fall of 2020, getting black turnout in Milwaukee is going to be critical. But nobody cares how many black voters will turn out in New York or Massachusetts. It’s already a done deal that the Democrats will capture both states.

The Electoral College drives me nuts. It wipes out the votes of people who live in states where one party is dominant. It gives small-population states disproportionate power. And gives the Republican Party a big, totally unfair advantage. If we elected a president by popular vote, Democrats would have won six of the last seven elections.

And of course even if a Democrat gets elected, he or she will have to deal with a Senate in which the 578,000 people in Wyoming have the same voting power as the 40 million people in California.

Bret: As a guy who, until recently, always voted the straight Republican ticket in New York, I know what it’s like to have my vote count for almost nothing. And the idea of abolishing the Electoral College tempts me because I think we’re living in a moment when the country could really use a viable major third-party with a centrist orientation, something the Electoral College does a lot to hinder.

But the inveterate conservative in me worries about rejiggering a system that has mostly served us well. The Electoral College tends to amplify the margin of victory for presidents who win by only a tiny sliver of the popular vote. In 1960, for instance, John F. Kennedy won by barely 100,000 votes out of more than 68 million cast but still beat Richard Nixon 303-219.

Gail: Yeah, and it sure does help the presidents who win while losing the popular vote completely, like a certain party I could mention.

Bret: Knowing your love of history, Gail, I know you’re not talking about the party that won the election yet lost the popular vote in 2016, 2000, 1888 or 1876.

Where I feel more strongly is that every state should get two Senate seats for the sake of regional representation and national cohesion. Sure, Republican Wyoming has just as much representation as Democratic California. But you might say the same about Vermont having as much representation in the Senate as Texas or Florida. Ditto for small blue states like Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Oregon and New Mexico.

Gail: OK, you can keep the Senate if we can ditch the Electoral College.

Bret: Tempting. The bottom line for me is that I worry about the unintended consequences of broad constitutional fixes that can be hard to undo once they’re implemented. My main goal is to throw the bum out.

But let’s end on a more uplifting note. I’ve been really moved by all of the tributes to Apollo 11. I seem to remember you writing a very good column several years ago about your own experiences of July 1969. Could you refresh my memory?

Gail: Well the summer of 1969 was certainly eventful for those of us who were old enough to go to Woodstock. That left a much stronger impression on me than the moon landing. It wasn’t the music or the counterculture so much as the fact that you had hundreds of thousands of people totally cut off from the outside world — traffic was jammed for miles and miles, there was no such thing as a cellphone and not much evidence of any pay phones in the humongous stretch of fields and forests where everybody was camped.

But things worked out. People shared stuff. They just had faith this was a gathering that was meant to be and everybody would take care of everybody else.

Bret: Boy was I ever born too late.

Gail: The moon landing, on the other hand, was not that big a deal where I was — a small town full of anti-war, alienated students. It wasn’t that people were against exploring space; they just didn’t want to applaud anything that involved Richard Nixon.

I’m sorry I didn’t really get to share the thrill of what was legitimately a great leap for mankind. Although, you know, for us average citizens there wasn’t much long-term payback. Those brave guys went up to the moon, got back safely and … life went on. All the dreams of interspace travel and colonies on Mars just dwindled away.

Bret: I wasn’t alive to see them, but watching old footage and new documentaries about the Apollo program has done a lot to restore my sense of wonder, of possibility, of unity and national purpose. Something we really could use these days, don’t you think?

Gail: Ah, we end on agreement. If it takes a walk on Mars, I’m all for it. Do you think they could do a musical version of the landing? Then the whole country could all get together outdoors and watch and sing and share their picnic dinners.

Bret: Sure, provided Lin-Manuel Miranda writes the lyrics and music.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.