Yup, as noted to a friend last night, they don’t mind lying outrageously about their agendas and their opponents’, so trying to outsmart them by seizing the inoffensive center will often not work out great.
At the first debate in 2012, Obama pointed out that Romney wanted to give rich people a huge tax cut, and Romney just said no that’s not true (it was true) and Obama lost the debate in devastating fashion.
Fortunately he recognized this was a mistake and came prepared in debates two and three to do what the whole point of these things is: make your opponents look small and ridiculous by contrast to your confidence and charm.
There are again implications here for the “seize the inoffensive policy center” theory of campaigning.
There's another facet to this argument that I didn't have space to get into, but it's about a different lesson from 2009-2010 that many people have somehow forgotten.
It's common to shorthand that stretch as the period where Democrats had a historic 60 vote supermajority. But what really happened is they had fewer than 60 votes, then they had 60, then they didn't again. And the reason It worked out that way is that an elderly senator died.
Trump is the decisive figure here but worth remembering that the broader GOP strategy all along has been to try to optimize stimulus to juice the economy until after the election, then pull the plug if Biden won anyhow. They undershot, and it’s on them as much as Trump.
Maybe Republicans panic, or maybe some other force will intervene. But the real nightmare isn’t waiting 4 more months for the rescue America needs. It’s McConnell keeps the Senate and completes Trump’s revenge. Absolutely can’t let that happen.
The reason they are trying to cover up the number of people Trump infected with coronavirus is that it’s clearly a very large number, and that’s just counting the direct transmissions, not the people who will contract it turn.