Which points to the third key to a Trump victory: He needs Clinton’s potential support to be depressed, which means he needs outside events to raise constant doubts about her leadership, and beyond that about the entire political establishment that she embodies. Earlier this year I called Trump’s ideal event a “gray swan,” as opposed to a black one — meaning that he wants a constant drippage of stuff that makes both Clinton and the larger elite seem clueless, feckless or corrupt, but not the kind of huge crisis that would change the basic shape of the campaign or make him seem like an untenable risk.
The weeks before the Republican convention were filled with gray swans — terror attacks in Europe, cop killings here at home, the F.B.I. director James Comey’s rebuke of the Democratic nominee — and not surprisingly they were weeks when Trump sometimes led the polls (by, again, 44-43 or 43-42).
There have been fewer such events since, but Clinton’s hidden-then-acknowledged pneumonia is a perfect example of what Trump needs. It’s not a black swan, not a devastating illness that would force the Democrats to turn to the more electable Joe Biden. Instead, it just feeds into two of Trump’s narratives: alpha-male power versus actual physical weakness (people with pneumonia are even more low-energy than Jeb Bush, after all), and bold outsider truth telling versus reflexive elite cover-up.
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