Trump will still win.

It's inevitable.

I'm just finishing A Canticle for Leibovitz. Oh boy.

Probably. The odds still favor him, even considering the fuckup we're now in the midst of.

(https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/26/trump-is-an-authoritarian-weakman-149573)

[...]
The notion of Trump as authoritarian strongman, however, has been cast in an odd light in this pandemic. Would-be tyrants use crisis to consolidate power. Trump, by contrast, has been pilloried from many quarters, including many liberals, for not asserting authority and responsibility more forcefully to combat Covid-19. Rather than seizing on a genuine emergency, Trump was slow to issue an emergency declaration, moved gingerly in employing the Defense Production Act to help overburdened local health systems, and even now seems eager to emphasize that many subjects—closure of schools and businesses, obtaining sufficient ventilators—are primarily problems for state governors to deal with.

Trump's apparent personal affinity with Putin, and other dictators, has caused foes to conclude that he has an aesthetic attraction to leaders who don't let procedural niceties of democracy or law get in their way. But he has shown passivity in what by all rights would be a dream scenario for an authoritarian strongman.

Perhaps the way to think of Trump is as an authoritarian weakman.

“I don't take any responsibility at all,” Trump said, a line that seems likely to join a pantheon that includes George W. Bush's “Brownie, you‘re doing a heck of a job,” and Bill Clinton's “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is' is,” as debacle-defining one-liners.

That was in response to a question about inadequate supplies of coronavirus testing kits, which many health experts regard as the essence of why the United States has been flat-footed in containing the spread of disease. But the spirit has animated other dimensions of Trump's response, in which he has been reluctant to make Washington the focal point of pandemic policy. “The governors,” Trump said at a media briefing on Sunday, “locally, are going to be in command. We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job.”
[...]